A research on Fatma Aras's life and works

Poetry, as a genre of literature, which dates back to centuries ago and accepted as a language by some researchers, has an important role in Turkish literature. In traditional Turkish society, patriarchal structure had always tried to reduce woman to silence, like in every other aspect of society, by saying "Poetry is a man's job." Even so, in each epoch, some women had come to light to make themselves heard. Nigâr Hanım who struggled to compose poetry with her own woman identity, is the first example of this. Nezihe Yaşar Bükülmez, the first woman representative of socialist poetry, and many other women poets, such as Nilgün Marmara, Şennur Sezer, Gülten Akın, Didem Madak, Lâle Müldür, and Bejan Matur, struggled to make their marks in patriarchal Turkish literature with their poems. During recent years, the number of woman as individuals, who have been revolting against these restrictions has increased and will continue to increase. Fatma Aras, born in a small village with sixty households in Iğdır, who became acquainted with traditional laws of the village at a very young age, was precluded from writing poetry; however, she never gave up, publishing her first poem at the age of twenty one in the European section of Hürriyet newspaper when she was living in Germany.Turning point of her poetry was her meeting with Veysel Çolak, another poet, and her finding an opportunity to publish her first poetry book in 2008, at the age of 58. Fatma Aras, raised by listening fairytales and folk songs, wrote her first poems with syllabic meter, and then switched to free verse. This study, aims to examine the poetry of Aras, who is a contemporary poet, regarding how her poetry was shaped by her environment in which she was born and raised, as well as how it was developed in a new environment. Aras' proses are also important and therefore examined since they form the basis of her poetry, being influenced by life in general and emotional accumulation fueling from her own life.