Friday, April 14, 2023

2023: Guntekin - Gypsies


Guntekin
Guntekin (Reshad Nuri Guntekin) (1892-1956).  Turkish novelist, journalist, and playwright.  Guntekin was educated at a French school at Izmir (Smyrna) and at Istanbul University.  Guntekin worked as a teacher and a school inspector.   

A very prolific writer, Guntekin began his literary career after World War I as a playwright.  Guntekin’s first novel, Calikutu (“The Wren”), was published in 1922.  Calikutu won Guntekin fame and immense popularity.   

Guntekin’s novels and short stories owe their success to a clear style, a fecund (inventive) gift of narration pointed by realistic detail, and a sympathetic, rather sentimental, exploration of character.

Guntekin's novel, Calikutu (Çalıkuşu) ("The Wren", 1922) is about the destiny of a young Turkish female teacher in Anatolia. The movie was filmed on this book in 1966, and remade as TV series in 1986. His narrative has a detailed and precise style, with a realistic tone. His other significant novels include Yeşil Gece ("Green Night") and Yaprak Dökümü ("The Fall Of Leaves")

His father was a major in the army. Reşat Nuri attended primary school in Çanakkale, the Çanakkale Secondary School and the İzmir School of Freres. He graduated from Istanbul University, Faculty of Literature in 1912. He worked as a teacher and administrator at high schools in Bursa and Istanbul, then as an inspector at the Ministry of National Education (1931). He served as the deputy of Çanakkale between 1933 and 1943 in the Turkish Parliament, the chief inspector at the Ministry of National Education (1947), and a cultural attaché to Paris (1950), when he was also the Turkish representative to UNESCO.

After his retirement, he served at the literary board of the Istanbul Municipal Theatres. He died in London, where he had gone to be treated for his lung cancer. He is buried at the Karacaahmet Cemetery in İstanbul.
  
The works of Guntekin include:

Books

Roçild Bey (1919)
Eski Ahbab (Without known time)
Tanrı Misafiri (1927)
Sönmüş Yıldızlar (1928)
Leylâ ile Mecnun (1928)
Olağan İşler (1930)

Novels

Çalıkuşu (1922) (The Wren - translated as: "The Autobiography Of A Turkish Girl")
Gizli El (1924)
Damga (1924)
Dudaktan Kalbe (1923) (From The Lip To The Heart)
Akşam Güneşi (1926) (Afternoon Sun)
Bir Kadın Düşmanı (1927)
Yeşil Gece (1928) (The Green Night)
Acımak (1928) (To Pity)
Yaprak Dökümü (1939) (The Fall of Leaves)
Değirmen (1944) (The Mill)
Kızılcık Dalları (1944)
Miskinler Tekkesi (1946)
Harabelerin Çiçeği (1953)
Kavak Yelleri (1961)
Son Sığınak (1961) (The Last Shelter)
Kan Davası (1962)
Ateş Gecesi (1953) (The Night Of Fire)

Plays

Hançer (1920)
Eski Rüya (1922) (The Old Dream)
Ümidin Güneşi (1924) (Hope's Sun)
Gazeteci Düşmanı, Şemsiye Hırsızı (The Umbrella Thief), İhtiyar Serseri (1925, three works)
Taş Parçası (1926)
Bir Köy Hocası (1928)
İstiklâl (1933) (Independence)
Hülleci (1933)
Yaprak Dökümü (1971)
Eski Şarkı(1971) (The Old Song)
Balıkesir Muhasebecisi (1971) (The Accountant Of Balıkesir)
Tanrıdağı Ziyafeti (1971)


Reshad Nuri Guntekin see Guntekin

Gurage
Gurage.  An Ethiopian chronicle of the fourteenth century contains the earliest known reference to the Muslim Gurage of Ethiopia.  Their traditional homeland in southwestern Shoa Province lies roughly between Lake Zway on the east and the Awash River on the west.  Bordered on all sides by groups who speak Cushitic languages, the Gurage represent the southernmost extension of North Ethiopic Semitic people.  No reliable figures exist on the number of speakers of Guragina, which is spoken only by the Gurage, but it is estimated that one third of the speakers of Guragina are Muslim.  

Islam was introduced among the Gurage perhaps as early as the thirteenth century.  In this era of Islamic expansion in Ethiopia, several Muslim sultanates flourished in Shoa Province.  A Muslim invasion of Christian Ethiopia in the sixteenth century left behind in Gurage territory contingents of Muslim soldiers who established a foothold for the later expansion of Islam. {See also Sultan.}

Gurage is an ethnic group in Ethiopia. According to the 2007 national census, they numbered 1,867,377 people (or 2.53% of the total population of Ethiopia), of whom 792,659 are urban dwellers. This is 2.53% of the total population of Ethiopia, or 7.52% of the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People's Region (SNNPR). The Gurage people inhabit a semi-fertile, semi-mountainous region in southwest Ethiopia, about 150 miles southwest of Addis Ababa. Their homeland extends to the Awash River in the north, the Gibe River (a tributary of the Omo) to the southwest, and to Lake Zway in the east. The Gurage ethnic group has usually been said to consist of three distinct subgroups, Northern, Eastern and Western, but the largest grouping within the Eastern subgroup, known as the Silt'e, did not consider themselves to be Gurage, and in a referendum in 2000 they voted unanimously to form their own administrative unit, the Silte Zone, within the SNNPR.

The origins are explained by traditions of a military expedition to the south during the last years of the Aksumite Empire, which left military colonies that eventually became isolated from both northern Ethiopia and each other.

The Gurage languages do not constitute a coherent linguistic grouping, rather, the term is both linguistic and cultural. The Gurage people speak a number of separate languages, all belonging to the Southern branch of the Ethiopian Semitic language family (which also includes Amharic). The languages are often referred to collectively as "Guraginya" by other Ethiopians (-inya is the Amharic suffix for most Ethiopian Semitic languages).

Gurage, also known as Guragie is written with the Ethiopic alphabet. The Guragie subset of Ethiopic has 44 independent glyphs.

There is no general agreement on how many languages or dialects there are, in particular within the West Gurage grouping.

The Gurage live a sedentary life based on agriculture, involving a complex system of crop rotation and transplanting. Ensete is their main staple crop, but other cash crops are grown, which

include coffee and chat. Animal husbandry is practiced, but mainly for milk supply and dung. Other foods consumed include green cabbage, cheese, butter, and roasted grains, with meat consumption being very limited (also used in rituals or ceremonies).


Gurani
Gurani (Sharaf al-Din Gurani) (Molla Gurani) (1410-1488).  Ottoman scholar and Shaykh al-Islam.  He wrote commentaries on the Qur’an and on the Sahih of al-Bukhari.
Sharaf al-Din Gurani see Gurani
Molla Gurani see Gurani


Gurgani
Gurgani (Fakhr al-Din As‘ad Gurgani) (Fakhruddin As'ad Gurgani) (Fakhraddin Asaad Gorgani).  Eleventh century Persian poet. Author of the first known courtly romance in Persian, called Wis and Ramin, this work was written in the eleventh century.

Fakhruddin As'ad Gurgani, also spelled as Fakhraddin Asaad Gorgani, was a 11th century Persian poet. He versified the story of Vis and Ramin, (Vis and Ramin) (Wis and Ramin), a story from the Arsacid (Parthian) period. Contemporary scholar Abdolhossein Zarrinkoub however disagrees with this view, and concludes that the story has a Pahlavi (middle-Persian) origin in the 5th century Sassanid era. Besides Vis and Ramin other forms of poetry were composed by him. For example, some of his quatrains are recorded in the Nozhat al-Majales.


Fakhr al-Din As‘ad Gurgani see Gurgani

Gurnah, Abdulrazak

Abdulrazak Gurnah (b. December 20, 1948, Sultanate of Zanzibar). Tanzanian-born novelist and academic who was based in the United Kingdom. He was born in the Sultanate of Zanzibar and moved to the United Kingdom in the 1960s as a refugee during the Zanzibar Revolution. His novels include Paradise (1994), which was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize; Desertion (2005), which was shortlisted for the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Prize; and By the Sea (2001), which was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. 

Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021 "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents".  

Abdulrazak Gurnah was born on December 20, 1948 in the Sultanate of Zanzibar, which is now part of present-day Tanzania.  He left the island at the age of 18 following the overthrow of the ruling Arab elite in the Zanzibar Revolution, arriving in England in 1968 as a refugee. He is of  Arab heritage.

Gurnah initially studied at Christ Church College, Canterbury, whose degrees were at the time awarded by the University of London.  He then moved to the University of Kent, where, in 1982, he earned his PhD, with a thesis titled Criteria in the Criticism of West African Fiction.

From 1980 to 1983, Gurnah lectured at Bayero University Kano in Nigeria.  He went on to become a professor of English and postcolonial literature at the University of Kent, where he taught until his retirement in 2017, and where he became professor emeritus of English and postcolonial literatures.

Alongside his work in academia, Gurnah is a writer and novelist. He is the author of many short stories, essays and ten novels.

While his first language is Swahili, he has used English as his literary language. However, Gurnah integrates bits of Swahili, Arabic, and German throughout most of his writings. He has said that he had to push back against publishers to continue this practice, while they would have preferred to "italicize or Anglicize Swahili and Arabic references and phrases in his books." Gurnah has criticized the practices in both British and American publishing which want to "make the alien seem alien" by marking 'foreign' terms and phrases with italics or by putting them in a glossary.

In his works, Gurnah draws on the imagery and stories from the Qur'an, as well as from Arabic and Persian poetry, particularly “The Arabian Nights.” 


Gurnah began writing out of homesickness during his 20s. He started by writing down thoughts in his diary, which turned into longer reflections about home; and eventually grew into writing fictional stories about other people. This created a habit of using writing as a tool to understand and record his experience of being a refugee, living in another land, and the feeling of being displaced. These initial stories eventually became Gurnah's first novel, Memory of Departure (1987), which he wrote alongside his Ph.D. dissertation. This first book set the stage for his ongoing exploration of the themes of "the lingering trauma of colonialism, war and displacement" throughout his subsequent novels, short stories and critical essays.

Consistent themes run through Gurnah's writing, including exile, displacement, belonging, colonialism, and broken promises on the part of the state. Most of his novels tell stories about people living in the developing world, affected by war or crisis, who may not be able to tell their own stories.

Much of Gurnah's work is set on the coast of East Africa, and all but one of his novels' protagonists were born in Zanzibar. Though Gurnah has not returned to live in Tanzania since he left at 18, he has said that his homeland "always asserts himself in his imagination, even when he deliberately tries to set his stories elsewhere."

Gurnah edited two volumes of Essays on African Writing and has published articles on a number of contemporary postcolonial writers, including V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Zoe Wicomb.  He is the editor of A Companion to Salman Rushdie (Cambridge University Press, 2007). He has been a contributing editor of Wasafiri magazine since 1987, and he has been a judge for awards including the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Booker Prize, and the RSL Literature Matters Awards. 

In 2006, Gurnah was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL).  In 2007, he won the RFI (Radio France Internationale) Témoin du Monde ("Witness of the world") award in France for By the Sea.

On October 7, 2021, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2021 "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents". Gurnah was the first Black writer to receive the prize since 1993, and the first African writer since 2007. 

Gurnah lives in Canterbury, England, and has British citizenship. He maintains close ties with Tanzania, where he still has family, and where he says he goes when he can: "I am from there. In my mind I live there."




Gypsies
Gypsies (Cingane) (Cingene) (Luli) (Nuri) (Zutt) (The Romani) ( Romany) (Romanies) (Romanis) (Roma) ( Roms). Ethnic group of Europe tracing their origins to medieval India.

The Gypsy communities are indicated by a variety of names.  It is suggested that the name Cingane (in Turkish, Cingene) comes from Cangar or Zingar, said to be the name of a people formerly dwelling on the banks of the Indus.  Luli is one of the names for gypsies in Persia, while the terms Nuri and Zutt are also found.  In Muslim countries, the gypsies usually are said to profess Islam, but they have in fact their own form of religion.  The Arab historian al-Baladhuri relates that the Zutt had been settled in the ports of the Persian Gulf since before Islam.  The Arab historian Hamza al-Isfahani and the Persian poet Firdawsi relate that Bahram Gur, king of Persia (r.420-438), asked the king of India to send him 10,000 Luri, men and women, expert at playing the lute.  The Zutt, who had settled in the marshes between Wasit and Basra in great numbers, rose in rebellion during the reign of the ‘Abbasid Caliph al-Ma’mun, but submitted in 834 on condition that their lives and property be spared.

Gypsies profess, in nearly all cases, the religion dominant in their area of residence.  Thus, there are Catholic Gypsies, various types of Protestant and Orthodox Gypsies and, throughout the Islamic world and those portions of southeastern Europe where the Ottomans most recently ruled, large numbers of Muslim Gypsies.  The particular sect of Islam which they profess varies with the area.  Everywhere they are accused by non-Gypsies of being only superficially Muslim and of lacking true piety.  While this alleged indifference in religious matters is frequently overstressed, there often is a fusion of Islamic and traditional Gypsy religious belief and practice, particularly among those Gypsies still nomadic.  

Gypsy ethnogenesis apparently took place in northwestern India, where there still live Gypsy like peoples thought to be derived from the same stock as Gypsies elsewhere.  They are believed to have entered Persia by the ninth century, whence they spread across the Middle East, arriving in the Balkans in the early fourteenth century.  They comprise a number of different “tribes,” each identified with a particular sub-culture, often including a distinct dialect of Romany and a particular occupation or set of occupations traditional to the group.  In theory, each tribe or group of Gypsies is endogamous (although marriage with other types of Gypsies and non-Gypsies is not uncommon in practice).  In many respects, Gypsies can be considered a caste, or group of closely related castes, intruded into a society that is generally non-caste in structure.  

Cingane see Gypsies
Cingene see Gypsies
Luli see Gypsies
Nuri see Gypsies
Zutt see Gypsies
Roma see Gypsies

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