Birgül Oğuz

WINNER

The eight and a half stories in Hah contemplate the psychology of mourning and melancholia, and the politics of mourning in particular. This collection that reads like a novel begins with the loss of a beloved father, a member of the 1968 generation, a generation viciously treated by the Turkish state in events surrounding the 1980 military coup. Although the father had somehow survived these atrocious events and lived to witness the changes over the subsequent decades, he was filled with bitterness, and was not able to come to terms with the loss he experienced. So the narrative begins with the overt tone of an individual mourner, the daughter, who, in striving to come to terms with the loss of her father, gradually finds that unless she herself assumes the work of mourning which her father had been unable to accomplish, she will not be able to properly mourn him. However, this is a matter of collective mourning within a state that disavows the crimes it committed, thus rendering collective mourning impossible. So Hah, in search of a new literary agency to transform traumatic loss into meaningful narrative, seeks to answer these questions: how can one mourn when mourning is impossible? How can one write about mourning when it is impossible to find the means to narrate it? And how can one not write when writing is the only way to mourn?

In Hah, the intervention of time into mourning manifests itself as the intervention of mourning into language. Hah searches, finds, tries, uses and disposes of many types of literary devices in order to articulate the Loss (that is, ‘loss’ with a capital ‘L’) which defies articulation. It is a text that signifies the literariness of every discourse, politics included.

Highly intertextual, Hah draws upon a plethora of texts, from the Old Testament to 20th century European poetry, from 16th century ghazals to contemporary Turkish verse, from cornerstones of Turkish literature such as Leyla Erbil, Oğuz Atay, and Bilge Karasu, to the likes of James Joyce and William Shakespeare, from workers’ anthems to folk songs. It is a work that – while a product of a specific time and place – resonates with anyone who has ever experienced loss. Therein lies its particular universality.