Reading Yaşar Kemal's The Sea-Crossed Fisherman in the Year of the Dolphin

Ufuk Özdağ

《Concentric： Literary and Cultural Studies》 34卷1期 (2008/03) Pp. 45-74

https://doi.org/10.6240/concentric.lit.200803_34(1).0003

並列摘要

Environmental literature has a crucial function to play in raising environmental awareness, for such literature inculcates ecocentric values to public consciousness through heartfelt narratives of lived tragedies in ”particular places” across the globe. One fine example belongs to Turkey's most influential living author, Yaşar Kemal; his novel The Sea-Crossed Fisherman (1978), with its setting of Istanbul and its environs, takes up the issue of large-scale dolphin hunts in Turkish coastal waters in the early 1950s, a tragedy that was banned in 1983 but is still continuing in many coastal waters around the world. The novel, in rich language inspired by the epic styles of the Anatolian oral tradition and Turkish folklore and legends, makes a forceful call for extending moral concern to the environment. The novel's ecocentric approach covers the rights of both the Marmara ecosystem devastated following the overexploitation of dolphins for their oil and the intrinsically valuable dolphins, with their capacity for cognition and humanlike emotions. Still, the greatness of the novel lies in Kemal's conviction that changes in the natural world are followed by changes in human nature-this is perhaps Kemal's unique contribution to environmental studies. Along with the devastation that befalls Istanbul and its environs, the novel presents pictures from the lives of alienated, unwholesome human characters who confer only economic value to nature and its species. In the Year of the Dolphin (2007-extended into 2008), part of the UN Decade on Education for Sustainable Development (which aims, among other things, to make peoples of the world aware of the threats facing dolphins and to stop the exploitation of the seas of the world), it is crucial to read Kemal's The Sea-Crossed Fisherman, for it is both a plea and a strong voice to bring about transformation in our value systems that will lead to increased protection of the environment, including the world's oceans.

並列關鍵字

Yaşar Kemal ； The Sea-Crossed Fisherman ； Year of the Dolphin ； environmental literature ； dolphin hunts ； intrinsic values ； sea literature

參考文獻

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