When I set out to become a novelist in Turkey in the early 2000s, Leylâ Erbil had yet to publish what is perhaps her most accomplished work, What Remains (2011), an experimental bildungsroman written in verse about a woman obsessed with Istanbul’s stones, and published in an English translation last fall. Back then my favorite novels were Flaubert’s Parrot, The Name of the Rose and My Name is Red—the fruits of monkish devotion to historical scholarship transmuted into postmodern fiction. In contrast to the clever maneuvers of Julian Barnes, Umberto Eco and Orhan Pamuk, I saw Erbil as a remnant of a bygone era. I didn’t care for her explorations of middle-class morality and gender roles. Nor did I understand why she had rebelled against Turkish syntax and invented a unique form of punctuation known as “Leylâ signs.” She rarely used uppercase letters, and she favored a triplet of commas, a grammatical middle finger meant to force readers to pause and ponder. The writers in my pantheon treated their lives as just one text of many that needn’t take precedence over the others, a form of intertextuality that thrilled me; Erbil’s use of her own life felt hopelessly outdated, her use of her own rules self-indulgent.

Born in 1931, Erbil belonged to the “1950s generation” of Turkish modernist writers, and seen from today’s vantage point she could not have been more chic. Like her friends Vüs’at O. Bener, Ferit Edgü, Demir Özlü and Tezer Özlü, she often wrote autobiographically. Her sexuality, her marriages—all of it was fair game. Erbil’s story collections, published in the 1960s and 1970s, earned her some recognition; A Strange Woman (1971), the masterpiece of Turkish autofiction, earned her a place in the pantheon of Turkish literature. She died in 2013 from heart failure; the country’s avant-garde authors and critics, who saw her as a trailblazing experimentalist, mourned her passing.

For the rest of us, Erbil was a curiosity: an autodidact and a communist outcast who liked being mad, bad and sad in a nation of pious Kemalists. Her father was a ship engineer and the son of a Rumelian family that had settled in a Black Sea town of Turkey in the early twentieth century; her mother was of Albanian origin, born in Thessaloniki, and moved to Izmir during the Balkan War population exchange in 1923. In her twenties Erbil joined her father on a cargo steamer bound for the United States. She abandoned her studies in English literature at Istanbul University in 1951 after getting married but returned to them the following year after a divorce. She delved into the works of Marx and Freud—she is the most Freudian of Turkish modernists. She shelved her studies yet again after marrying a civil engineer. “These days I harbor no purpose other than a passion to write continuously without losing my mind or my soul here within this society, and I have reached the age of maturity,” she wrote in 1969 while working on A Strange Woman. “To do otherwise,” she later wrote, “would be considered biased, and such behavior is the archenemy of the novelist.”

Erbil used the same epigraph in each of her books: “never been submitted for any ‘awards.’” She was proud and a character, that’s for sure. And that was my problem with her. What she lacked in talent she made up for in self-promotion. Erbil was too eccentric, too full of herself. How could I take her seriously? What drew readers to her work, I thought, was not its quality but her extravagant self-display. The Turkish authors I admired, all of them male, were different. Invisible, silent and confident scribes devoted to ambitious literary projects, they resembled bank clerks, duly following standard Turkish punctuation and syntax, and were certain of receiving a solid dividend of praise upon the appearance of their new novel.

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In 2020, while working on a book about the eclectic texts that constitute “Turkish literature” and reject homogeneous notions of nationhood, I read What Remains for the first time. Nine years after its publication and seven years after the death of its author, I finally understood Erbil’s power. By embracing experimental language and exploring taboo subjects, she had posed a challenge to literary conventions in Turkey, one that still feels urgent and contemporary. As I savored What Remains and reread the books of Erbil’s I had once rejected, I came to see how she used her life to write the kind of selfless, political novel I thought only postmodernist techniques could achieve.

In collaging her life with the life of her country, Erbil had fermented a new strain of literature that I wanted to emulate in my own autobiographical fictions. What makes her version of autofiction so unusual is the way its autobiographical elements expand into something far more thoroughly historical and political—her work was not as self-obsessed as I initially thought. As Sylvia Plath, another mad, bad, sad twentieth-century luminary wrote, “it’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself; it’s much easier to be somebody else, or nobody at all.” In ignoring Erbil’s work in my twenties, I had taken the easy way out, postponing the messy responsibility of reckoning with myself, and all that it entails.

In an emblematic scene early in What Remains, the narrator guides readers through Istanbul’s Old City. On the way from Eğrikapı to Kocamustafapaşa, she observes:

with their walls and boundaries, other sides, passageways, people of so many lineages here,,, no one here’s a local,,, no one anywhere’s a local,,, the true locals are the folks buried underground, the ones aboveground are all foreigners,,, the true locals are the ones buried yet another layer farther down below the true locals,,, and the even more local locals are buried down below them,,, half of us are down below beneath the city, the other half of us are here but soon enough we’ll be down below

This is how Lahzen, the novel’s narrator, sees the world: layer upon layer, a history of erasures that human psychology is driven to excise and repress. Her stream-of-consciousness prose accommodates both personal and public political traumas, from the failure of her marriage to the Armenian genocide of 1915 and the Dersim massacres of Kurds in the 1930s; from the discrimination experienced by a Jewish friend to the September 1955 pogroms against Christians and Jews. At the same time, a counter-force tries to suppress this act of recollection by numbing the writer with painkillers, ADHD medications and antipsychotics. The drama of the novel lies in our own attempts to see it all too—to learn to see as Lahzen does.

In each stone of Istanbul, Lahzen sees a sign of past atrocities, such as the disappearance of harmony between Greek Orthodox Christians and the Laz people of the Black Sea. Only “the immortal stones of this earth” can counter the erasures of the city’s violent past. This is why the stones of Hagia Sophia, “bound together / by the pouring of molten lead condemned to immortality,” enchant Lahzen. She’s amazed at how “simply by pouring molten lead / they stopped up the cracks in the stones / the liquid metal flowed finding the gaps / and filling them in the gaps between the stones that earthquakes, disasters, armageddon could not pry apart.”

Along with its stones, an irrepressible interest in Istanbul’s gates, walls and ruins runs through the text. Lahzen’s house lies within the city walls, which stretch from the Golden Horn to the Marmara Sea and were built 1,500 years ago by Emperor Theodosius II. In Fener, the neighborhood where Lahzen grows up, the sun sears everything, and “a feral masculine harmony” pours from the Greek High School for boys, a building “carved out of a ruby the size of a mountain in 1881” by the Greek architect Dimadis. Nearby, fig, mulberry, plum, pomegranate and sycamore trees frame the Ayakapı Gate, formerly known as Aya Theodosias. Each thing, each person has a history awaiting excavation.

Erbil reminds us how Fener, “with its rows of matchbox houses and narrow streets behind the walls,” was once the core of Old Istanbul and the heart of Christian Orthodoxy. On the opposite shore lay Pera, the quarter of embassies and diplomats, with a more Catholic flavor. In Fener, Lahzen sees “nestled together, the souls of dead cities leading down into endless layers of the past.” The neighborhood’s distinct character is still there, if you know how to look, how to listen: the last remnants of the Greek petite bourgeoisie live there. Lahzen remembers how “songs were everything” in those years. From every house, she would hear a different voice, a phrase from a different language: “yirise…” “night and day…” “c’est si bon…” “ayrılık belki ölümden beter…”

A path leading to the garden of a neighboring house, owned by a Greek family, is paved in pebble mosaics made by a Greek citizen at a time when “there was no need to conceal one’s faith,” she writes. These mosaics are flower-patterned, and as a little girl Lahzen wonders whether they blossom or contain flower seeds: “when one is little, one thinks that everything contains something else.”

Erbil’s gaze soon turns to a specter from Lahzen’s childhood: Rosa, a Jewish schoolmate. They had been inseparable from primary school until college; the “essence of the truth of this text,” she writes, “may have to do with her.” Together Lahzen and Rosa discovered Istanbul’s culture, spending summers “binging on the episodes of our glorious history’s past” at school. Turkish historiography’s embrace of the “inheritance of bloodstained caftans / heirlooms of our forefathers” has troubled them. Parents expected children to be in awe of their past, but “this rusted-out demand / weighed heavily upon us,” she notes. How could they take pride in their rulers “hacking to pieces hundreds of thousands of alevi kurds or qizilbash”? Neither could they admire “suleiman the magnificent / slaughtering 25,000 enemy soldiers / on the plains of mohács / making a graveyard of the marshes of karassó.” Instead, reading such historical episodes made her and Rosa’s hair stand on end.

This tradition of cold-blooded murder is a central theme of the novel. In the fifteenth century, when Mehmed II ascended to the throne, Ottoman law legitimized the murder of the brethren of sultans, permitting him to have little six-month-old prince Ahmed strangled and unleashing a cycle of killings: “earringed selim poisoned his father bayezid II / and then / had five of his blood nephews executed along with his brother prince korkut and his brother prince ahmed / suleiman the magnificent / had piri reis put to death.” Lahzen says people forget that the Turkish Republic, “which was pulled with forceps / from the vagina of the empire they called the east / still hasn’t recovered” even now, centuries later.

The beginning of her friendship with Rosa promises something different: one day, Lahzen leaves her pencil case at home. None of her fellow students, not even her “darling friends,” will loan her a pencil, except Rosa, who “‘crack’ / broke her pencil in two handing me one half / saying, here, / carving that sound into my own personal history / laying the groundwork for who I am today.” That crack reverberates throughout the book, “suggesting to me the idea of world citizenship as an end.”

Rosa becomes “my darling rosa” and “my devoted childhood friend,” as important to each other as their youthful romances. When Rosa dates a naval officer who later abandons her, she runs to Lahzen as tears stream down her face: “he left me because he’s afraid; because i’m jewish! why else, he was in love with me!..” Yet despite their close bond, Rosa and Lahzen lose contact after high school, and Lahzen hopes Rosa is among her readers. In case she’s no longer alive, she mourns her: “if you’re dead may ‘nurkalem’ pencils / rain down upon your little plot of earth / as for me i’m still in this old madhouse / fit as a fiddle surprised i’m not dead yet…”

Her friendship with Rosa, her subsequent disappearance and the thread of violence in Turkish history clarify Lahzen’s view of her nation. She fumes about “our toddlers in orphanages beaten senseless with hoses at the hands of fatso jerks, little ones raped at an age when they know nothing yet of the world, child prostitutes pimped out, girls buried alive.” She is guilt-ridden about the pain of a Greek jeweler who tells her, when they meet in Rhodes, “we were kicked out of our country.” She feels terrible about how “we uprooted the greeks from these lands they’d called home for millennia we drove them out took their place.”

Turkish history, Lahzen believes, is also one of sad ironies. The Sanasaryan Han in Beyoğlu, an office complex commissioned by Armenian merchant Mıgırdiç Sanasarian, was confiscated after the Armenian genocide and repurposed in the 1930s as the headquarters of the Istanbul Police Department (nicknamed tabutluk, a coffin-holder), where political prisoners, including the poet Nâzım Hikmet and novelist Vedat Türkali, were held during anti-communist crackdowns. (Today it’s a luxury Marriott.) Even in the history of the Atatürk Cultural Center, which burned in November 1970 while the city’s premier theatre staged Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, she finds signs of a murderous will. Just two days before the fire, a statement signed by the “Theater Censorship Committee” demanded the removal of plays from the stage that were “not pious or nationalist”; the group had filed a complaint with the prosecutor’s office. Eight years later, seven university students who were members of the Workers’ Party of Turkey were assassinated by ultra-nationalists, including the Grey Wolves’ leader Abdullah Çatlı, who is venerated on the far right to this day. Lahzen follows the thread of violence all the way to 2007, when Turkish nationalists, likely with support from the state, assassinated the Armenian-Turkish writer Hrant Dink outside the headquarters of Agos, the newspaper he established in 1996. Polyphonic and heterogeneous, What Remains diagnoses and dramatizes the centuries-long tension between those disappeared and butchered by the state and those who perpetrated the violence. The Istanbul of Erbil’s youth—multiethnic and heterodox, with its “assyrian, armenian, and kurdish stone masons”—is a fatality of this violence. But a daring novel might restore it, showing what still remains today of generations past.

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I was a different person when I read Erbil in my twenties, unable to understand why so many of my friends loved her or Tezer Özlü, her comrade-in-arms. These outcasts, whose books never sold well in their time, refused to be swept into the shadows of Turkish literature. I didn’t know what to make of their secular, experimental interests. Erbil passed over what was then seen as Turkish literature’s central concern: the conflict between tradition and modernity, the drama of the pious masses interacting with the modernizing elites. She proposed something else: life as she lived it, history as she considered it. Through her prism, a single life contained everything, waiting to be shaped into literature.

In an astonishing scene in What Remains, Lahzen recalls how the mirrors in her house in Fener were hung at a certain height so that children could not see their reflection. Until she encounters herself in a mirror one day, Lahzen has no idea that such a reflection existed in the world. And yet, “it’s perhaps only when she sees herself in it that the child gradually comes to understand that she’s different from the adults around her, that she’s a child.” What Remains was Erbil’s mirror, allowing her, and her readers, to realize that one could be different and live in difference, and that her power lay in seizing mirrors and altering what they reflected.

Image credit: “Ayakapı,” Dosseman (CC BY-SA 4.0)