Appreciation: Memed, My Hawk

“Banditry” is not just another name for theft, or robbery, or even of outlawry. It’s a crime with a particular social context: great latafundia, weak central control, oppressed peasantry, bumbling police who vacillate between brutality and comic incompetence. The second-best book about banditry that I ever read is Eric Hobsbawm’s Bandits, one of the most convincing arguments I ever encountered for Marxist historiography (I read it Bandits 30 years ago; I see there is a new edition). Perhaps it takes a Marxist sensibility to understand the social yeast that gives life to this particular phenomenon.

Hobsbawm is second best; the best book I’ve ever read about banditry is Memed, My Hawk, which has been sitting on my shelf for several years, and which I threw into my backpack for travel just this weekend. It’s by a Turk named Yashar Kemal, born in 1922, apparently still alive. The blurb says he is “the descendant of landowners on his father’s side and bandits on his mother’s side.” I recall reading someplace else that eight of his mother’s brothers were bandits, though this sounds suspiciously like an exaggeration.

In some ways, Memed is a classic adventure hero. He’s fatherless; he runs away; he tangles with a powerful villain; he robs from the rich and he gives to the poor. And he rides into the sunset. Yet oddly, there is almost nothing here that would translate well to Hollywood. We have all the adventure, but also all the squalor: the bleak, pitiless, near-desperate world where man is wolf to man. Nearly everybody in this book lies. They betray their friends and their enemies. Many of them are trigger-happy killers. They almost all undergo fear, grinding labor and deprivation.

And a good many of them are hopeless romantics, in that they can spin fairy tales of salvation and self-justification. Yet there is so much to like about their world. There is the sere and awesome beauty of the landscape. More important is the sheer humanity—even if excess thereof—of these people. In a way it is an exhausting read, but it is ultimately hypnotic and you are sorry to see it done.

As I suggested above, I don’t know of any novel quite like it. But the wild world of the Turkish countryside does put one in mind of Tolstoy’s Haji Murat or The Cossacks, or of Gogol’s Taras Bulba. The compassionate portrait of the peasantry may suggest Silone or Verga. It certainly does not suggest (as one reviewer did suggest) Lampedusa; at least not to anyone who has actually read the book.

Kemal even dares to stop halfway through and offer a little sketch of the history of banditry in the Turkish countryside, in a manner that comes near to sociology. Even this bit is so precise, so economical, and so on point that you can accept it in its apparently intended function of the story. It’s a way of making it clear that this is not just a folk tale: it is a real story of real people in a particular social situation.

Folk tale: some readers have complained of the folk-tale style of the telling and this complaint is persuasive. The characters do indeed speak in a style that is direct, unadorned, and scarcely human. But their speech probably does capture the way in which this kind of story is told; indeed it’s not too much to say that the style serves to link Kemal with older traditions of war literature like the Norse sagas.

My copy of Memed is a “Pantheon Modern Classic” dated 1961 (for which it appears I paid $1.95). I see that NYRB classics has republished Memed along with a sequel (link) (and I gather there are still more sequels, perhaps not all translated into English). That is good news. I will surely put the sequel on the list, though perhaps not for tonight. Memed, at any rate, is a great discovery, well worth the time and effort.