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Maternal slavery and Gothic melancholy in Abdülhak Hamid Tarhan’s Vâlidem (My Mother) and Mihrünnisa Hanım’s counterpoetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2024

Burcu Gürsel Open the ORCID record for Burcu Gürsel [Opens in a new window]
Burcu Gürsel*
Affiliation:
Department of Western Languages and Literatures, Kırklareli University, Kırklareli, Turkey
*
Email: burcugursel@gmail.com
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Abstract

Late Ottoman writers whose mothers were formerly enslaved were haunted by the mother’s arrested mourning for her lost mother/land in the Caucasus. “Intimate biofiction” by these writers – potential masters and sons of slaves – offers a unique narratorial point of view distinct from first-person slave narratives and third-person abolitionist literature. Abdülhak Hamid Tarhan’s long narrative elegy, Vâlidem (My Mother), written at the time of her death around 1897 and published with a sequel in 1913, triangulates the mother/land, the father/land, and the son on his diplomatic and exilic itinerary. In Ottoman Turkish and aruz meter, Hamid imagines the melancholic crypt of the mother, the paradigmatic child of Gothic literature who remains undead – a phantom haunting her own progeny. In a melancholic inversion of loss, Circassia is reincarnated as the mother/land who lost her. Hamid’s mother is resurrected in a sequel to give birth to the sons of the new fatherland. Her narrative overwritten once again, the same mother appears in Mihrünnisa Hanım’s counterpoetics alongside the nanny who stayed. The metonymic chain of exilic replacement mothers extends even to Hamid’s last, teenage bride from Belgium.

Keywords

Ottoman literatureslaveryGothic literaturemothersmelancholyTanzimat literature
Type
Article
Information
New Perspectives on Turkey , Volume 70 , May 2024 , pp. 52 - 70
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of New Perspectives on Turkey

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