Innocence Surrendered to the Wolves / Murat Özer

2011.05.13
Radikal book supplement

Murat Özer The Critic

While Sabahattin Ali’s 1938 story ‘Ayran’ tells of the fate of a poor child, crushed by a corrupt order, heading towards oblivion, Selim Güneş arrives at a ‘poetic’ reality with ‘White as Snow’, which he adapted from the eight-page story

Although he was also a strong poet and novelist, Sabahattin Ali, who occupies an entirely distinct place in Turkish literature with his short stories, succeeded in becoming a writer who ‘clung’ to Turkey’s realities through the countless stories he fitted into his very short life (his death is a disgrace for this country and will remain a disgrace). Drawing material for his stories from the ‘hope-crushing’ effect on people of a ‘corrupt order’ that has not changed even today and is not expected to change, reflecting in his work, through striking observations, how the ‘little man’ is crushed and made smaller still, and also having a ‘triggering’ effect through a style that stirs the reader’s emotions, the writer was always seen as an ‘enemy’ of authority because of these qualities. His ‘suspicious’ death, if you think about it, is a reflection of this as well.

‘Yeni Dünya’, which contains 13 stories the writer penned between 1936 and 1942 and was first published in 1943, is a true ‘treasure’. In this piece, however, given our subject, we will not discuss 12 of the 13 stories. We will turn our attention to ‘Ayran’, the fourth story in the book, which takes up only eight pages, and share our thoughts on it with you.

‘Ayran’ carries us into one day in the life of a poor village boy named Hasan. Fatherless, with a mother who works as a servant in the township, and therefore obliged to look after his two little siblings, Hasan sets off that winter day, as on every other day, on the road that stretches from his home to the station. His aim is to sell the ayran in his jug and buy dry bread to feed his siblings. But selling ‘ice-cold ayran’ on a winter day is not easy at all. He cannot even collect the money for the two mugs of ayran he does sell, because he cannot give change. Fate has woven its nets for him; poverty and deprivation are a ‘sin’ for him, and he will pay the price bitterly. Though he is the very embodiment of innocence, he hurries towards the ‘end’ through the heedlessness of those who cannot come anywhere near him in that respect, his bare feet sinking again and again into the snow…

‘Ayran’, which makes us ashamed of our humanity even as we write the paragraph above, is a ‘very special’ text that lets us feel intensely the power of Sabahattin Ali’s pen. With content ‘substantial’ enough to furnish a novel, the story forms an unbroken bond with the reader, and while it puts on the page the fate of its protagonist Hasan, it is also disturbing because of the ‘seeds of sin’ it scatters onto us from there. Accompanying Hasan on his ‘plain’ journey while witnessing moment by moment the circle tightening around him has a ‘suffocating’ effect on us. Everyone here is ‘guilty’ of Hasan’s disappearance: from his mother, who loads a heavy responsibility onto him, to his two siblings who are forever ‘hungry’, to the customer who does not pay for the ayran he drinks, to the station officer who makes him wait for the evening train. These ‘sinners’ do everything they can to trap the little boy inside the circle and ‘erase’ him. Hasan, whose only sin is poverty, has to pay the whole price alone; with the identity of a barely visible ‘dot’ ground to pieces by the order, he falls among the real wolves to which the ‘two-legged wolves’ have pushed him, with all his helplessness and fear…

With his story written in 1938, Sabahattin Ali points to a phenomenon that remains valid in every era. He takes up the way poverty, ‘cursed’ by being put under fire from within and without, is torn to pieces in a whirlpool, and he captures this perfectly in its points of ‘representation’ as well. The utterly lonely individual represented by Hasan and the ‘surroundings’ that represent the order holding him in its grip, although they breathe the same air, are so disconnected from each other that the troubles of the ‘other’ never for a moment become something ‘thought about’. Humanity’s age-old illness kicks in, and its ‘boundless’ qualities fail to emerge; it shuts itself up in its own world and does not turn to look at what is going on around it. In the end, it is the ‘powerless’ who suffer, forced to live a life condemned to darkness…

Delivering the load to its recipient

Taking on with his first film the responsibility of bringing such a powerful story to the big screen, Selim Güneş carries Sabahattin Ali’s plain realism into a ‘poetic realist’ structure with ‘White as Snow’. The writer-director takes the feeling of the story and pairs it with superb images and as little dialogue as possible. And the result is highly satisfying. Aware of the weight of the load on his back, Güneş, rather than throwing it off, strives to go all the way and deliver the load safely to its recipient.

In our view, Selim Güneş makes the right first move by taking the story to the unique nature of the Black Sea. In this way he secures the material that will form the film’s visual texture, and there is no need even to say how important this is for ‘White as Snow’. Then come the points where he meets and departs from Sabahattin Ali in some elements of the story. He reflects Hasan’s one-day adventure in a similar way, but because he changes the period, he makes some additions. The biggest difference lies in the role given to Hasan’s father. Hasan, who is fatherless in the story, misses his father in prison in the film, and the father, too, is made to share in the ‘sin’. The pocketknife Hasan got from his father also plays an important role in the finale.

Finding the practical solution a feature film requires, such as turning the station into a roadside shop, is also a plus for Selim Güneş. This choice makes Hasan’s waiting ‘more visible’ and makes it easier for us to believe in the boy’s helplessness. On the other hand, the waiting of the shop’s owner also supports the story by creating a contrast, and there is no such character in Sabahattin Ali. We could set the station officer against him as a counterpart, but he is not in a similar situation either.

Turning a short eight-page story into a feature film requires extra additions, and the director makes just such an effort, but he does not stray from what Sabahattin Ali is fundamentally saying. Güneş explains through a clash of emotions how the fate of the poor, who turn into a ‘dark shape’, is pulled out of their hands; he sets against each other every kind of emotion that could cause an ‘earthquake’ when brought face to face. He leans especially hard on ‘compassion’ and ‘cruelty’, hands the lane these two concepts open over to the ‘wide-angle’ gaze of the viewer, and makes the gradual loss of meaning of these concepts into material for the protagonist’s loss. And in the end he leaves humankind alone with its ‘conscience’…

What the film achieves beyond the story seems to be the phenomenon of ‘waiting’. Starting with Hasan, all the characters in the film are waiting for something, even if their expectations are never met in any way. This makes those other than Hasan look like ‘victims’ too, but ultimately it is their waiting that creates the ‘pain’ and triggers the ‘loss of innocence’. And the scale of the loss is ‘priceless’; nothing could justify the heedlessness!

There is no doubt a great deal that could be said about ‘White as Snow’, but let us settle for voicing two more things for now. The first is the ‘quotations’ that bolster the film’s poetic quality. By working powerful lines from writers into his material, Selim Güneş makes his film, on which he spent special effort to make it ‘poetic’, serve this aim, and thus eliminates the risk of falling short halfway… The second is the performances of Hakan Korkmaz, who plays Hasan, and Sinem İslamoğlu, who plays the mother. Korkmaz seems in every way to be Sabahattin Ali’s very own Hasan, like a character who has leapt out of the pages. İslamoğlu, for her part, gives flesh and blood to the mother character we know of in the story but never really get to know.

Bringing ‘Ayran’ to the screen is truly a hard task, and it is our duty to say that Selim Güneş has come through it with flying colours. It has its shortcomings too, but next to its strengths they are not worth mentioning. We hope that this effort of his will also set an example for our filmmakers who keep their distance from literature…

*****

Note: ‘White as Snow’ opens in cinemas today.

YENİ DÜNYA, Sabahattin Ali, Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2011 (8th printing), 124 pages, 9 TL.

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