Spot: Our June guest was academician & writer Ayfer Gürdal Ünal. We had a pleasant interview on her master’s thesis published as a book, Disability in Turkish Juvenile Literature. Ayfer Gürdal Ünal was born in 1953, in İstanbul. After American Girl
Spot: Our June guest was academician & writer Ayfer Gürdal Ünal. We had a pleasant interview on her master’s thesis published as a book, Disability in Turkish Juvenile Literature.
Ayfer Gürdal Ünal was born in 1953, in İstanbul. After American Girl College, she studied in Faculty of Management in İstanbul University. She turns back to her education life after 22 years, this time for graduate study in Turkish Language and Literature department of Bogazici University. She has been lecturing on “Juvenile Literature” since 2007, in the department of Pre-school Teaching, in this university and beautiful campus where we interview with her.
She has 13 original works all of which belong to the genre of children’s literature. But today, it will be focused on a different study, her postgraduate thesis that named Disability in Turkish Juvenile Literature, 1969-2009.
Hello Mrs. Ünal. Thank you very much for your time today to interview with us.
It’s my pleasure to meet you again, with my old students, to sit and share a common ground. I thank you.
Not only in children’s literature, but also in literature for adults, it is hard to see the disability issue. You are focusing 40 narratives in your thesis, published in the 40 years period between 1969 and 2009. Can you tell us why you chose this issue?
As you said, I turned back to my master’s degree very late; I was fifty four years old when I began and fifty seven when it was time to finish. At that age, you tend to think like “if I make a great effort, it should be worth to do that, should be a useful work”. I thought working on disability issue would be useful because there are few studies in this field. And I understood why people hesitate to work on disability when I went deeper; first things first, it touches your heart deeply. Then, it is really hard to find sources. You can’t ask a librarian in our libraries, “Can you show me where are the books including disabled characters?”. You have to visit bookshops, bibliopoles and search in websites. I could find forty books; it might have been forty one yet couldn’t reach access. It is quite interesting and a good coincidence; forty books in forty years. And on the other hand, it shows the rarity.
You highlights that, in four decades passed between 1969-2009, there is a conversion in the representations of disabled people in Turkish juvenile literature; from the passive to the active, from the inside thorough the outside. How would you wrap up all these for ones who didn’t read your thesis?
The conception of disability has been changed in forty years passed between 1969-2009. While disabled people were “poor, piteous, ridiculed and pathetic losers” forty years ago, we started to see them as “integrated with life, positioned under the equal circumstances with healthy people”. In the first stages, we see children with disabilities as they sit by the window and look at the playing children. Then it changes; a book by Zeynep Cemali, named Girl with Roller Skates poses the girl having impaired hearing while she is roller-skating. Apart from that, there is a book awarded by The Association of Juvenile and Youth Publishing for the best picture book prize two years ago: Shushu, John and Four-wheels. Two children, one having a bicycle and the other having a wheel chair, play and have fun equally in this book. These samples indicate that handicapped children have gone out of their houses thorough streets, meaning a conversion from inside to outside, from the passive to the active.
Arguing its theoretical background, you mention different models and doctrines regarding disability. To make the things we’ll discuss meaningful for our readers, can you mention some of them briefly?
There are two main approaches; one of them is an outdated, medical model. This approach sees a handicapped as sick, for instance, if a child with disabilities is not able to go to school with his/her wheel chair, s/he should have been treated, this is his/her responsibility. What a strict way of thinking! In response to this, there is social model, which is more humane, we can say. This model gives the responsibility to society saying that it is in society’s hand to make disabled people live as if they are not disabled. Our county is still living in the medical model but is trying to get closer to the social model.
When it comes to socio-cultural theories… In marking theory, different one is marked; this person might be disabled, from a different ethnical background and might have a different sexual tendency. This brings exclusion and mockery together. In dirt theory African indigenous people is on table. If a boy is born disabled, they let him flow in the river/lake. Because he is a spot on their social order, a mistaken form of being, to them. We see its counterpart in literature. In one of the Kemalettin Tuğcu’s novels, o boy is exiled and sent to the village for his face is considered ugly.
And Foucault’s theory named as “Bio-power and Obedient Bodies”. In this theory, powerful bodies think that they have right to interfere in disabled bodies, they put limits on disabled people’s lives. We see this perspective in Hitler’s suppression of disabled people. In one of the books I study, a disabled girl is not sure whether she is going to undergo surgery and her friend says: “Of course you should go under the knife, it is better to die otherwise!” She thinks that she has the right to say this judgmental phrase as a powerful body.
In your thesis, you talk about eight stereotypes in all genres of literature. What is the thing that makes the children’s book successful in disability narrative? By going beyond stereotypes and taking “what ought not to be” into account, we can describe this successful book.
One of these stereotypes is to represent disabled people as pathetic figures. A successful book shouldn’t be like that. Second one; people who make disabled individuals object of victimization; like Lenny in Of Mice and Man. Third one; people who characterize them as evil, we generally see its samples in fairy tales. Captain Hook in Peter Pan might be a good sample of it; not having one hand, he is an evildoer. Then there some using disabled character’s lives as atmosphere. To emphasize the goodness of protagonist, disabled people are used as means. And sometimes they are the objects of mockery, at some point, there are disabled types who feel pity for themselves. To my surveys, it is rare, disabled type feeling pity for oneself, in Turkish literature. There only few samples in forty books. It is more in texts written in foreign countries. We see the disabled people represented a burden on society in our literature. And the eighth stereotype is disabled people indicated as isolated from society. Either the family members feel ashamed of their child or the disabled person isolates himself/herself because no one listen to his/her spiritual concerns.
So, what do we seek for in a good work? First, disabled character should not be extremely good or bad person; should be multidimensional character with his/her jealousy and compassion. It shouldn’t be portrayed as in need to be understood, should not be a means for another character. When people without disabilities read the book, they should consider their own behaviors; whether they make handicapped people’s lives easy or not. Work should give a sense of hope to the disabled reader. It doesn’t have to have a happy ending. We do not expect miraculous ending that disabled boy can suddenly walk but we expect a realistic ending. The most fictive element will not compromise on literary qualities. The reader will feel pleasure of a good literary work.
There is a chapter regarding some surveys carried out on this issue al around the world. A Spanish researcher says that this issue is neglected in their literature. An Iranian researcher complains about the rarity of that kind of works in literature. What do you think is the situation in Turkish literature? After years of work, as one who produce in this field, how do you find your colleagues’ works recently?
Few, few, unfortunately very few… In picture books, this issue is almost invisible. In the year I complete my thesis, there wasn’t any work for the early years (0-6 years). Thanks God, for a while, it began to be produced, translations appear; for instance, Erdem Publishing created a series of books. Apart from that, number of works for ages 8-12 increased drastically; in Cock Man and Pirate and in Summer of Rainbow by Sevim Ak, we see the theme of disability. If I take our ideals about disability narrative into account and grade our current situation, I would give 7 or 7,5 out of 10. Yet, we are in a better position compared with previous one.
“Language and Ideology” is one of the most enjoyable chapters in your thesis. You reveal the “healthy man is superman” approach lying under some texts written with good intent. The example you gave, “he is sentenced to wheel chair”, is striking. You say that this sentence is a product of a powerful body because wheel chair is a conviction for healthy bodies. On the other hand, this is the way of getting rid of obstacles for disabled people, a free space. Can you elaborate on that issue, the language and its revealing itself?
This issue is the most depressing of all when I write my thesis; why there is no book written with disabled person’s own language, that is, in first person narrative, including his/her inner world. Just one or two… the conclusion I came up with is that the writer hesitates to write in first person narrative because s/he is not disabled. Or s/he think this way; people not having disabilities will also read my book, what if they have an identification problem or it affects negatively reading rate of my book…
When healthy bodies write these texts we see this kind of problems, I also mentioned this sample in my thesis; the teacher wants to change the classroom’s location for one of his students who has walking disabilities, they will move to downstairs. Students carry their tables but they are not happy, since it is hard to carry. To persuade them, the teacher says that “Why are you doing that? We have to help your friend. He can’t even walk.” At this point, saying that two words “even” and “can’t” is noteworthy. It shows the author’s ideology, his inner perspective. We see this kind of thinking for ages. Let me give you an example, a proverb: “See the lame, close the gate” And to describe disabled individuals, that’s said “poor, miserable”. We need to get rid of these pejorative adjectives, marking phrases like lame and crippled. When the writer realizes how offending these phrases are and don’t use them in his book, children won’t say them as well.
Mrs. Ünal, you quote a poem as a bad example in your thesis. We want to argue why this poem is a bad and inappropriate example and call an end to our interview because we believe that your points can create a change in ordinary reader’s mind and make them conscious readers. Can you make a comment on this sample based on the language and other models we talk about today?
This poem is an extract from a survey of History Association Publishing done for the sake of conscient textbooks about human rights, edited by Melike Türkan Bağlı and Yasemin Esen:
“Handicap is a lack
Felt for whole life
Don’t scorn the lame, hold his hand at any rate, and get to know him
Don’t brush him aside, don’t make the things worse for him”
There are more than one: I’m not going to talk about the wrong word choice, “handicap” in detail, and yet defining handicap as a “lack” completely wrong. The perspective we need is not based on lack but is based on difference. The writer plants the seed of despair: “will feel this lack for whole life”. And then “don’t scorn the lame” the writer says, s/he assumes that the lame will be scorned. May be the child has nothing in his/her mind like bias, so why to plant the seed of despair? “Hold his hand at any rate”; no, disabled people don’t want it! I have a friend named Sercan, visually impaired. He walks faster than everyone. He says: “I ask if this bus goes to Şişli and one holds my arms and help to get on the bus though I didn’t want to. I don’t even know to which direction the bus goes. I want a simple answer ‘Yes it goes, no it doesn’t’.” “Hold his hands” is not something that disabled people want to; I heard it with his own words. We need to have some examples that prevent from these thoughts affecting negatively this boy. Besides, these samples need to be cleaned from textbooks!
Here our interview ends, we thank Mrs. Ünal for sharing this afternoon with us and accepting our request to talk.