Orhan Kemal’s children stories compilation, Fifty Kuruş Chocolate, which involves eight different stories of a child character, was republished with illustrations in 2016.

Orhan Kemal’s children stories compilation, Fifty Kuruş Chocolate, which involves eight different stories of a child character, was republished with illustrations in 2016. Kemal, who wrote short stories from 1942 till his death, highlights the social condition during and after the World War II in his writings and produces Turkish literature works from a socialist realism perspective. We can observe that, in his writings, the social condition of the era appears as misery, poverty, hunger, being forgotten in society and lives of “little men” which was named by many critics. It is possible to see the similar tendency in his stories where he didn’t directly aimed children readers but considered them indirectly. Stories in Fifty Kuruş Chocolate display the “light” that characters still keep even if they had to involved in survival struggle with their childish bodies and minds.

It is possible to encounter two different sides in Kemal’s compilation of eight stories. First, the ones that are about children, who personally entered to the money making battle. In stories “Fifty Kuruş”, “Joy” and “Child”, children characters, who struggle with making a living in public places of metropolitan atmosphere like streets and ferries, are present with their moral aspects and earning ethics based on deserving. In these stories, characters enter the earning struggle “with their voices which scare the night even if it snows or rains too much or the snow freezes because of the frost” (Orhan Kemal 7). The narrator especially emphasizes in each story that these children are members of families which suffer from poverty. The author also creates a dialogical tone by sharing the ideas, which push him/her to this earning struggle, in the mind of the child character. In this dialogical tone, as Bakhtin states in his research on Dostoyevski, “everything should be on the main character and turn to him/her, everything must make itself to feel like a discourse about someone real and as the word of ‘second’ person, not the ‘third’” (118). With the existence of this aforementioned “second” tone, Orhan Kemal refers to a narrator who can understand the characters and manage to develop a discourse from their perspectives. This perspective also proves that Orhan Kemal chooses to reflect the character’ inner realism as well as his/her exterior features from a socialist realist side as Lukacs states two different realisms, which are critical and socialist realism (95). Even if the characters are children, the author and characters are in a reconciliation: The way of telling “Desperately, leaving the school at fifth grade to contribute something to what his/her mother’ and granny’ gains, at least to help cover the expenses of himself/herself and his/her three years younger sibling” (Orhan Kemal 8) is presented to the reader in a legitimized way. In this legitimacy, sometimes the feelings of negligence and disbelief, that those children are obliged to keep them covertly, dominate. They start out after the obligation of accepting the realities of life, thus facts of life cannot hurt them on the way. “My dad is an alcoholic and my mom … Come one roll the twenty-five!” (57). As far as these characters are aware of the difficulties that they have to face at a young age, they also have virtuous minds and look for earning rightfully. They are dignified enough not to accept money which was given to them just because they are “cute”, “beautiful” or “have sparkling eyes”. In some parts questioning like “Really? Are you going to give me fifty kuruş? Why no one gives me this much money…” (58) “What are you going to want in return…” (12) “That extra hundred kuruş made him/her felt bad. He/she didn’t deserve that money. It made him feel like dishonesty or theft. Wish he/she had never given it…” (90) turns to reactions like “he grabbed first the five then ten liras and tossed them to his face. Scoundrel!” (92). Orhan Kemal’s narration style in these stories, just like in other his novels, is in a position that prefers to make the characters talk instead of making the narrator visible in the story. According to Berna Moran, Orhan Kemal prefers to “show” the story instead of “telling” it and as she quoted from Kemal’s own words, he takes a back seat and leaves the reader with the story (55). This is an important point because it ensures impressiveness and it prefers showing rather than telling tone to the children reader. Children characters are present sometimes as children but sometimes as adults in their children bodies and the reader gets a chance to make a bound between himself/herself and characters by hearing their own voices. A male character, who communicates with children, approaches to them with same reasons and in the same way in all three stories and his dialogues with children characters end in similar ways: living with honor, earning righteously and asking for what he/she deserves. Male and middle-aged characters are created to make speeches that will help children showing their honorable behaviors visible, help them unconditionally and make their earning better with the money they give away. It can be clearly seen in these three stories that Kemal demonstrates the way these children characters show the right thing, the possibility of making the reader get a lesson and support an exemplary behavior by these functional characters and dialogues.

Stories which can be evaluated in the second group are the texts in which families of the characters are included in the survival struggle together with their children. Also, these people fight with the authority which is the power symbol of society. “Streptomycin” is the story a mother selling a medicine, which can be a remedy for her ill child, due to moral and material hunger. An impressiveness is apparent in the story that it shows how hunger and misery can change the priorities of people and how it can affect even sacred feelings like motherhood and mercy. In this story where the effect of misery on people is starkly evaluated from a totally different point of view, Orhan Kemal’s socialist realist behavior is presented as a dirty fight with society’s upper class. Even the mother’s reaction is harsh to her child who can’t buy his own medicine. “This is how they trick and bundle off fools like you. Didn’t I tell you to scream, shout and swear?” (21). The fight with life, government and institutions for the sake of very basic personal needs is at the center. A similar approach can be seen in other stories “Red Earings” and “Nermin”. The effect of authority on the family and misery can be clearly evaluated. In “Red Earings” this situation appears as grandmother’s, the authority in the family, ruthlessness. The grudge of the absence of love, mercy sometimes reaches to levels in their child’s hearts that they think “I would run away to the forest. If wolves savage me, lumberjacks find my bloody clothes and bones in the morning,” (64). In “Nermin”, there is a dialogic tone that is enough to unbalance the family even though they fight with hunger and can never gather themselves up under the dictate of social norms. “Her grandfather, grandmother, father and their close relatives consider the situation and say ‘Shame, such shame!’ You sent your wife to work! Didn’t you think about our honor?’” (77). Family dynamics in this story does not publicly fall apart unlike “Red Earrings” which focuses on fleeing from home, but it shatters. However, in the story of “About Selling a Book”, the attitude of a father, who cannot sell his books because of the social pressure and leave his family to starve, presents a sort of break down. The father enters the house and gets a feeling of his wife cheats on him, wakes his little girl up by the sound of the mirror he has broken, “You don’t love me, neither you nor your mother… You don’t love me, you are lying to me, lying… Is it possible to love an unemployed father, husband?” (35). The woman, who faces this situation when she gets home, states that it is not a material hunger that she suffers from, narrator express it as “she sighed and felt her hunger in all over her body” (37). What Orhan Kemal touches on, in these stories, is the reflection of people who gets ill-tempered against misery and fall to a material hunger. A similar tone can be seen in children that are obstinate to each other in “Chocolate” story. In front of the chocolate store’ showcase, next to two siblings, who are in a better condition, some other elements are present such as the daughter of a yoghurt maker with dirty hair, empty pockets, a mother who is dead in mind, a sister that always work and cannot even clean the house, a father who always drinks and beats. The siblings fight with the feeling of “it is a sin to make someone desire” and this feeling was placed in them with fear rather than mercy. To avoid this, they do not buy chocolate when they enter the store together with the daughter of yoghurt maker, the girl attempts to provoke them, so the story is presented childishly but impressively. While the children compete with each other for what they see as precious, the hunger, desire and love for “chocolate” in yoghurt maker’s daughter makes her ill-tempered and aggressive. In the end, she gets what she wants and she obliges them to commit the sin of “making someone to desire”. The grudge against the life is the feeling which she had while she feels the heaviness of this sin and her hunger. “She closed her eyes. There was chocolate which was consuming with a great pleasure after taking the packing papers out. She opened her eyes, the showcase… She closed her eyes” (49). Eventually, she grabs the packing papers in a position that she made them commit the sin, could not get her revenge, alternating between the hunger and pride and stays there by afraiding someone would call her “gypsy”. The story ends with her not being able to control herself anymore as she licks the papers of chocolates at a hidden, stinking corner. Orhan Kemal concentrates on the huge gap between the one who is strong because he/she has money and the one who is weak because of misery in his “Chocolate” and “About Selling a Book”. He mentions the moral and material situation of hunger as well as little people who are forgotten and by doing that he conflicts with the strong representatives of society.

With stories in Orhan Kemal’s children stories compilation Fifty Kuruş Chocolate, based on children characters and their stories, marginalization of little people is written with a simple expression that child minds could understand and these stories have the characteristics of socialist realism. Orhan Kemal faces the reader with misery, hunger and humanity by putting characters, who face the realities of life, at the center and continues to search for “hope and light” behind the impressive and dirty realism of these stories, but this time he searches them on the light which he sees in the eyes of children as Berna Moran states.

Bibliography

Bakhtin, Mihail M. Dostoyevski Poetikasının Sorunları. İstanbul: Metis Yayınları, 2004.

Lukacs, Georg. Roman Kuramı. Çev. Cem Soydemir. I·stanbul: Metis Yayınları, 2003.

Moran, Berna. Türk Romanına Eleştirel Bakış II. İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2002.

Orhan Kemal. Elli Kuruş Çikolata. İstanbul: Everest Yayınları, 2016.