A deep ecological reading of Yaşar Kemal’s The Birds Have Also Gone

Abstract

Yaşar Kemal is an author with the outspoken advocacy of his political view and can also be considered as the one who is excelled at reflecting the actual panorama of his age from critical point of view. At the target of his criticism there lies the fast urbanisation period to which many provincial people desperately try to adapt. This theme is illustrated in the novel The Birds Have Also Gone (1978) whose story revolves around a group of young boys in Istanbul trapping migrant birds and selling them to the customers who aim to gain paradise by setting these birds free. Through eco-critical lenses this business is a direct manifestation of anthropocentrism which will probably cause serious environmental crisis in near future. Anthropocentrism ignores intrinsic values of nonhuman beings and justifies human interference in the nonhuman world. As eminent eco-critics, Arne Naess and George Sessions assert “Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening” (Naess& Sessions, 1995:68). This study then tries to explore the issue of anthropocentrism in Yaşar mKemal’s The Birds Have Also Gone with reference to the theories of deep ecology.