Mehmet Hakkı Suçin
Adalet Ağaoğlu’s playwriting holds a prominent and pioneering place in Turkish dramatic literature, owing to a distinctive style and mode of expression that set her apart from the other leading figures of Turkish theatre, past and present.
In writing her plays, Adalet Ağaoğlu draws on a set of procedural tools, the most important of which is perhaps the concept of the “implied reader”. Through it she shows how the reader is bound up with the inner world of the text and how the text guides the reader in building interpretive meaning. She maintains a critical perspective, points to the stereotyped structure of society and seeks to expose the mechanisms that reinforce these stereotypes, without imposing her own ideas on the text, so that the reader can take part in shaping the meaning and in uncovering what is obscure and hidden behind what is clear and visible – that is, in discovering what the text leaves unsaid.
There are no fixed endings, no “certainty”, in Ağaoğlu’s plays; they do not offer answers so much as openings. She likes to leave the door open, treating the reader as an essential partner in the creative work, giving him room to infer and complete, and turning him into a second author, or almost an author, who adds something of his own and feels that he shares in this world.
In her communication with the reader, Ağaoğlu goes beyond the patterns of traditional theatre, and most of her plays rest on symbolic and abstract narration. Sometimes she takes her characters from everyday life, so that readers can recognise themselves and see their own situation; at other times she uses a symbolic and abstract style, so that they interpret and, again, see the situation in which they live. She uses the set to express her characters’ identity and names them according to their social position, thereby exposing the constraints society places upon them. She uses simultaneous sets and leaps in time and space, shuts her characters up in a single room, or employs symbolic décor.
Through all this, Ağaoğlu seeks to move the reader away from the position of a passive recipient, to activate his role, free him from passivity and prompt him to think about what lies between the lines. In this way the reader grasps the nature of the social relations that prevail in society, analyses what lies behind them on the basis of the text, and fills in its blank spaces. The symbols used in the text, the forms of expression and discourse, the set and the leaps in time and space all form the basis of her plays; through them she aims to create suspense and to invite the reader to probe the depths of her characters.
We also observe that Adalet Ağaoğlu does not present a fixed point of view to the reader of her plays, nor does she propose solutions to their events, leaving their outcome suspended. She presents fragments of everyday life and leaves it to the reader to work out and draw the solutions. The author tries to elevate the reader by making him an improvising reader who is not content with the ready-made but seeks discovery and interpretation, in order to reach the depths of the text and glimpse the new horizons hidden in its folds.
We also see that Ağaoğlu makes women’s issues a central axis of her plays and exposes the role of the dominant traditional discourse in shaping women’s situation, and the various ways in which it exerts its influence. Although women stand at the centre, they live their lives under the wing of others. The cornerstone on which the dominant discourse of women’s oppression rests is the lack of education, tradition and mistaken religious beliefs; and while the dominant powers spare no effort to extend their influence by reinforcing their discourse, writers wage the opposite struggle through their plays.
Ağaoğlu also addresses the concept of hegemony in her plays. Hegemony leads women to submit to the patterns of behaviour that society adopts and imposes on them. This submission begins in childhood and leads women not to reflect on their lived reality in the future; and even if a woman thinks of questioning her way of life, this is quickly put down to a mistaken notion of fate. Ağaoğlu shatters these patterns of behaviour in her plays and treats the dominant powers and prevailing ideologies of society from the standpoint of social criticism.
Ağaoğlu conveys women’s situation to the reader through critical feminist writing and draws attention to the role of the dominant powers in shaping women and their position in a patriarchal world. She also deals with the role assigned to women under the patriarchal order, the extent of their rights, the obstacles they face under the existing social and economic system, and ways of solving these problems. She raises questions about how far women obtain an identity of their own and the sacrifices they make to obtain it. She explores this through the relationships between father and daughter, brother and sister, an elderly woman and her elderly husband, and mother and daughter; through relationships among women themselves; and even in plays with no female character at all. Her main aim in treating these different relationships is to expose the social sexism practised against women and the system of social development built upon it.
Ağaoğlu writes her plays from a critical feminist perspective in order to break the rigidity of women’s position in society, without resorting to stereotyped phrases and discourse. In her plays we find successful businesswomen, or women who have managed to free themselves from the constraints placed on women despite every difficulty. Her main aim is to reveal the role of capitalist forces in marginalising women and how far these forces seek to entrench that marginalisation. She also shows that some women have managed to win their freedom despite all these pressures. We do not find stereotyped female characters in her plays, but women who break the stereotyped and misleading discourse and are able to rely on themselves.
Adalet Ağaoğlu’s plays form an integrated whole that encompasses the reasons why women avoid taking part in the process of their own liberation, the obstacles they face if they try to rebel and free themselves from society’s stereotyped constraints, and what befalls those who succeed or fail in freeing themselves.
In her plays Ağaoğlu puts forward the following ideas: her female characters’ fear of the outside world and the ways in which women are deceived into believing that the outside world is evil; the oppression women suffer from childhood and the problems this oppression causes in their later lives; the erasure of women’s sexual identity and their being forced to play the role imposed upon them. In addition, she attaches importance to the furniture of the house in which a woman spends her life, the clothes she wears, her childhood games, the ideas imposed on her by her husband, father and brother, and the relation of these ideas to the dominant powers and prevailing discourse in society.
The author does not merely draw attention to women’s way of life; she goes further, to the role of the dominant powers in entrenching women’s marginal position in society, and to the extent of these powers’ influence on society and its institutions, its ways of living and thinking. In this way she wants the reader to realise that the stereotyped order adopted and prevailing in society is not a fixed rule, even if it seems unchangeable, and that it rests on nothing but the dominant powers in society.
Language and space are the author’s means of communicating with her reader. Through the discourse, proverbs and dramatic expressions repeated by her characters, she aims to expose the role of the dominant powers in imposing particular forms of stereotyped discourse and thought on people and society. Space, in turn, is the room and the house in which women are confined and spend most of their time. Language and space are therefore the most important bridge between the reader and her characters. Through them she also stresses the shared ideology of male domination, the powers of the patriarchal and capitalist order, and reveals how far women submit and yield to this domination.
The author chooses a thorny path in writing her plays as she seeks to break taboos and bring examples of the constraints imposed on women to the stage. Instead of taking the easy road of repeating the prevailing social discourse, she uses elements of the theatre of the absurd and of symbolic theatre in communicating with her reader, leaving him gaps and spaces to fill in himself. She thus achieves what she aims for: activating the reader’s role and clarifying his vision, so that he grasps for himself the reality of the society in which he lives.
The author does not offer the ideal solution in her social criticism. She exposes the workings of the ideologies prevailing in society and leaves empty spaces that give her reader freedom to think. She turns to abstraction in her texts and makes room for symbol and for leaps in time and space, opening the way for the reader’s imagination to interpret and deepen understanding.
Ağaoğlu delves into the depths of women’s problems in relation to the dominant powers, avoiding false discourse and submission to the patriarchal order. She treats the psychological and intellectual dimensions by penetrating the unconscious of the female characters in her plays, in order to present their private lives under the existing social order, while pointing to cases in which women fail to see the truth of their situation and so continue the way of life imposed on them, accepting it as a fact.
Ağaoğlu approaches women’s issues from an objective standpoint, out of deep experience and knowledge of these problems. When she presents the existing order of society, its ideologies and its individuals, she draws attention to the petrified structure of society and the harm this condition brings upon humanity. Alongside awareness and liberation at the level of the individual, what Ağaoğlu seeks is awareness and liberation at the level of society. In seeking to expose the humiliating situation of women, she creates different perspectives by treating women’s situation in different social classes, without resorting to generalisation. She also deals with everything women endure, in events and in detail, whether in a capitalist or a revolutionary society.
In her plays Ağaoğlu shows that there is a continuity between the dominant powers and their ideology. The dominant powers treat women as second-class citizens. The first step is for women to free themselves from following the ideology of the second-class citizen, or at least to be convinced that this ideology is wrong and to reject it inwardly. Her plays lead to the conclusion that a woman who accepts being treated as a second-class citizen and does not try to free herself from this reality is imprisoned in a closed circle; yet the author indicates that it is not only women who are trapped in this closed circle, but the whole of humanity.
Although Adalet Ağaoğlu deals with women’s issues in her plays, her texts cannot simply be classed as women’s dramatic literature. Yet, with unparalleled creativity, she produces unique examples of feminist criticism in Turkish theatre through a new vision of the role of the dominant powers in shaping women’s place in society. She breaks all the patterns of classical writing and enables the reader to perceive women’s situation from a different angle, and she does so with a critical eye towards all the ideas of the existing social order. In communicating with her reader, Ağaoğlu shows a lofty neutrality and objectivity in exposing the various ideologies of society – the patriarchal and the capitalist order – and their role in making the hero and shaping his image to suit their interests, and she draws attention to women’s position and participation under these ideologies. In each of her plays she treats the prevailing ideologies from an angle different from the others, opening wide horizons for the reader through which he can see more clearly, and from different angles, the basic pressures under whose yoke women labour.
Although Ağaoğlu addresses women’s issues in almost all her plays, she conveys to the reader that these conditions are a burden on men and on the younger generation as well. She makes plain that the solution to women’s problems begins with understanding their causes, and that this cannot happen unless people reach a certain level of awareness and education. In this connection she examines intellectual stagnation and its role in halting the development of society. She prompts the reader to think deeply, so as to grasp how negatively these conditions affect human life and to discover for himself the role of stereotyping powers in manipulating the minds of the masses. To this end, Ağaoğlu attaches importance to giving her characters and settings a universal dimension.
Alongside these ideologies, Ağaoğlu also deals with the predicament of the individual, revealing the forms of social norms through which the individual is moulded within this predicament, how people’s thinking is controlled, how people confront authority, and how all this affects women. In Adalet Ağaoğlu’s plays we may meet people from every sector of society and from every position within it.
Ağaoğlu also addresses the predicament of society by exposing its petrified structure, incapable of development. Among her characters we see people who have been normalised by the prevailing ideologies, social patterns and dominant discourse, who behave like a herd, whose individuality has been erased and who have been driven into a dead end. We also see educated people who have managed to free themselves and assert their individuality. This is one of the most important features of the diversity apparent in her plays.
The author uses a different style of writing in discussing the economic, political, social and sexual ideologies prevailing in society, treating each one separately from a different angle. She draws attention to women’s situation as an individual predicament and presents the image of women in different forms and from different angles. She also uses different theatrical techniques to break the stereotyped discourse and change the image of women.
When we examine the content of Adalet Ağaoğlu’s plays in the order in which they were written, we notice that different ideologies prevail in each period; thus it is the prevailing ideologies that define and frame social relations. The author presents social relations and the dominant discourse in an abstract way that can be understood through the female characters of her plays – their behaviour, way of life, clothes, place of residence and the way of living that follows from it. She wrote her plays in the following years: Playing House (Evcilik Oyunu), 1961–62; Bingo (Tombala), 1963; A Crack in the Roof (Çatıdaki Çatlak), 1964; On the Border, 1967; Death of a Hero (Bir Kahramanın Ölümü), 1968; The Exit (Çıkış), 1970; The Song That Wrote Itself (Kendini Yazan Şarkı), 1970–71; Cocoons (Kozalar), 1971; and Very Far, Too Near (Çok Uzak – Fazla Yakın), 1988–89. In them she exposes the ideologies that prevail in society – isolationism, fear of the outside, tradition, the institution of marriage, relations of domination within the household, lack of education, the dominant powers and a mistaken belief in fate – so as to enable the reader to perceive and to rethink women’s situation outside the bounds of the stereotyped circle and of preconceived ideas about them.
Although Ağaoğlu’s plays rest on absurd and abstract elements and contain symbolic and imaginary images, they are in harmony with lived reality. While the author goes beyond the patterns of traditional theatre through the abstract images she skilfully handles, their resemblance to real life points tangibly to realities that exist in society and draws the reader’s attention to the forces of power and their role in erasing and marginalising women’s identity.
It may be said that isolation and servitude are the two central ideas at the forefront of the plays Adalet Ağaoğlu wrote at different periods and in different styles. It is women who feel most acutely that they live in chains, deprived of the chance to assert themselves. Women are also prisoners of economic dependence, of tradition and of the patterns of their relationship with men; the author works along this line in her plays in order to turn the reader against it, representing it from different angles – from afar and up close, from inside and outside – and plunging into the depths of the unconscious. Re-reading the text with such a critical eye and seeking to discover its striking aspects is a task that falls to the creative reader, or what we may call the implied reader, while the author attends to her style and her phrasing, leaving this reader spaces to fill freely, to plunge into their depths and draw out their secrets for himself.
Her writing in The Exit and Cocoons bears the hallmarks of the theatre of the absurd, through her treatment of fear of the outside world and of isolation; she presents symbolically the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy, isolation and fear of the outside, and people subjected to repression and persecution. The girl in The Exit puts an end to patriarchal authority and frees herself by breaking the chains imposed on her; she leaves the house to face the unknown of the outside world, heedless of the consequences of her liberation. The female characters in Cocoons, by contrast, remain imprisoned in their closed world under the influence of the dominant discourse, cut off from the outside world and withdrawn into the world imposed upon them.
In Playing House, Bingo and A Crack in the Roof we find an analytical view of tradition, the institution of marriage and the mistaken notion of fate, through the everyday private lives of her female characters. In these three plays the author also shows how much harm men, like women, suffer as a result of tradition, failed marriages, the mistaken notion of fate and the petrified ideologies entrenched in society, and she reveals that lack of education is the main reason why people yield to these ideologies and accept them as an irreversible fact.
In Death of a Hero and Very Far, Too Near the author offers an analytical view of the blind acceptance of the dominant discourse in society, using a different writing technique in each play. In Very Far, Too Near she uses leaps in time and space in communicating with her reader, allowing him to see images of women from different angles. She sets before us two opposite characters: a married businesswoman who pays no heed to her family, and a girl who tries to prove herself to her twin brother without realising that she is blindly following patriarchal authority. In Death of a Hero, on the other hand, she uses elements of the theatre of the absurd. She puts two men on stage who in fact represent a single man with a split personality living in inner contradiction. The proclamation of this man as a popular hero reveals society’s prevailing, stereotyped notion that heroism belongs to men, not women.
The universality of her theatre is evident in On the Border and The Song That Wrote Itself, both of which deal with the global conflict rooted in ideology and in the dominant powers of the world. The Song That Wrote Itself is closer to traditional theatre in its elements; here she gives importance to social relations and places the question of women within that context. On the Border, by contrast, relies on elements of the theatre of the absurd.
It is clear from the above that, although Adalet Ağaoğlu raises the same issue throughout her plays, she treats it in a different way each time she presents it to her reader.
Adalet Ağaoğlu’s plays keep the reader at a distance from the aesthetics of theatre and lead him to a clear judgement or solution while ensuring his agreement. The author aims to offer a visible, critical theatre of ideas to reader and spectator alike, avoiding the patterns of traditional theatre and presenting a different conception of theatre through its set and its own world, its textual content and the roles of its characters. In her theatre we can detect artistic ideas similar to those of Louis Althusser, and an affinity with the view of literary creation as production rather than reflection, in that she avoids adopting the ideologies prevailing in society.
References
Ağaoğlu, Adalet (2005). Toplu Oyunlar I, İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları.
Ağaoğlu, Adalet (2005). Toplu Oyunlar II, İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları.
Ağaoğlu, Adalet (2005). Toplu Oyunlar III, İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları.
Aytaş, Gıyasettin (2013). “Adalet Ağaoğlu’nun Tiyatrolarında İnsanın İnsana Anlatılması”, Türkbilig, 2013/26: 107–128.
Erman, Burcu Kan (2010). “Adalet Ağaoğlu’nun Kozalar Oyununda Dramatik Metnin Çağdaş Uyarlamasından Performans Metnine: Göstergebilimsel Bir Yaklaşım”, Tiyatro Araştırmaları Dergisi, 30: 2010/2.
İpşiroğlu, Zehra (1998). 2000’li Yıllara Doğru Tiyatro, İstanbul: Mitos Boyut Yayınları.
Schwenk, Süheyla Mukaddes (2009). “Adalet Ağaoğlu’nun Oyunlarında Toplumsal Eleştiri”, unpublished MA thesis, İstanbul: Haliç University, Institute of Social Sciences.
Şener, Sevda (2016). “Tiyatro Eserlerimizde Kadın İmajı ve Kadın Sorunları”, retrieved from http://dergiler.ankara.edu.tr/dergiler/26/1242/14183.pdf (20 October 2016).
First published as the critical study in: Adalet Ağaoğlu, Bingo, Cocoons, Death of a Hero, The Exit [in Arabic], translated by Safwan al-Shalabi, revised with a critical study by Mehmet Hakkı Suçin, Kuwait: National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters, 2017.
Translated from the Arabic for this site.