Celal Güngördü’s novel “Bana Tahir’i Sormayın,” published by Ayrıntı Yayınları last week, explores through grief, loss and memory the question of whether remembering a person means preserving them as they were or reconstructing them from fragments in one’s memory. At its center are the bones of Tahir Miraz, delivered to his father in a cargo box, and Ezo, who learns of the news as if it were a newspaper footnote. The contrast between Tahir as the boy who fed pigeons on the terrace of the family home and was Ezo and Sıla’s “older brother,” and Tahir who years later has been reduced to bones, forms the foundation of the novel. Rather than bringing Tahir’s story to an end, death begins Ezo’s process of confronting the past and the void he left behind.
Ezo tries to sculpt Tahir using the stone-carving heritage she inherited from her Armenian mother, but she cannot find the face she is looking for. The people she encounters and her suitcase on the journey from Galata to Van reveal the weight of the past and the fragmented, unreliable nature of memory. Tahir’s identity is constructed not only through Ezo’s account but also through those of Sıla, Evdal, Melis and Faruk: he ranges from a compassionate young man to someone who joins the political struggle and goes to the mountains, whose body is found on the Marmara coast. The novel holds these contradictions side by side; it neither exonerates Tahir nor rejects him with a single judgment.
Why it matters
The novel’s center of gravity lies in showing that, after a death, the truth cannot be left to a single narrator or a definitive account of identity. The traces of Tahir that remain with different people raise questions about how family memory intersects with the political past, and why contradictions must be preserved when trying to understand a person. Ezo’s search, pursued through her stone-carving heritage, reveals that remembering is not only a mental process but also a physical and cultural one. For this reason, the novel speaks not only to those living with loss but also to anyone who constructs the past through family narratives, testimonies and incomplete information; the question left open is which fragments reflect the truth and which reflect the needs of those left behind when reconstructing someone.