Anonymous Planets

Şükran Balekoğlu Yamak's new book, Unnamed "Wanderers", has been published by YEM Yayın.

The book features five stories whose protagonists are women with heart-wrenching experiences.

Adil Hacıömeroğlu, describing the author's literary nourishment as her ability to draw from her rich roots without straying and to convey it in a simple and fluent manner without forcing the language, says the following in the book's Foreword:

“Whether stories are lived firsthand or written as realistic fiction, they always preserve their inherent realism. Realism and verisimilitude increase people's interest in a story. Even if they are seen as short-lived, that short breath gives life to an existence.

The lives of people on Earth are never the same. The process we call life is an uphill and downhill road. A person experiences the contrasts of life together. Isn't the natural balance based on contrasts anyway? Would the value of day be known if there were no night? Would humankind yearn for spring if it didn't feel the hardships of winter to its core?

Şükran Balekoğlu Yamak is a writer from my hometown. She is also a good friend of mine… We met in a virtual environment. Our writings brought us closer. Our distant friendship in the virtual world moved to phone calls. Like a forty-year-old friend, or, if you will, like a daughter from a relative's house. However, we haven't yet met this warm-hearted person face-to-face.

Balekoğlu was born and raised in Zonguldak. Her connection to her ancestral lands in Of came through her elders. Thanks to her mother, she grasped all the subtleties of the language spoken in Of in general, and in Bölümlü (Zisino) in particular. She internalized the details of the dialectal features. Through her mother, she adopted the dialectal features of her native language.

This is why we call the language we learn in the environment where we are born and raised, the language in which we dream, our mother tongue.

Şükran Hanım's mother was a wise Black Sea woman. Her memory was very strong. She was a living example of oral history in her time. She did not take what she knew, her experiences, and what she lived through to her grave; she passed them on to her daughter like the most precious heirlooms in a chest. Şükran Balekoğlu knew the value of this heirloom and put it into writing. I had read her two previous books (Kal-leş and Kurdar Beni Daa) breathlessly. As in her previous books, in this book too, she recounts life's realities and experiences with her simple language, without altering a single comma.

There is no forced language in her writing! Her stories reflect the spoken language of daily life. The use of colloquial language in her writings does not bore the readers. The events that are the subject of the stories find flavor with the readers through the simple language used.

There is a deep realism in each of the stories. Lived experiences make the stories attractive. All the stories tell of heart-wrenching events. The protagonists of the stories are generally women. Women who are crushed and scorned by feudalism, bad traditions, and sexual discrimination… In fact, bad traditions also crush the male protagonists. Opportunism and the lust for gain overcome love in the stories. Beautiful people with hearts full of love melt away in the face of evil. It's as if the monster of evil feeds on beauty…

In the stories, it is seen that other women are also active in the oppression and scorn of women, especially in Fatma-Dursun and Yıldız-Nejat this is very evident. It is all our duty to free our women from traditional feudal molds. It is also women who raise men…

While the stories break the hearts of readers, they also make them smile at the same time. Isn't life like that too?

I wish Ms. Balekoğlu success in her literary life. I know she has many stories in her store. She should share them with her readers. The gold beneath the earth should be brought to the surface so that it finds its value in the hands of the jeweler. Let the works that emerge begin their journey into eternity.”