İsmail Habib Sevük’s Together with Atatürk (Atatürk’le Beraber) (2)

The capitalised “He”

PART 1 | PART 2

A photograph taken during Mustafa Kemal’s 1923 tour of the country, on which he was accompanied by Sevük in his capacity as a journalist. Tarsus, 18 March 1923.

In the first instalment of this series, I wrote that İsmail Habib Sevük was not only an exceptionally sincere and passionate voice of the National Struggle, but also an admirer of Atatürk through and through. As I read the book, one small but, to my mind, highly significant detail caught my attention: Sevük’s admiration shaped not only what he wrote and how he wrote it, but even his use of capitalisation.

When referring to Atatürk -or to Mustafa Kemal when recounting the years before the Surname Law- Sevük systematically capitalises the third-person singular pronoun o ("he"). Nor does he stop there: whenever a suffix is added to the pronoun, he sets it off with an apostrophe: O’nun, O’na, O’nu… (‘His’, ‘to Him’, ‘Him’…)

Throughout the book, I found only one instance in which onun (“his”) was printed with a lower-case initial. Given the remarkable consistency with which this convention is observed throughout the rest of the text, it is quite clear that this was a typographical error rather than a change in practice.

Let us take an example from the very first piece in the book. In his introduction to “X-Ray Vision”, an article published in Cumhuriyet on 24 December 1938, some six weeks after Atatürk’s death, Sevük writes:

For days and weeks, elegies were written on His (O'nun) death-our greatest national bereavement. (p. 3)

Under contemporary Turkish orthographic rules, this usage contains two distinct errors. According to the Turkish Language Association, the pronoun o, when used in place of a proper name, is not capitalised within a sentence. Nor is a suffix added to the pronoun separated from it by an apostrophe. The correct form is therefore not O’nun, but onun.

Yet what we are dealing with here is not a mere orthographic error. Sevük does not capitalise o by accident. He does so consciously and systematically, reserving this usage for one particular individual. When capitalisation and the apostrophe are used together, an ordinary pronoun is effectively transformed into a proper name. There is no longer any need even to mention Atatürk by name: the capitalised “He” is enough, on its own, to make clear who is meant.

I interpret this deliberate choice on Sevük’s part as both a written expression of his profound admiration for Atatürk and a way of investing him with a certain sanctity. Here, the capital letter is not merely an orthographic device, but also a mark of reverence and exaltation. Even the pronoun used for Atatürk cannot be the same as that used for ordinary mortals.

In fact, this deliberate orthographic choice tells us a great deal about the book’s overall approach. As I noted in the previous instalment, Mustafa Kemal is not just any historical figure in Sevük’s eyes. Nor is he a political leader whose decisions, ideas and actions should be examined and explained in their historical context-and criticised where necessary. Rather, he is a singular figure whose every word and deed is invested from the outset with a special significance. It could hardly be expected, then, that the pronoun referring to Mustafa Kemal would remain an ordinary “he”, like the one used for everyone else.

This approach has an important political consequence. When a historical process is presented as revolving around the will, genius and foresight of a single individual, its real social actors gradually disappear from view. The hundreds of thousands of people who took part in the National Struggle -workers, peasants, soldiers, local resistance organisations and conflicting social forces- recede into the background of the narrative, while at the centre of history stands a single individual who sees everything, thinks everything and does everything. To my mind, the capitalised “He” is a small but highly revealing symbol of this conception of history.

Still, to give Sevük his due, this usage was not unique to him. A brief search shows that the same practice can also be found in other texts published immediately after Atatürk’s death. One example appears in İsmet İnönü’s “Declaration to the Nation”, issued after Atatürk’s body was brought to Ankara and also reproduced in the 24 November 1938 issue of Servetifünun Uyanış:

In truth, His resting place is the heroic and faithful bosom of the Turkish nation, brimming with love for and pride in Him.

The same declaration also states that the creation of a modern state was “His chief concern”. It would seem, then, that the form O’nun, with its capital letter and apostrophe, had become part of the official language of mourning, at least in the immediate aftermath of Atatürk’s death.

More striking still is the title of a fifty-two-page book compiled by Vedat Ürfi Bengü and published by Resimli Ay Matbaası in 1939: "O"nun Ölümü Karşısında Samsun (Samsun in the Face of His Death). Atatürk’s name does not appear anywhere in the title. Nor was there any need for it: the capitalised O, all by itself, stood for Atatürk.

As I have said, I have not devoted the time to researching this question in depth. Yet even this brief survey was enough to confirm my initial impression: Sevük had not devised this practice himself. At least in the language of mourning and commemoration that emerged after Atatürk’s death, the capitalised O, together with the practice of setting off its suffixes with an apostrophe, had acquired a currency extending well beyond Sevük. Nor has this convention disappeared entirely over time. Even today, one may occasionally come across such expressions as O’nun düşünceleri (“His ideas”), O’nun gösterdiği yol (“the path He showed”) and the like in texts about Atatürk.

This brief and limited inquiry has left many unanswered-questions that continue to intrigue me.

Who first introduced this practice?

Was it already in use during Atatürk’s lifetime, or did it become widespread particularly within the language of mourning and exaltation that emerged after his death?

How widely was it adopted by newspapers and writers?

For how long was it in widespread use?

Why did it lose ground over time, and within which circles did it persist?

These are not questions that can be answered conclusively without a systematic survey of the newspapers and periodicals of the time. Who knows? Perhaps some of those reading this piece know the answer to at least one of them -or can point us towards further examples.

In the next instalment, we will return to the article entitled “X-Ray Vision” and examine a passage that genuinely struck me and took me quite by surprise when I first read it.

To be continued