Yasar Kemal gave voice to the powerless – Expressen

Kurdo Rear remember Nobel Prize candidate Yasar Kemal

The turkiskspråkige world-writer Yasar Kemal died on Saturday after a brief illness.

Yasar Kemal was peasant boy became a journalist and then switched to the author, inspired by Cervantes and Chekhov .

Because he wrote a lot about village life in Anatolia and the Kurdish areas were defined, he not infrequently as “peasant writer” or working writer of Turkish media. It was only in old age that he dared to speak openly about their Kurdish ethnicity.

Kemal’s authorship is large and wide. The memories and the people from childhood he never released. Kemal always gave voice to the right helpless and powerless. Bestseller “Let the thorns burn” (in Swedish translation 1970), the story of the thin rebel Mehmet, is a Turkish version of Robin Hood. Mehmet tire of her cruel employer Abdi Aga and takes his gun and goes to the mountains with his beloved Hatice. In “The thousand bulls Mountain” (1976) he allows nomadic tribe Karachullu be heard. With great dedication he depicts how the tribe forced to abandon their pastures because of those in power laws in Ankara. He himself had grown up in difficult conditions and knew what impotence meant.

To our mutual friends he used to point out that “angry sea”, depicting some fishing villages in Istanbul’s vicinity and the fisherman Selim was one of his favorites. Kemal took the destruction of the environment seriously, long before many other writers.

The man who wrote great books and could sing thousands of Kurdish songs have changed the planet. The loss is great, but the world shall remember his works. His first name means the one who always lives.

It hurts to a much loved author did not receive the Nobel Prize that he was current as early as the 1970s. According to a member of the Swedish Academy did not Yasar Kemal price because he wrote too simple.

I hope that the setting will not affect any other appropriate Nobel Prize candidate. Yasar Kemal was 92 years old. Rest in peace.

Kurdo Baksi is a writer and debater