Narratives of Korea and Dersim in Erendiz Atasü's The Other Side of the Mountain

This article examines the collocation of the Dersim Rebellion (1937–1938) in Eastern Anatolia and Turkey's entry into the Korean War (1950–1953) in Erendiz Atasü's 1995 autobiographical novel Dağın Öteki Yüzü (The Other Side of the Mountain, 2000). Atasü writes in her "Letter to the Reader" that the protagonist Vicdan is based on her mother, who in 1935 climbed Mount Uludağ in Bursa with her brothers to celebrate Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's foundation of the modern Turkish Republic in 1923. Vicdan's unnamed daughter-narrator, however, idealizes neither her Kemalist mother, who supports the armed conflict in Dersim, nor her veteran uncles (Burhan, Reha, and Cumhur): Burhan's guilty conscience connects the causalities of the Korean War to his murder of the rebels in Dersim; Reha remembers the woman he raped in Dersim; the disabled Cumhur suppresses his anger at the government that forsakes lives in Korea for NATO membership. Atasü's circular narrative that travels backward and forward in time portrays history not as progressive but as repetitive due to Turkey's involvement in war. The Other Side of the Mountain narrates the silenced "other side" of the Republic by recalling Turkey's entry into the Korean War and the armed conflict in Eastern Anatolia.