DEMİRDAĞ’IN GÖLGESİNDE - NAZIM HİKMET’İN “FERHAD İLE ŞİRİN”* OYUNUNDA TOPLUMSAL CİNSİYET

This article aims to analyse a modern adaptation by Nazım Hikmet of an old Persian fairy tale, “Ferhad ile Sirin”, employing the methods of feminist literary criticism in terms of sexual politics of the text and the playwright. In the original story of “Ferhad ile Sirin”, Ferhad, to prove his love for Sirin, is asked by the sultan of Arzen city to dig a passage through Iron Mountain into the source of the water spring, which is an impossible mission. In the end of the story the lovers cannot come together, but Ferhad discovers his inner view to reach the way to divine love for God. In Hikmet’s modern adaptation of the story, Ferhad’s love for Sirin turns into the love of ideals for the benefit of the public, and he continues digging through the Iron Mountain to reach the water source for the happiness of the people in the city, while Sirin waits for him to return. Love is not an individual matter but something shared, and when shared it multiples. From this point of view, Nazım’s version is not a love story but Ferhad’s own story of heroism based on a love theme, and Iron Mountain becomes a symbol of independence, which, unfortunately, casts a shade on heroines. The question of gender in the play is tackled by analysing the presentation of female and male figures in the roles in the textual frame of the main themes (such as “love”, “power”, “waiting”), the cliché forms of the fairy tales present in the text, and textual and sexual oppositions constructed in the story and discourse levels of the play. It is also discussed and criticized the fact how the Marxist point of view of the playwright supports social and sexual equality on one hand, but on the other it also strengthens its ideology by means of patriarchal way of thinking and using gender as an instrument in a natural way without even realizing its own dilemma. Analysing this play from the point of gender may provide different interpretation and reception alternatives for new staging strategies, and may break the repetitions, or duplications, of the same reading and staging ways through the Marxist view of the play and the playwright, as has been done so far. This revolutionary effort in enhancing a text written by a revolutionary playwright by stripping it off its established conventional sexual discourse would be a deed that Nazım Hikmet himself would not oppose but approve.