The Other Boleyn Girl

Passion, Power, Revenge and Blood

‘Other Boleyn Girl’ takes the crossroads of Britain history as background and depicts the tragedy of a family trying to get involved in the court of Henry VIII. As the male members of the Boleyn family are stimulated by a greed for power, the Boleyn women are propelled towards notoriety and damnation.

“You think you know the story but you only know the end. To get to the heart of the story, you have to go to the beginning.”

The popular TV series of last season, ‘The Tudors’ started with these lines. Indeed, in order to better read today’s Britain, one should go back and understand the reign of Henry VIII, which holds a special place in the history of Britain.
Tudor Dynasty stayed in power from 1485 to 1603. They came to power with the glorified victory of Henry VII over Richard III, which put an end to the War of Roses. The son of Henry VII – later to be crowned as Henry VIII, married his elder brother’s widow, Catherine of Aragon, aunt to the King of Spain.
Perhaps the biggest ambition of Henry in life was to have an heir to his throne, who will continue his blood and take over his kingdom. Unluckily, Catherine could give Henry only one child – a daughter, who is to be remembered in history as the Bloody Mary. Many other babies of Catherine and Henry arrived stillborn. Henry, at this point, would sleep with other women hoping to produce an heir. In the larger picture, we had a Europe in the 1500s tainted by wars between Portugal, Spain, and France.
Justin Chadwick’s first feature-length film, ‘The Other Boleyn Girl’, takes this picture as background and focuses on the ambivalent relationship between two sisters - Anne (Natalie Portman) and Mary Boleyn (Scarlett Johansson). The film’s narration mainly grounds of Anne’s perspective, as the title suggests, but it fails to position itself accurately, and therefore cannot establish a balance between what is told and untold.
The story evolves around the plans to get Anne into the King’s bed – a relationship which would get Thomas Boleyn (the father), and Thomas Howard (the uncle) a place in the court and some authority.
Although Anne is initially given the task to charm the King during his visit to their estate, she unexpectedly fails to attract the King’s attention. Moreover, she causes an accident during a hunting ride, as a result of which the King returns home wounded. To everyone’s surprise, the King is enchanted by Mary, the younger sister, who is sent to the King’s room to take care of him. The dilemma is that Mary is a newly-wed. However, her fresh marriage could hardly be an obstacle on the way to the court, now open wide for her father, uncle, and husband. From now on the sisters’ relationship will get tainted by the rivalry for the court, and above all, for King.
There is a huge amount of literature – novels, plays, films, etc. – inspired from this period of Britain’s history marked by love, revenge, passion, and blood. Some of them depicted Henry VIII as a womaniser, some as a pitiful creature lacking self-confidence; some as a reputation-driven King afraid of being overshadowed by the accomplishments of his father... ‘The Other Boleyn Girl’, however, apparently focuses more on the tragedy of the Boleyn family rather than Henry himself.
‘The Other Boleyn Girl’, however, features a rich number of characters, immensely varied, as they are driven by various interests. Mistress Boleyn, the mother, for instance, fails – or not even tries(?) – to restrain her husband’s greed for power. Thomas Boleyn, the father, on the other hand, forces his daughters to adultery for the sake of power. The uncle is a corrupt man enough to “use” anyone to gain his position in the court back. Anne and Mary’s brother is happy-go-lucky for his popularity, which is a result of his sisters’ adultery. And the Boleyn sisters – Mary, and Anne. The former is a young girl who is taken away from her husband’s arms and thrust to King’s bed only later to fall in love with him desparately. The latter “the other” Boleyn girl, namely Anne Boleyn, is not discouraged by her sister’s pregnancy and deep love for the King in her merciless fight to “get” him to her bed....
If you do not know already how the story ends, here it is: Henry divorces Catherine of Aragon to carve the way to Anne Boleyn’s bed. However, a devoted Catholic, Catherine does not collaborate for a divorce; instead, she tries every way to prevent this from taking place. Not surprisingly the Pope does not approve the divorce. But this hardly puts an end to Henry’s strife. Dazzling everyone, Henry goes as far as to break up from the Catholic Church and establishes the Church of England, which favours the newly rising protestant values over the Catholic ones. This rupture changes the path Britain meant to take, and a new era begins. The war is not yet over, though. Catherine’s daughter Mary tries to restore Catholicism by massacring thousands – hence, Bloody Mary. However, the golden age of Britain comes with Anne Boleyn’s daughter Elisabeth, who is crowned as Elisabeth I, who restores Anglicanism, and triggers the unimpeded rise of England as an independent kingdom.
The film is powerful with Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson, two talented and beautiful actresses. Although the film is a fest to the eyes with costumes and art direction, it fails to entertain the audiance with a quality plot. Yet if you find this period of British history appealing, or if you are curious about what might have come out of the duo – Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson –, we recommend you to watch ‘The Other Boleyn Girl’.

Burçin Tuncer

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Lazarus, go back to your ‘Cave’

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds once again salutes their worldwide fanbase with their 14th studio album “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!”. The Australian “prince of darkness” and his musician friends “Bad Seeds”, who went to a beauty sleep with their 2004 album "Abattoir Blues", have woken up with Lazarus.

The musical journey of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds began in 1984 with their "From Her to Eternity" album. The band reached the zenith of their career with “Henry’s Dream” (1992), “Let Love In" (1994), "Murder Ballads" (1996) and "The Boatman's Call" (1997) and then decided to chill out with “No More Shall We Part” (2001) as the piano began to overshadow the guitars.
Nevertheless, the new album, which takes its name after the story of the resurrection of Lazarus told in the Bible, witnesses the return of the hard rock sound which was de-emphasized by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in recent years. Built on a strong rock infrastructure, the album is full of screeching, weird and suspensful melodies.

Lazarus, I want you to dig
Cave, who loves telling gothic and crime stories in his songs, frequently refers to such dark themes as sin, revenge, repent, and guilt, often inspired by Biblical stories. It is therefore safe to say that “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!”, the song which gave the album its title, is a typical Nick Cave song.
The resurrection of Lazarus is one of the most interesting Biblical stories. According to the Gospel of John, Lazarus had been dead and in the tomb for four days, but was resurrected by Jesus who had the stone rolled away from the tomb and bade Lazarus to come out.
"The resurrection of Lazarus" deeply affected Nick Cave: “Ever since I can remember hearing the Lazarus story, when I was a kid, you know, back in church, I was disturbed and worried by it. Traumatized, actually. We are all, of course, in awe of the greatest of Christ's miracles - raising a man from the dead - but I couldn't help but wonder how Lazarus felt about it. As a child it gave me the creeps, to be honest. I've taken Lazarus and stuck him in New York City, in order to give the song, a hip, contemporary feel.”
The song rolls on with the chorus “Laz’rus dig yourself” accompanied by guitar riffs that sounds like asphalt diggers digging into our brains.

In praise of loneliness
The song alludes to the fact that we do not know what awaits us after death. The high tempo of the first song carries us to "Today's Lesson" in which Mr. Sandman, the starring actor of naive children tales, is given by Cave a nasty role in a gothic sexual fantasy.
With “Moonland”, we slow down and wander in a snowy and starry night accompanied by drums. After this blues song obviously written in praise of loneliness, we once again enter a mysterious world: “Night of the Lotus Eaters”. Performed along the fine line between “disturbing” and “peaceful”, the bass guitar and the echoing sound of an electric guitar make us feel in our bones the mystery of this song.
“Albert Goes West” brings us into the already conquered territory of punk and we feel relieved. This song feels like a simulacrum of Moonland. Snow is replaced with sun, but the praise of loneliness remains with a single difference. This is not a melancholic blues song, but a fervent punk song.

How to write a love song?
In “We Call Upon the Author to Explain” the dark poet of Australia greets the underdog. Cave gives us two examples: Charles Bukowski and John Berryman. Out of these two alcoholic poets, Cave prefers Berryman who followed his father’s example and committed suicide. Cave also cannot help but mention another suicidal man, the famous American writer Hemingway.
With “Hold On to Yourself”, Cave explores the terrain of love ballad the rules of which he knows by heart. We are talking about a poet who gave a lecture on “How to write a long song?” at Vienna Poem Festival. Yet Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds immediately disrupts the melancholy of this ballad by a powerful antidote: “Lie Down Here (And Be My Girl)", a song that tells a story about the ebb and flow of love. The screeching guitar is accompanied by deceivingly comforting piano tunes, and that familiar voice reflects on the hopeful dream of mending a broken love.
After this booming song comes another love ballad powered by violin and piano: “Jesus of the Moon”. The sorrow that emanates from the St. James Hotel enfolds wherever this song is played. In this song, another familiar hero of Nick Cave songs fears that his life will stay the same for ever and escapes. "People often talk about being scared of change / But for me I'm more afraid of things staying the same / 'Cause the game is never won / By standing in any one place / For too long”…
“Midnight Man”, filled with tambourine and complicated, irregular organ tunes, tells the story of a secret heroine who looks for the eternal love of her life in a series of one night stands...

More News From Nowhere...
The final song of the album, "More News From Nowhere" takes its name after an utopic socialist novel written in 1890 by William Morris. In this novel, Morris claimed that socialism must abolish not only private property, but also the division between daily life, work, and art. Nick Cave reconstructs this utopian world of Morris in order to settle old scores with his own past.
The old loves of Nick Cave parade through the song, two of which being well-known figures: Polly Jean Harvey and Deanna.
Cave psychoanalyzes himself through the women of his life and explain his feelings with these lines: “And don't it make you feel so sad / Don't the blood rush to your feet / To think that everything you do today / Tomorrow is obsolete / Technology and women / And little children too / Don't it make you feel blue?”
And calmly, “Well I gotta say / Yeah I gotta say / Goodbye / Goodbye / Goodbye”, says Nick Cave, after 53 minutes 35 seconds of great music... Does he say goodbye to us, to his women, or to a regretful past? We do not know... Thanks to him we can curse this wearisome world that did not even leave Lazarus alone in his tomb...

Burçin Tuncer

Juno

A fairy tale come true

"Juno", the latest success of the American independent cinema, is a very entertaining and passionate movie. Combining the aesthetics of comics with cinematic language, it is the product of creative art directorship and a powerful screenplay. It is no surprise that “Juno” was rewarded the Academy Award for the Best Original Screenplay.

An absurd teen movie
Written by Diablo Cody, directed by Jason Reitman, this is a small budget film that contains both comic and tragic elements and tells an absurd story of youth which fortunately does not fall prey to the cliches of the genre. The ordinary moviegoer knows Jason Reitman from his first long film “Thank You for Smoking” of 2005 which he directed like the devil’s advocate. It was an above average movie, though not as remarkable as “Juno, that was once again inspired by the aesthetics of comics. “Juno” clearly shows that Reitman is on the right track...
The plot of the movie is as follows: As many of her peers update their profiles on Facebook or march up and down the shopping centres, Juno (Ellen Page), an intelligent girl from Minnesota, is living her life according to her own principles. During a usual, boring afternoon, she decides to have sex with her boyfriend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera). Juno gets pregnant, decides to have the baby and makes a plan for the child’s adoption. She meets the couple Mark and Vannessa Loring who want to have a child. After learning that their daughter had sex with Bleeker, Juno’s parents are briefly shocked, but then they start doing their best to help her...

The aesthetics of comics
Juno’s costumes represent a visual richness, reminding the viewer of the Wes Anderson movie "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” which was one of the leading examples of the aesthetics of comics within the American independent cinematic tradition. Especially Bleeker who never removes his training clothes is a good representative of the movie's aesthetic approach.
The aesthetics of comics inside the movie is not simply due to the costumes and the colourful shooting techniques, but also because of the story-telling technique. Juno’s antiheroism is emphasized through the story of a pregnant superhero in a Japanese magna.
Juno, portrayed as a typical “Gemini” adolescent with narcissist and even nihilist characteristics, is trying to deal with the problems of an unborn child, getting the best out of her stepmother and father, and, most absurd of it all, having a child whose father is an insecure and clumsy adolescent frequently eating candies.

Music is just great
Behind this surrealist touch in the story-telling approach lies a harsh critique of the lifestyle represented by the American higher middle class. The colourful, messy, sincere and “real” nature of Juno’s middle class suburban home is contrasted with the pale, snow white regularity, fragility and artificiality of the home of the Loring couple. The wearisome smile on Vanessa Loring's face is a concrete example of this fake happiness.
This world is so fake that it does not deserve a real pregnancy and a real, living baby. Nevertheless, this fake picture gets smashed when Mark Loring, (probably yesterday’s hippie and today’s yuppie) who earns his livelihood by selling his dreams and freedom to advertisement jingles, breaks up with his wife.
Juno gets rid of her burden, a physical excess in her body and a symbol of her approaching adulthood, by giving the baby to Vanessa, whereas the audience happily gets carried with the surrealist vision and great soundtrack of a 96 minute long fairy tale come true...

Burçin Tuncer

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - 2005
This is a science-fiction comedy based on the book of the same name by Douglas Adams. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” is an absurd, funny, extraordinary and fantastic comedy telling a story about the meaning of life. One morning, a British man named Arthur Dent awakes and find his house is going to be demolished. But for Arthur, the demolition of his house is only the beginning, Arthur's friend eccentric Ford Prefect reveals that he is an alien and saves Arthur when Earth is wiped out to make way for an intergalactic motorway. And an adventure involving a paranoid android, an spaceship called “Heart of Gold”, and a two-headed former president of the galaxy begins... This is a must see for all those people who suddenly finds the meaning of life only to immediately lose it...

La Battaglia di Algeri

The Battle of Algiers - 1966

A must see for cinema lovers, a re-release of Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 masterpiece “The Battle of Algiers” has just hit the market. Rewarded with a Golden Bear at the Venice Film Festival, this is a docudrama about the Algerian struggle for independence against French colonialism. Pontecorvo's film was banned in France until 2004 and it was supposedly screen at the Pentagon in 2003 after the invasion of Iraq. Shot on location in grainy black and white, “The Battle of Algiers” shows how greatly talented in making documentaries Pontecorvo is. Cinematographer Marcello Gatti's pioneering use of a hand-held camera for the crowd scenes makes it seem as if events are being documented as they happen. “The Battle of Algiers” is not simply a good docudrama, but also an honest means of showing the ugly face of war.

No Country For Old Men

What’s up in the Wild West?



The sun is rising on the plains of Southwest Texas. The old sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), who finds the recently increased crime rate in the world quite ungraspable, narrates the good old days when sheriffs would not have to carry even a gun. The sun is rising on the village, where he has been the sheriff since his twenties. As sheriff Bell counts down to retirement, he philosophies his job.
Coen Brothers’ ‘No Country For Old Men’ – winner of 4 academy awards – starts with this lyric nostalgia.
Ed Tom Bell, apparently, is not a man of his age. He is an old style western character from the films of Sam Peckinbach, John Ford, or Sergio Leone, where the good and the bad, the criminal and the innocent are two separate entities whose borders are definable.
However, ‘No Country For Old Men’ positions itself in the misty quarters of the postmodern 80ies, when people do not kill any more for a bunch of dollars but just for fun. Or, like Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), live the matter of life and death to a toss up.
Anton Chigurh, one of the main characters of the film, is a total anti-hero with his funny haircut; cool, empty, and frightening face, and an effective air pressure gun he carries with himself. Chigurh does not need a reason to kill – he kills the ones he has to, and tosses up for the ones he cannot decide.
We first see Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), another main character, a veteran soldier fought in Vietnam, hunting deer in the desert. He is younger than Sheriff Bell but older than Chigurh. Running after his hunt, Moss falls into the afterfight of a drug deal. He discovers a few dead bodies, a truck full of heroine, and the money – 2 million dollars – after a quick search. As Moss evolves from hunting to gathering, he remains unaware of the easy-money troubles.

Postmodern Western
Coen brothers, tracing the three characters on a multi-layered story, tell a postmodern tale of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”. However, in the picture by the Coen Bros., we do not find the sort of good, bad, and ugly that we see in Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Western classique. Here we have a bad, who is a principled bloodspiller; an ugly, who messes up his life with a trace for easy money but who has a conscience; a good, who does not care.
In this film, Coen Bros., whose filmography is a blend of film noir and comedy, set out to re-produce, re-think, and re-locate the Western.
To the common knowledge, Coen Brothers love crime stories. One should not forget, though, that a Coen movie is always-and-already authentic – regardless of its content, it is told in a particular Coen-style language.
What makes a movie a Coen movie? First come the characters – meticulously worked from tip to toe. Coen characters are hardly outstanding or unusual; quite the contrary, they are ordinary characters, usually inept, and even clumsy.
Talented as they are to create exciting characters, Coen Brothers are equally successful in constructing atmosphere. It is possible to claim that the Coen Bros. cinema is atmospheric above all. ‘Barton Fink’ successfully conveys the depths of human psychology, while ‘Fargo’ effectively depicts the small-scale life of a North American village, and ‘The Hudsucker Proxy’ extraordinarily renders a Kafkaesque atmosphere.
In this sense, ‘No Country For Old Men’ conveys an authentic atmosphere and successfully created characters, though not so satisfyingly compared to other movies by Coens. Highly charged with a high tension from the first moment till the last, the film does not bring a Hollywood ending but keeps the tension at stake. Whether the reason behind is a Brecthian critic of the catharsis, or a favouring of shock end, remains a mystery.
Unfortunately, the most powerful weapon of ‘No Country For Old Men’, which tries to reposition the masculine world of the wild west, turns out to be its sole point of vulnerability – the film cannot establish a balanced narrative. Nostalgic and local, Sheriff Bell is portrayed as an old man who is born into a wrong age of which he does not want to be a part. Psychopathic and austere murderer Chigurgh stands as a metaphor for the coming age that is defined as cold and meaningless. Moss, on the other hand, is a hyphenated character who cannot belong neither to the good old days nor to the coming age. His sole aim is an escapist gesture – to take the money and live a happy life at home.
The film cannot escape a narcissistic failure that is triggered by the Chigurh character, which is stunningly enacted by Javier Bardem. Therefore, the story is not developed satisfactorily and the audience is left alone to float in the cat-and-mouse sort of plot.
As it is always the case with the battles of old and new, the lost generation turns out to be the one who suffers. Moss dies; Bell retires, whereas Chigurh walks his way down the road. A new era begins, and the realms of this new era is ‘No Country For Old Men’.

Burçin Tuncer

Mehmet Yaşın

The portrait of a poet as a father

The works of the well-known Turkish Cypriot poet and writer Mehmet Yaşın will be reprinted by Everest Publications. Mehmet Yaşın, who spends his time in England, Turkey and Cyprus, answered our questions about literature, identity and Cyprus.

Despite the fact that you were born and raised in Cyprus, it is known that England and Turkey were more crucial determinants in your development as a poet and a writer. You say that Cyprus was not directly influential in your development as an artist. What is the exact relationship between the novelist and poet Mehmet Yaşın and Cyprus?
Cyprus is more of an inspiration for me... It is not a place where I can professionally reproduce myself as a writer. My publishers have always been located in Istanbul. Therefore you cannot escape from the literary circle there which directly effects and transforms your lifestyle and perspective. You find yourself observing the island not only as an insider but also as an outsider, a foreigner. This intensifies the multilocality that is always already part and parcel of being a Turkish Cypriot. You begin to evaluate your birthplace in the light of the literary concerns in many different countries. Because it is a small place, Cyprus does not offer the professionally equipped, adequate level of literary and artistic institutionalization. Turkey and England offer more for authorship as an institutional vocation. Yet Cyprus is important in being a source, a reference point. Poetry and literature are deeply related to childhood. One's vital concerns, resources of language and culture, and inspiration come from one's birthplace. Cyprus and childhood are therefore significant inspirational materials for me. There are no professional, contract-based publishers, distributors, literature magazines and centres, research and critique institutions, literary agents in Cyprus.

Can you elaborate on observing Cyprus both as an insider and as an outsider?
I believe this holds for every professional writers and artists born in Cyprus. It is of course saddening to see the closed and isolated lives of the Turkish Cypriots in the last fifty years. This effects literature and art very negatively. Life in Cyprus is completely centered around the subject of Cyprus problem which is a very limited perspective that cannot nurture literature and art. A poem or a novel calls forth a type of reading with philosophical and aesthetic concerns that question the universal, deep and complex dimensions of human existence. This matter of "reading" is very important. Literature, with the engagement of its readers, realizes itself and attains a reproductive capacity. I analyzed the theoretical consequences of the under-institutionalized, peripheral, and minor nature of the Turkish Cypriot literature in my book “The Anthology of the Turkish Cypriot Poetry”. In “Collected Essays”, there are analyses on the meaning of the insider-perspective about the Turkish Cypriot literature which sees it as a unique literary development and the outsider-perspective which perceives it as a sub-category of the wider Turkish literature.

FATHERHOOD COMES FIRST
Since you mentioned a couple of your books, let’s talk about the portrait of Mehmet Yaşın as a writer?
I have a small daughter. If you ask me who I am, I will probably define myself not with respect to the books I wrote, but with respect to my role as a father. But of course people get to know me as a writer. This is an identity independent from the one you have in your private life. Most of the time, this identity has a life of its own, independent of the intentions of the writer. The identity as a writer is mostly shaped by the image formed by the public opinion, a process that the writer can never control. How much of this identity is formed by the works of the writer, on the one hand, and how much by the subjective and superficial readings of these works, on the other; this is uncertain. As I said, the issue of reading and readership is of utmost importance. Many of those who know your name know it from the newspapers or from mutual friends. However, if someone wants to talk about the identity of a writer, this must be derived from the works of the writer. His or her literary style, artistic approach, and worldview can easily tell who a writer is. Though a writer changes in time. With every new book, you redefine yourself.

You say that poetry is very much related to childhood. Let's return to past, then... How was your family life, how was your childhood?
My mother was a teacher who was very interested in literature. She was a close friend of Ulus Baker's mother Pembe Marmara who was a talented poet. For instance, there is a poem in Marmara’s book dedicated to my mother. She was also the cousin of Taner Baybars, a poet and writer who produced works not only in Turkish but also in English and French. My grandmother was related to the family of Müftü Raci Efendi, the famous divan poet. My father Özker Yaşın was also a poet. He wrote novels, plays, and essays. He was a newspaper owner and a publisher. I met my father’s poet, writer and published friends from Istanbul. We were not a very traditional family and we were not very close to each other. I grew up alone. I was not raised in a crowded house or in an extended family, except for the holiday times. I never showed what I wrote to my parents. I was not encouraged to do so. As I look at it retrospectively, it looks like my being a writer was something inevitable and quite natural.

How did you become a professional poet and writer in this process that developed spontaneously?
Before learning how to write and read, I made up stories and sentences that sounded like a poem. Then as I began to read poetry, I was inspired by other poets. My first poem was published in a school magazine at the age of 11. I don’t know how it developed, the poem is created spontaneously. My family probably had an influence on me... When I first shyly handed in a file of my poems to a publisher in Istanbul, I was a 25 year old postgraduate student. Some of my poems were published in several magazines in Turkey. Without thinking of the consequences of publishing a book and how this will change my life and without being prepared for the consequences, I tried to get my first book published so that I could dedicate it to my mother who were to die of cancer soon before the first print. This first book won two poetry awards in Turkey in 1985 and was reprinted in Istanbul. It was well received both in Cyprus and in Turkey. Therefore I half-consciously found myself in the world of literature. I saw my name in newspapers and magazines and it felt like “Mehmet Yaşın” was someone else, different from the person I myself had come to know. Perhaps this process of self-alienation which every poet and writer must go through happened to me earlier and harsher than it was supposed to be...

THE FIRST BOOK THAT CAME AFTER 25 YEARS
Everest Publications is now reprinting all of your works. Have these reprinted editions caused you to face the creative process of your past, have they stimulated a self-reflection? Is there anything in the past that you wish you had or had not done?
It is really interesting to reflect on the 25 years of poetry and how, why, and in what direction it developed. Of course you view your old poems from a distance and see things that you wouldn't write or you would definitely add if they were written in the present. You also think whether it was better to wait longer before the publication because you face much wider creative potentialities in your works. Nevertheless you hope that the reader will make the connections and unveil those potentialities himself/herself. In this sense, it is fruitful to read my poems in a collected edition. Therefore, the newly printed "Collected Poems" is like a finalized first book. It covers a period of 25 years and almost 200 poems. For the first time it feels like a whole...

You said that life in Cyprus is completely centered around the subject of the Cyprus problem. The TRNC is internationally non-recognized and isolated. How do you think isolation affects the Turkish Cypriots individually?
It affects them very deeply, in every sense. There are very few communities, especially in Europe, who have lived such an isolated life. Usually the political, economic, commercial, and administrative deadlocks caused by isolation are emphasized. I believe there is a psychological deadlock which is much more determining. Feeling disconnected from the world, being punished and unwanted, being surrounded by hostilities and developing very unhealthy psychological defence mechanisms in reaction to these hostilities. Individuals perceive themselves through a mirror of unrecognition, unacceptance, and exclusion and this perception makes them either very fragile or very aggressive, or fragility and aggressivity feed each other.

Isolation undoubtedly affects the Turkish Cypriot literature. What can you say about the Turkish Cypriot literature?
The Turkish Cypriot literature is under the pressure of a definition of "Cypriot Literature" in Greek monopolized by the Greek Cypriots. Only the Greek Cypriot writers can use the cultural advantages of the European Union membership. Turkish, which is one of the official languages of the 1960 Republic of Cyprus, was not accepted as an official language in the European Union. The Turkish Cypriots unfortunately have not applied to the EU courts to seek their very understandable right in this matter. Any writers association in North Cyprus could have made that application. However, the isolation of North Cyprus leads to the formation of a shallow, isolated mindset in the world of Turkish Cypriot writers... In order for the cooperative bicommunal activities between the Turkish and Greek Cypriot poets and writers to have positive results, the Greek Cypriots need to accept the Turkish Cypriots as equally rightful owners of the island. This cannot be solved with naive brotherhood/sisterhood slogans. If you think that the 3,000 year old Cypriot literature only consists of Greek elements and leave the Turkish and many other elements out of this common history, then the problem is bound to remain unsolved. Therefore the most important issue is the Turkish language... I know from my own experience that whatever I write, the fact that it is written in Turkish and I am related to Cyprus causes disturbance. They think that I subvert the image of Cyprus as a Greek island and the equivalence of Cypriot literature to Greek Cypriot literature.

TURKISH LITERATURE
The honorary guest of this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair (one of the most important literary activities in the world) is Turkey. Will you participate in this fair?
All of my Turkish books published by Everest will be there. There will also be some French, Italian, English, and Letonian translations. I am not sure whether the German translation will be completed by then.

Are you happy to be represented in Frankfurt under the category of Turkish literature? Is the literatary works of Mehmet Yaşın a part of the Turkish Cypriot literature or a part of the Turkish literature?
These categories are not mutually exclusive. A writer who was born in Cyprus can simultaneously be part of the Cypriot, Turkish Cypriot, Turkish, European and at times English literature. Moreover I consider Turkish literature to be a "Turkish language" literature. My Turkish Cypriot literary works can therefore be considered as contributions to a wider conception of Turkish literature. There are many strands of literary currents that are rooted in the wider Ottoman-Turkish tradition without belonging to modern Turkey.

Are there new books on the way?
In 2007, Everest Publications published five books of mine. This year they will publish some more. Currently most of my time is spent on following the translations of my novels and poems. They will be published, also as poem DVDs, in English, Italian, French, German, Letonian and Russian.



Mehmet Yaşın’s works
Born in 1958, Lefkoşa, Mehmet Yaşın lives in Cambridge. Several of his novels have been published in English, Italian, Greek, Hebrew magazines and anthologies. "Soydaşınız Balık Burcu" and "Sınırdışı Saatler" are being currently translated into English and Italian.

Novels: Soydaşınız Balık Burcu (1994), (1995 Cevdet Kudret Novel Award), Sınırdışı Saatler (2003)

Poetry books: Sevgilim Ölü Asker (1984), (1985 Akademi Poem Award/A. Kadir Award);
Işık-Merdiven (1986); Pathos (1990); Sözverici Koltuğu (1993); Hayal Tamiri (1998); Don’t Go Back to Kyrenia (2001); Adı Kayıplar Listesinde (2002); Collected Poems / 1977-2002 (2007)...

Essays and reviews: The Anthology of the Turkish Cypriot Poetry (1994); The Anthology of Ancient Cypriot Poetry (1999); Poeturka (1995); Step-Mothertongue - From Nationalism to Multiculturalism: Literatures of Cyprus, Greece and Turkey (2000); Kozmopoetika (2002); Diller ve Kültürler Arası Bir Edebiyat İncelemesi: Kıbrıs Şiiri Antolojisi: MÖ 9. yy. - MS 20. yy. (2005), (2005 Memet Fuat Award); Collected Essays / 1978-2005 (2007)...