{"id":2348,"date":"2023-04-09T20:06:00","date_gmt":"2023-04-10T00:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/?p=2348"},"modified":"2025-05-30T13:29:29","modified_gmt":"2025-05-30T17:29:29","slug":"dawn-by-selahattin-demirtas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/dawn-by-selahattin-demirtas\/","title":{"rendered":"“Dawn” by Selahattin Demirta\u015f"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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\"Dawn\" by Selahattin Demirta\u015f<\/h1>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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\"DawnDawn: Stories,<\/strong><\/em> by Selahattin Demirta\u015f. Translated from the Turkish by Amy Marie Spangler and Kate Ferguson. New York: SJP for Hogarth, 2018.<\/strong><\/p>

Discussed at our Book Club on April 4, 2023.<\/p>

This slender book contains twelve stories by Selahattin Demirta\u015f, a human rights lawyer turned HDP co-chair turned political prisoner. Written from his cell in a maximum security prison in Edirne, the book is dedicated to \u201call murdered women and victims of violence.\u201d The stories are simple, modest, and unpretentious, sometimes funny but more often heartbreaking.<\/p>

\"DemirtasTwo seem to point to his current condition: in \u201cThe Man Inside\u201d a prisoner in a high-security cell converses with a bird. And in the last story, \u201cA Magnificent Ending,\u201d the narrator is a politician, representing a city that has achieved all the demands in the HDP program.<\/p>

Other stories relate to the author’s condition as a prisoner by expressing sympathy for prison workers. \u201cGreetings to Those Dark Eyes\u201d is about two construction workers And in \u201cA Letter to the Prison Letter-Reading Committee,\u201d a prisoner addresses a story to those whose job is to screen his words.<\/p>

In other stories, Demirta\u015f projects himself into the lives and psyches of people very different from himself. In \u201cIt\u2019s Not What You Think\u201d \u00a0he writes from the point of view of a psychotic stalker. In \u201cAh, Asuman!\u201d he captures a nighttime conversation between a bus driver and a young passenger as the kilometers roll by somewhere in Anatolia. That story is funny and upbeat, but \u201cKebab Halabi\u201d is about the consequences of a bomb that exploded in an Aleppo marketplace killing 68 people.<\/p>

Demirta\u015f sometimes takes the risk of writing from the point of view of women and girls. In \u201cMermaid,\u201d he becomes a five-year-old Syrian girl who is taken by her mother to escape the country. In \u201cNazan the Cleaner,\u201d a cleaning woman gets swept up in a violent demonstration and, through a series of mishaps, ends up unjustly imprisoned.<\/p>

In \u201cSeher,\u201d a dreamy, romantic teenage girl is raped, for which she undergoes an \u201chonor\u201d killing at the hands of her family. The story is devastating.<\/p>

Finally, \u201cAs Lonely as History\u201d concerns a woman who is an architect, married to her professional partner. The couple become alienated from all aspects of life except their work. It is beautifully written and, among other things, a heartfelt statement of the power of literature.<\/p>

Available for purchase from Penguin Random House<\/a>.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Demirta\u015f’s 2017 short story collection “Seher,” published in English in 2018 as “Dawn”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14065,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[97,62],"tags":[80,81],"class_list":["post-2348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-club","category-literature","tag-literature","tag-short-stories"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2348"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2348\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14064,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2348\/revisions\/14064"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}