Pir Sultan as an Artist Rebelling Against Absurd

Abstract

Rebellion is a behavior that has been known since the existence of man and is seen as a part of his na-ture. The behavior of rebellion is one of the first reactions of man against a ban in mythical narratives and holy books. Accordingly, in the traditional worldview, disobedience has always been considered an immoral behavior, and obedience has been seen as a virtue. However, in the world of psychology and philosophy, rebellion has often been interpreted as a behavior that people who have reached the stage of self-realization will dare. The phenomenon of rebellion, which has been commented on many times, was handled with a philosophical orientation by Albert Camus. For Camus, who was also interested in existentialism, the basis of the rebellion is the questions about existence and existence, the answers that cannot be found exactly, and the sense of absurd that people feel in life that they remain unanswered. Camus considers life and the world as irrational and evaluates the way people view this irrationality, the way they feel and think, as absurd. Most of the time, this becomes a problem that needs to be solved for the person. Rebellion is one way of solving this problem. For Camus, who divides the rebellious human types into four, it is the artist type who realizes the most moral and ideal rebellion. The artist accepts the absurd, but also rebels against its consequences. The artist accepts the absurd, but on the other hand, rebels against the results it has created, instead constructing a new form in own world. The rebellious artist type of Camus can be seen in Pir Sultan's poems in Turkish folklore. The rebellion of Pir Sultan, one of the most important representatives of the Alevi Bektashi poetry tradition, develops in the axis of the Alevi-Sunni, Ottoman-Safavid opposition, sometimes it turns into a general attitude towards life itself and is reflected in his poems. In many of his poems, he complains about the Ottoman sultan, beys, pashas, kadis, and replaces them with Iranian shahs, and sees them as a way to get rid of the feeling of absurdity that is growing day by day. The ideal world felt in the background of Pir Sultan's poems is a world where injustices are not experienced and where Hz. Muhammad, Hz. Ali and the Twelve Imams live. In his poems, he creates the representations of the figures in the present time, by bringing the figures he opposes with anger and the figures he longs for. How the sense of nonsense emerged in Pir Sultan, the social structure in which he lived, and the events he heard or witnessed becomes understandable when examined. How the sense of nonsense is reflected in his poems and how he copes with this emotion are questions that need to be answered. In this study, the sources of the sense of the absurd in Pir Sultan's poems, how they are reflected in his poems, and the codes of the rebellion of Pir Sultan, who chose art and rebellion to deal with the absurd, based on the examples of poetry. While the analysis was being conducted, the Pir Sultans discussions were kept out of the way, and independently of these discussions, considering that Pir Sultan is a tradition, the poems to be discussed in the study were chosen from among the poems published by Ibrahim Aslanoglu, Cahit oztelli and Pertev Naili Boratav and Abdulbaki Golpinarli.