Ecological imagination and women’s memory in the contemporary Turkish novel

Abstract

This essay will explore the use of ecological imagination in women’s writing as counter-memorial practice in the contemporary Turkish novel. In a growing body of work the search for a language and aesthetics of ecology serves both to subvert human-centric ideologies and to rewrite official history that aims to erase collective memories of ethnic conflicts and political injustice. Ecological imagination as the essay will argue serves as an alternative medium for remembering and transferring the untranslatable. In this context the essay will discuss the ways of rebuilding women’s memory in alliance with traumatized landscapes and non-human agencies. Sema Kaygusuz’s Every Fire You Tend (2009) and Ayşegül Devecioğlu’s Weeping Mountain Silent River (2007) the two novels explored in this essay are emblematic of the potential of literature to make catastrophic events representable through an ecological imagination as a challenge to prevailing patterns of historical conditions. The narrative styles of these texts bend official modes of history writing and traditional modes of testimonial writing as they draw upon the lived experiences memories and subjugated knowledge of female subjects. Reading these novels through the lens of ecology also contributes to women’s memory which in the context of Turkey has always been in a tense relationship with the conservative historical practices of the nation-state. © 2025 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.