Oldal 106 [106]
OCR
104 Ilkim Buke-Okyar The Arab Other in Turkish Political Cartoons, 1908-1939 The date is November 18, 1943. It is a regular Thursday in the streets of Istanbul. The layperson, on his daily routine, will quickly pay for the newspaper, the one he gets every morning, the daily Cumhuriyet (“The Republic’).! Rushing to work, he will scan the headlines on the front page. His eyes will stop for a few moments on the attractive bold print. After getting a grasp of the major events, he might start turning its black-and-white pages, one by one, perusing the day’s news. But when the reader reaches page four, he is undoubtedly struck by Cemal Nadir’s colourful cartoon, which covers the entire top half of the page.” One can assume that such busy laypeople with their worldly cares would be better reached by the clichés of the colourful cartoon than by the printed lines of type. The cartoon is a panoramic depiction of the political situation in north Africa and the Middle East (Fig. 1).? If we read this cartoon today, looking beyond its immediate context—namely, a moment in mid-November 1943—we will be able to identify a motif that was quite familiar to Turkish audiences. The various illustrations of Arabs seen in Nadir’s cartoons functioned as visual reference points laying the groundwork for the evocation of a variety of themes and subjects concerning the images of Arabs as embedded in post-Ottoman and early republican Turkish public opinion. ' Cumburiyet, the Turkish daily was the new republic’s most important source of news. It had the widest distribution of any newspaper, yet its daily distribution was limited to Istanbul. It was distributed nationally by subscription but went out only weekly. Since the day it first went to press, Cumhuriyet’s stable of writers embodied the republican era’s intellectual elite, including Ziya Gökalp, Aka Giindiiz, Hasan Bedreddin, Resat Ekrem Kogu, Ahmet Rasim, Peyami Safa, Ahmet Refik, Ismail Habip, Abidin Daver, Cenap Sahabettin, Vedat Nedim, Halit Ziya, Cevat Fehmi Baskut, Mümtaz Faik, Fuad Köprülü, Halit Fahri, Zekeriya Sertel, Yakup Kadri, M. Nermi, and Sükrü Kaya. ? Cemal Nadir was widely acknowledged as one of the most important political cartoonists of his period. His cartoons were published in Cumhuriyet along with prominent cartoonists like Ramiz Gökce. Starting in 1928, Nadir’s cartoons were published on the newspaper’s front page. However, with the economic downturn of the Second World War, the newspaper cut its page count from eight to four and moved Nadirs space to page four (Öngören 1983). > The political cartoons appeared in Ottoman print during the 1860s, almost half a century later from its appearance in Europe. They became the indispensible tool for political propaganda throughout the 20" century, especially during World War I. Although the late Ottoman and early Turkish cartooning and cartoonists were highly influenced by their European counterparts in technical terms, the significant influence of traditional Turkish satire and stereotypes as displayed in 16" century Karagéz shadow plays could be traced in early Turkish cartoons.
