Bir Ada Hikâyesi'nde Tarih ve Bellek

In the tetralogy titled ‘An Island Story’ Yaşar Kemal lyrically depicts the drama of people from different ethnicity and region in Anatolia after World War I, on an imaginary island. In this paper the second novel of the tetralogy, Karıncanın Su İçtiği (Where the Ant Sips Water) will be analyzed. The first book of the tetralogy called Fırat Suyu Kan Akıyor Baksana (Look! Fırat River Bleeds) narrates the relationship between Christian Rum Guardian’s and Muslim Turkish Poyraz Musa’s selfidentities, the others and nature in the island they nestled. The struggle of the people who try to overcome the trauma after the war narrated in the book. The second book narrates the struggle of different ethnic and religious communities, who suffer the damages of the war, to form a common future. Yaşar Kemal, who deals with the effects of war and migration on the lives of the characters, focuses on ‘human reality.’ He reports the events, which affected the formation of individual and social identity, in an anthropocentric discourse. The aim of this paper is to question the role of war and migration on the identity construction of the island community. Yaşar Kemal’s work differs from classical narratives of heroism in its humanistic approach to the relation between history and identity in many respects, which will also be a exposed. The author who narrated a notable break in the historical process sheded light to the richness and complexity of the people’s inner lives. This paper will start from how the characters settle accounts with their own histories, and analyze the construction of individual and social identity.