A. VAHAP AKBAŞ’S STORIES AND THEIR BASIC THEMES

A.Vahap Akbaş is one of the poets and writers of the post-1980 Turkish literature who were not given much emphasis. Akbaş is a personality from the ? movement called New Islamist Movement, which gathered around the magazine Mavera and was comprised of people including Sezai Karakoç, Cahit Zarifoğlu, Nuri Pakdil, Erdem Bayazıt, Rasim Özdenören,etc.. The author has approximately twenty works published in the areas of poetry, story, verse, essays, anthologies and children's literature. He compiled a total of sixteen stories of his which were published in various newspapers in a book called “Ayna ve Sûret (the mirror and the image)”. In these stories, which focus on individual and community problems, events are presented from the perspective of the narrator, and from this aspect, his stories have autobiographical characteristics. The objective of a majority of these stories is to establish certain bonds with tradition. Akbaş represents his commitment to Islamic culture and civilization, which feeds this tradition and appears in its background, by quoting particularly from ottoman poetry and referring to folk songs, one of the products of anonymous folk literature. Some of the story texts in the book can be said to be also eligible for intertextual reading. In addition to this, doubts and personality fragmentation of young people from Anatolia before love and modernization continue to be an important line in these stories. Young people coming to cities for some reason, mostly to complete their education/study at the university have difficulty in communicating in such environments where emphasis is placed on material values and human tenderness and sensitivity are lost, and they fail to hold on to life. They see "villages/towns" as a place of refuge with exotic nature and nonperishable human values compared to the city. Story heroes- mostly the narrator- get their true identity in such environments modern life couldn’t, even partially, disrupt or corrupt. They exhibit more natural behaviors and feel much more secure there. Another important line in Akbaş’s story universe becomes evident in the contrast of the thing that changes/does not change. In this sense, the individual finds himself/herself again in the thing that does not change. To sum up in a single sentence, love, holding on to life in the city, escape to villages/towns, longing for childhood, lost values appear as main themes in the author's stories.