Post-imperial crises and liminal masculinity in Orhan Kemal’s My Father’s House–The Idle Years

Abstract

My Father’s House–The Idle Years is an autobiographical novel by Orhan Kemal, one of the giants of Turkish literature. The novel’s explicit focus is on a boy who grows up pursuing self-realization in a working-class atmosphere. The story takes place during a period of abrupt transformation when the Republic of Turkey, newly born out of the ashes of the collapsed Ottoman Empire, is adapting to oppressive conditions introduced by a burgeoning capitalism. Scholarship on Orhan Kemal has extensively uncovered and charted his socialist realism and unorthodox look at the history of Turkey, but it has not concerned itself enough with the issue of masculinity, which is an indisputable part of Kemal’s view of labour and political power. This paper is an initial attempt to approach Kemal’s autobiographical novels with theories of masculinity. I argue that My Father’s House–The Idle Years explores rites of passages into manhood in what can be referred to as a crisis of imperial loss: the boy grows in an attempt to restore his father’s victimized manhood, in a symbolic parallel to the transformation of the disintegrated Ottoman Empire into self-governed nation-states. Kemal handles the loss metaphorically, using the instability generated by the gender anxieties of a young boy who fails to be like his father to represent the instability generated by the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. I examine My Father’s House–The Idle Years as the Oedipalized story of post-Ottoman Turkey.