 Tears
and Respect
(Tears vs. Respect)
Most of you’ve taken (and the rest of you are going to take) your first
midterm of the semester around now, but even at such a busy time, I’m
sure none of you missed the news last week: one of the greatest Turkish
poets of our time, Attila Ýlhan, has passed away.
I won’t mourn him, or try to say how meaningful his life was. These
things have been done by nearly half of the press in Turkey since the
day of his death. We've had the chance to read his poems in the
newspapers and listen to them on TV (thanks to the recordings he made
while he was alive), which means that all the necessary rituals for the
death of a popular artist have been carried out. Those who remember what
happened when Barýþ Manço or Cem Karaca left this world will understand
what I mean.
But everyone didn’t lose control while expressing their sadness. (I know
losing control means love in this country, but I don’t feel the need to
accept such a point of view.) There were healthier reactions to Ýlhan’s
death than crying through words. That of Zeki Coþkun, a columnist for
the newpaper Radikal, is an example. His column of October 14 greatly
surprised me and also put a smile on my face. “So,” I started to think,
“there are people who don’t feel guilty because they’re alive when a
popular person is dead.”
Why do people feel the urge to express over and over again how tragic
the death of a gifted man/woman is? Moreover, why does an artist’s death
affect people so much? It’s not easy to answer this question. What I do
know is that an artist gains a place in people’s lives even if he/she
doesn’t know those people personally. Millions of people have read
Attila Ýlhan’s poems and believed that they understood his life and his
feelings. This happens in the case of all popular artists: his/her fans
believe in an imaginary world where the artist is a friend of theirs,
which is an obvious lie. They identify their limited understanding of
his/her art with the artist’s personality. This creates an image, which
is very different from the artist’s real self. As time passes, the fans
lock the artist in a cage made of his/her image. When the artist passes
away, his/her fans mourn the source of their fantasy, not the person him/herself.
This is because, beginning from the day of his/her death, they have to
re-create the image in a vicious cycle, without any new input. (Maybe
that’s why gossip about dead artists has become so popular.)
One way or another, we "know" such artists, and we're sad when they die.
But there’s an important thing we should learn: the only thing we really
know about them is their art, and it’s everlasting. There might be many
people who don’t like such a viewpoint, but I still hope that someday we
will have more intellectuals like Zeki Coþkun, who put sadness aside in
order to analyze what an important person has left behind.
Ýsmail O. Postalcýoðlu (POLS/III)
ismail_orhan@yahoo.com
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