Turkey

Introduction

My grandfather came down from a village above Kozan to pick cotton on the Çukurova plain every autumn until he was forty. He used to say that the plain was white twice a year, once with cotton and once with the dust off the threshing floors, and that neither kind of white belonged to the people who made it. When I first read M.J. Hydara’s Songs of Dust and Water and reached the line about the old farmer Ousman, whose father “had grown cotton for the government’s buyers and eaten none of it” (Hydara 107), I thought of him. Then I thought of Yaşar Kemal, whose İnce Memed (1955) every student in Adana is supposed to have read, and most of us really have.

The two novels are far apart. Kemal’s is set in the poor Taurus villages above the Çukurova, on the thistle plain where the landlord Abdi Ağa owns the land of five villages. Hydara’s moves between two fictional West African republics, Awdagha and Tekuru, and covers some twenty-five years, from a solar plant that burns in a northern village called Madina to a union of villages that grows out of Nafawol, a settlement on an abandoned floodplain. Yet both books ask the same question: what happens to people who grow a crop on land, or along a road, where someone else names the price?

This essay argues that Hydara’s novel turns down the answer that Kemal’s first Memed novel gives. Kemal’s answer to the ağa is one young man with a rifle who goes up into the mountains and comes back down. Hydara’s answer to the man who owns the only lorry is a crew, a ledger and a clay pot of stones, and the novel counts what that answer costs in a way that a legend like Memed’s never has to. I read Memed, My Hawk first in Turkish and then in Edouard Roditi’s English translation (1961). Because I am comparing a translation with an English original, I paraphrase Kemal rather than quote a translator’s sentences, and I quote Hydara exactly.

1. Where the power sits

In Kemal’s novel, power is simple to locate because it is made of land. Abdi Ağa owns the fields, and the villagers plough them and hand over his share of the harvest. When Memed’s widowed mother Döne displeases him, he takes nearly all her wheat and forbids the neighbours to help her; they help her secretly anyway. As a small boy Memed is made to plough fields so thick with thistles that they tear his legs. Fear and land are one thing on the Dikenli plain. Even the state, in the form of the gendarmes, sits on the ağa’s side of the scale.

In the Nafawol half of Songs of Dust and Water nobody owns the land in this way. The floodplain belongs to the village, and the elders know “the floodplain’s old moods” (Hydara 107) better than any engineer. Power sits instead at the narrow places a harvest has to pass through: the lorry, the weighing scales, the ginnery at the port. Fatou, the trader who has hired other men’s lorries for thirty years, puts it as a proverb: “When one man owns the only lorry on the road,” she says, “he’s kind all through the planting. At harvest he names his price” (Hydara 92). That is a perfect description of an ağa without fields. The novel then gives him a face. The cotton board’s buying agent drives up to the floodplain villages after every harvest with “a set of scales in the back” (116) and buys at the farm gate at the board’s price, “less a transport charge he named” (116), because “for most of those years there had been no other way for the cotton to reach the coast” (116). He knows Fatou’s mother’s name and once brought her children sweets. Abdi Ağa beats a child; this man gives children sweets. The manners differ, but the structure is the same: one man, one route and one price.

Part One, set in Madina, shows the same structure from the side of the people who mean well. The engineer Adam Sterling arrives with “a solar and water plant that runs itself” (6) and promises the minister that “Nobody in Madina will ever need to touch it” (8). He thinks this is a gift. The minister, Khresay, hears it as a warning, and replies with a saying of his Sarahule ancestors: “a man who does not help build the granary will never fight to defend it” (8). The blacksmith Malik, whose repaired bracket Adam leaves lying in the dust, says it more sharply: “A thing you are not allowed to mend is not yours” (16). Adam is a foreign ağa, a generous one, but the village still stands outside the fence. When the plant is taken over by Minister Dunia through an amendment Adam signed without reading to the end, and evidence of fraud is found, Khresay tells Adam that “Evidence is a goat. It goes where the man holding the rope leads it” (66). Memed’s mother would have understood that sentence at once. On the thistle plain the ağa held the rope, and the law walked behind him.

2. The rifle and the machete

This is where the two novels divide most clearly. Memed’s answer is to shoot Abdi Ağa’s nephew and wound the ağa, run to the mountains, join Deli Durdu’s band of outlaws and become, in time, a legend that the poor of the Taurus tell to each other. Near the end he refuses the government’s amnesty, comes down to the town and shoots Abdi Ağa, and then rides back into the mountains. As a reader I have to admit that this ending is satisfying. I remember closing the book in Year 10 and feeling that justice had been done.

Hydara gives the novel its own Memed and then does not let him become one. Demba grew up in “the hunger years” (115) and works on the road crew, and “for him every new stretch of road felt like a blow struck back” (115). When the culvert at the gully crossing is smashed in the night, he comes to work with his father’s long farming machete at his side. Everything in Kemal’s tradition says that this young man will go after the people who did it. Instead the village makes him a Floodplain Guardian, with a radio, and the Guardians’ rule is that “Catching a man mattered less than warning him off and bearing witness” (121). On their first night watch, his partner Fanta notices his hand going to the blade and tells him: “Then leave it at home with your father” (121).

The rule is broken once, and the novel is honest about what happens. Two new Guardians chase a figure in the dark; it turns out to be a herd boy from the neighbouring village of Sirawol, who falls into a gully and breaks his arm. Years later his alkalo reports that “It healed crooked. He herds with it” (155). After that night, Demba “left his father’s machete at home” (124). The real culprits are eventually named, and here again Hydara chooses the record over the rifle. The two brothers who broke the culvert were paid by the same courteous buying agent. He is never punished in a court, because “there was nothing anyone could prove in a court” (155), but his name goes into both villages’ ledgers, and “within a year he was buying his cotton somewhere else” (155). Memed’s bullet removes one ağa. The two villages’ ledgers remove this one’s market.

I do not think Hydara is saying that Kemal was wrong. Kemal wrote about the early years of the Republic, when a poor villager in the Taurus had no ledger and no regulator to appeal to, and Memed is a figure from the folk tradition of the brigand who stands up for the poor. But Kemal himself seems to have known that one bullet was not enough, since he went on to write three more Memed novels. Hydara starts from the place where those sequels lead. If one pair of hands can stop an ağa, another ağa can come and buy that pair of hands.

3. İmece and the Road of Hands

The part of Songs of Dust and Water that felt most familiar to me was the building of the road. In Anatolian villages there is an old custom called imece: when a family needs a house roofed or a harvest brought in, or the village needs a path or a well repaired, everybody turns out and works without pay, and the help is returned later when another household needs it. My grandmother still talks about the imece days in her village, when the earth roofs were rolled flat before the autumn rains. The men worked on the roofs. The women cooked for all of them from dawn, and nobody counted that.

Nafawol’s road is an imece. When a lorry with ten tonnes of cotton sinks in the mud and the government sends only “a surveyor who drank our tea and vanished” (111), the builder Edrisa says simply, “Then we build it” (111). He “drew the labour from the kafo, the age groups that had always turned out together to clear land or roof a house” (112), which is almost a definition of imece. Kadiatou, the Water-Keeper, opens the work by pouring a bowl of clean water onto the dust and saying, “Let it be a road of hands” (112). Even the foreign engineer is fitted into the custom and not the other way round. Edrisa puts Adam on hauling with the youngest kafo, and the boys put him “at the back of the line” (112) and keep resetting the basket on his head “until he carried it their way” (112). In Madina the village had to fit Adam’s system; on the Road of Hands he has to fit theirs.

Hydara then adds something that my grandmother’s imece never had. Isatou, who runs the women’s kafo and the cooking at every funeral and naming ceremony, comes to the committee with a list of millet, oil and hours at the fires. “When the road is finished,” she tells them, “the men will say, ‘We built this road.’” And: “I want it written down who fed them while they built it” (113). Fatou enters it in the ledger and the common fund pays for the millet. I found this the most radical moment in the book, more than the vote, because it changes the custom from the inside. An imece is fair between households, but it is often unfair inside them. Hydara keeps the old form of shared labour and puts a ledger beside it, so that nobody’s work can disappear into “we”.

The road also does something that imece alone cannot. It breaks the buying agent’s hold on the price, because now the village’s own hired lorries can reach the ginnery. This is exactly why someone pays to have the culvert broken. When Fatou walks the first finished kilometre and says, “We made this” (114), the word “we” includes the women whose millet is on the list. It is also a threat to the man who owned the only lorry.

4. The ağa who offers

Kemal’s ağa takes. The most interesting figure in Hydara’s second half is the one who offers. TransGlobal Agriculture’s representative, Evelyn Reed, arrives with two billion dollars for the region and fifty thousand dollars for every Union family. When Bintu, from the academy, discovers a clause that would hand all the Union’s future inventions to TransGlobal “in perpetuity” (196), Reed removes it within two days. What remains, though, is a management veto over large investments and “the first right to buy every bale and every litre of oil” (197). The narrator’s verdict is calm and exact: “The Union’s leaders would still sit at the head of the table. TransGlobal would still decide what the table was for” (197). “Fatou knew that clause from the farm gate” (197). In other words, she recognised the agent with the scales, scaled up to a whole region.

Hydara does not make the choice easy, and this is where the book is more troubling than Kemal’s. Nobody on the thistle plain is ever offered fifty thousand dollars to accept Abdi Ağa. Demba’s father, who complains that “For sixty years this land has taken my back” (189), tells his son that “A hungry man does not eat sovereignty” (190). Fatou herself, who wants the offer, still insists on calling it by its right name: “It would be a sale,” she says. “Call it one, and we can talk about the price” (187). Kadiatou’s question to Reed is only six words long: “With whose hand on the key” (187). I think this is the question the whole Turkish tradition of village novels keeps asking, from Kemal to Fakir Baykurt. The answer used to be “the ağa’s”. Hydara imagines a village that is offered a very good price to put the key back in someone else’s hand, and has to decide.

5. Counting the cost

The Union votes with stones, white for yes and black for no, dropped one by one into a clay pot and counted in front of everyone: “Fourteen to ten” (200), and the offer is refused. A Memed novel would end there, with the horseman riding away. Hydara keeps going and puts the bill on the wall. Crop prices fall the next year for reasons that have nothing to do with the Union. The Teranu family cannot keep up their repayments and leave for the coast, and old Teranu says without anger that his sons “have waited ten years” and that “They are young once” (204). Kadiatou’s granddaughter Mariam loses a year of study. An old man in Kumbawol dies still waiting for the hospital TransGlobal’s money might have built. These costs come from the collective’s own decision, and nobody in the novel is allowed to hide behind a hero.

In Kemal’s novel the costs fall too, above all on Hatçe, who is imprisoned for a killing she did not commit and dies, after giving birth to Memed’s son, while he is still an outlaw. But the legend absorbs her, and her death becomes part of Memed’s story. In Hydara’s novel the costs are written beside the figures in the square, with names. The last sentence of the story, in its short coda about the lost empire of Wagadu, explains why the novel needs many hands and not one: “One pair of hands can always be made to let go” (233). Memed is one pair of hands, however brave. The ağa, or the buyer, or the company, only has to wait for him to be killed or caught.

Conclusion

To a large extent, then, Songs of Dust and Water answers the power over land and harvest with collective labour, where Memed, My Hawk answers it with an armed hero. Hydara even seems to stage the moment of choice inside the story: Demba’s father’s machete is the rifle Memed picked up, and the novel has him leave it at home. In its place the novel offers things that are slower and less heroic: an imece-style road with the women’s cooking in the accounts, a ledger that ruins a dishonest agent without a single shot, and a vote that the losers are allowed to keep arguing about for years.

The limit of my answer is that Hydara does not pretend this is free or always fair. Some families leave, and the farmers at the edges of the Union remain the poorest people in it. Kemal’s legend gives the reader the pleasure of seeing the ağa fall. Hydara takes that pleasure away and offers a harder satisfaction: a road that still belongs to the people who carried its stones. When my grandfather talks about the cotton seasons, he never says the ağa was defeated. He says the tractors came and the work went. I think he would have understood Hydara’s floodplain better than Memed’s mountains.

1. Introduction and aim

My uncle farms sugar beet near Çumra, about forty kilometres south of Konya city. His well has been deepened twice since I was born. When I asked him why, he said that everybody’s well has been deepened, so it is nobody’s fault. That answer is the starting point of this project. Water underground looks like a private thing, because each well belongs to one farmer, but the aquifer under the Konya plain belongs to all of us, and to people who are not born yet.

The aim of this project is to compare three ways in which decisions about water are made: (a) many private decisions about groundwater in the Konya Closed Basin; (b) central state decisions about dams in the Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP), especially the Ilısu Dam and the flooding of Hasankeyf; and (c) a fictional case, the village of Nafawol in M.J. Hydara’s novel Songs of Dust and Water (2026), where a community decides about its own well, borehole and water machine. I chose a novel as my third source because our teacher allowed “one comparative source of your choice”, and because the novel shows a decision process from the inside, which a statistics table cannot do.

2. Method

I used three kinds of sources. For Konya, I used news reports of the disaster agency AFAD’s sinkhole mapping and general sources on the basin. For the GAP and Hasankeyf, I used NASA’s Earth Observatory article on the filling of the Ilısu reservoir and general reference material on the GAP. For the novel, I read the whole book and noted every passage about water, measurement and decisions, with page numbers. I also asked my uncle and two of his neighbours three questions: Who decides how much water you pump? Do you know how deep the water is this year? Who would you trust to set a limit? I have kept figures modest and rounded, because sources sometimes disagree, and I did not want to claim more than I could check.

3. Case study A: the Konya Closed Basin

The Konya Closed Basin is an endorheic basin: its water does not drain to the sea. Rain and snow that fall on it either evaporate, flow to lakes such as Tuz Gölü, or sink into the ground. It is one of Turkey’s most important farming regions, and over the last decades farmers have moved to water-hungry crops such as sugar beet, maize and lucerne. Much of the irrigation water comes from wells, and many of these wells are unlicensed. As a result the groundwater level has been falling for decades.

One visible result is the obruk, or sinkhole. The area around Karapınar and the Obruk Plateau has always had natural sinkholes, because the rock is limestone that slowly dissolves. But new ones now open much more often, sometimes in the middle of fields, and geologists connect them to the falling water table, which removes the support that groundwater gave to the ground above. In August 2026 AFAD reported that it had mapped 739 sinkholes across the basin. Even if not every one of these is new or caused by pumping, the trend is clear to anyone who lives here. The state has also tried to bring water in from outside, for example through the Blue Tunnel (Mavi Tünel), which carries water from the Göksu basin to the plain. That helps, but it does not change the basic problem that pumping is decided well by well.

My interviews showed this clearly. None of the three farmers knew the depth of the water table this year. All three said they would accept a limit “if everyone else accepted it too”. One said he would trust a limit set by farmers together more than one sent from Ankara, but he also said that farmers together would probably set it too high.

4. Case study B: the GAP, the Ilısu Dam and Hasankeyf

The Southeastern Anatolia Project is the opposite kind of decision. It is a state plan for the Euphrates and Tigris basins in the south-east, including 22 dams and 19 hydroelectric power plants, with large irrigation schemes such as those on the Harran Plain around Şanlıurfa, which turned dry land into cotton land. It has brought electricity, irrigation and jobs. It has also brought problems, including salinisation on parts of irrigated land where too much water was applied, and tension with Syria and Iraq downstream, who depend on the same rivers.

The Ilısu Dam on the Tigris is one of the last large GAP dams. According to NASA’s Earth Observatory, water began collecting behind it in July 2019, and by early 2020 the reservoir was rising over Hasankeyf, a settlement thought to be around 12,000 years old. The residents were moved to New Hasankeyf on the hill across the river, and some monuments, such as the Zeynel Bey tomb, were moved there before the flooding. Many caves and medieval buildings were left under the water. NASA adds that once the reservoir is close to full it is expected to displace more than 70,000 people across the whole area.

In this case the decision was made centrally, for national reasons: energy, irrigation and development. People in Hasankeyf were compensated and moved to a new town with modern houses. But the important point for my project is that the people who lived with the result did not decide it, and could not stop it.

5. Case study C: Nafawol in Songs of Dust and Water

In the novel, Nafawol is a village on a floodplain the river has abandoned. Its only well has turned salty: “The well had been going bitter for six years before anyone from outside acted” (Hydara, 2026, p. 81). Kadiatou, the Water-Keeper, who draws the well every morning, thinks: “This water is slow poison, and I am the one who serves it” (p. 87). This is the Konya situation in miniature: a shared underground source, slowly getting worse, and a person who knows it but has no tool to change it.

The engineer Dr Arramata was born in Nafawol. She has measured the floodplain for eleven years, including “the drawdown at every well from here to Sirawol” (p. 89), and published her results twice, but “Nobody funds a study of a place nobody intends to visit” (p. 89). I thought of Konya’s geologists, who have been warning about the sinkholes for years.

5.1 Refusing the easy technology. When villagers suggest desalination, Arramata refuses. On the coast, she says, they pour the salt back into the sea, but “We have no sea” (p. 89). In a closed place, the brine “would lie on the land we are trying to wash clean” (p. 89), and the membranes “come from abroad and die in a year of this dust” (p. 89). Most important for this project, “the deep water they would pump is the water your grandchildren should drink” (p. 90). Konya is also a closed basin with no sea, and this argument fits it exactly: in a closed basin there is nowhere to “send away” a problem.

5.2 The harvester as a bridge. Instead, the project builds an atmospheric water harvester that takes water from the air, together with a borehole. Arramata calls it “a bridge” (p. 102) and explains: “It buys us years” (p. 103). Its water is for “Drinking and cooking for every compound, and not a litre for the fields” (p. 103), and “Every litre this makes is one we leave in the deep water” (p. 103). She is honest that the bridge may lead nowhere: if the old river channels do not recharge the ground, “we’ll have built a very expensive way to lose slowly” (p. 103). For the fields she uses a second, shallow borehole into the salty layer, “short of the deep water she kept for drinking” (p. 105). In other words, the deep, good water is reserved for people, and lower-quality water is used for crops. In Konya the deep water goes mostly to crops.

5.3 Measuring in public. The harvester disappoints. It settles at “a little under seventy per cent of its design yield” (p. 125), because “The salt in the dust wore down its coils, trays and filters” (p. 125). Arramata’s response is the most useful advice in the book for a geography student: “It will not get better,” she says. “We stop asking it to. We plan around it” (p. 125). Then: “every Friday Dr Arramata lowered a tape into the borehole and wrote the depth beside the curve” (p. 125), on a public wall in the square. In a bad year, “Every Friday the figure was lower” (p. 205), and the village rations: “They opened the taps for two hours after dawn and two before dark” (p. 205). Even Kadiatou “stood in the line with everyone else” (p. 205). Nobody in my uncle’s village knows the depth of the water this year. In Nafawol, every person who can read knows it every Friday.

5.4 Recharge, slowly. The long-term solution is low stone lines across the dead river channels, so that rainwater will “slow and sit and sink” (p. 126). Even this involves negotiation with herders, whose “cattle had walked those dead beds since before the river left” (p. 126); Mamadou has to go to their camp three times before they agree. “Nobody expected the channels to run again for years” (p. 126), and when a boy on the crew asks, “Then why did they build it?” (p. 126), an old man gives a two-word answer, “For us,” and “set another stone” (p. 126). In Year 10, water stands in the oldest channel. Arramata’s rule is: “If it stands eleven days, it goes down into the ground instead of off it” (p. 210). “It stood for twelve” (p. 211). By Year 15, “the borehole’s line on the wall had stopped going down” (p. 225), and the old well gives sweet water again: “The bucket struck water, clean and deep” (p. 232).

5.5 Who decides. The novel’s decision structure has three layers. First, the funder, Proxima, has a rule that it gives money only where the people who live with the result “owned it, and could stop it” (p. 82). Second, the village owns the machines and the accounts. Third, when a large company, TransGlobal, offers to invest on condition that it holds a veto and the right to buy the crops, the twenty-four representatives of the union of villages vote with stones, and “A simple majority would decide it” (p. 197). The offer is refused by fourteen to ten. The company’s representative uses the water figures as an argument: the borehole, she says, is drawing on “water your own scientist says belongs to your grandchildren” (p. 186). So the deep water and the vote are linked: if the village cannot manage its water, an outside power will offer to manage it.

6. Comparison

The contrast with Hasankeyf is sharpest if we look at Part One of the novel, set in the village of Madina. There, a government official tells foreign investors, “The community has been consulted” (p. 72) and “The households nearest the site have been relocated, with compensation” (p. 72). The narrator adds that one old woman was moved away, and “what the Energy Fund had paid her, nobody in Madina ever learned” (p. 72). I do not want to say that Hasankeyf was the same as a fictional corrupt ministry. But the sentence “The community has been consulted” is one I have heard on Turkish television about more than one dam, and the novel made me ask what “consulted” means if the community could not say no.

7. Discussion: is the novel’s model realistic?

There are three reasons to be careful.

First, scale. Nafawol has about eighteen hundred people. The Konya basin has millions, and the GAP serves a whole region and a national electricity grid. A clay pot of stones cannot decide whether to build Ilısu. The novel partly answers this by showing the union growing to thirty-one villages and still voting, but it never shows a decision at the scale of a river shared by three countries.

Second, a vote is not automatically wise about water. One of the farmers I interviewed said that farmers together would probably set the pumping limit too high, and he is probably right. In the novel, the stone vote is about the company’s offer. How much water to pump is decided by the committee on the advice of one honest scientist who is also from the village. Arramata even stays out in the field before the vote, on purpose, and does not deny it when Fatou tells her, “Half the Union would vote whichever way you told them to” (p. 192). Konya has many good scientists, but the farmers do not know them as neighbours.

Third, the novel’s state is weak and far away, and the GAP shows what a strong state can do that a village cannot. In Part One, a minister says that after all the charity projects had failed, “The only thing still there, when everything else had gone, was the state” (p. 61). That is also true of the GAP: whatever we think about Hasankeyf, the dams are still there and still produce electricity, and the Harran Plain grows cotton where it did not before. A village model cannot easily build a dam or a national grid.

But the novel’s most useful lessons do not depend on scale. Three of them could be used in Konya tomorrow: measure the water and put the figure where everyone can see it; reserve the deep water for drinking and use technology as a bridge while the ground recharges; and give the people who will live with the result a real way to say no.

8. Conclusion

My question was who decides how water is used, and who should. In the Konya basin the answer is everybody and nobody, and the sinkholes are the result. In the GAP the state decided, with real benefits and the real loss of Hasankeyf. Songs of Dust and Water imagines a third way: a community that measures its water in public, plans around what its machine can actually do, builds stone lines for grandchildren it will not meet, and keeps the right to refuse. It is slow, and in the novel some families leave because of it. But the well comes back. When I showed my uncle the page where the borehole depth is written on the wall every Friday, he laughed and said the whole of Çumra would be too frightened to read it. Then he asked me to find out how deep his well is now.