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Füsun Özbilgen: RIFAT ILGAZ TRANSFORMING SARROW TO LAUGHTER With 60 published books to his credit, Rifat Ilgaz must be one of Turkey's most prolific writers. The author of thousands of short stories, poems, novels, plays, memories and articles. The most famous of his humorous works is "Hababam Sinifi", about the teachers and pupils of a boys' boarding school. Rifat Ilgaz's identity card is older than the Turkish Republic. He was born in 1911 in the small picturesque town of Cide on the Black Sea. In 1908 Constitutional Government had been declared, and the slogan "Liberty has come" was on everyone's lips. "I was born soon after this proclamation of liberty," explains Rifat Ilgaz. "I was one of the first liberty children. But this did not stop them encouraging me to shout 'Long live the Sultan!' when Vahdettin came to the throne around four years later. I was not destined to be a patriotic Ottoman for long, only until I was seven or eight. After the Military College was closed down, a young teacher from the college who came to my school persuaded me to throw my fez away and put on a kalpak (fur cap) instead. So I became a supporter of the National Independence Army." Those turbulent years during which the collapse of the empire was followed by the War of Independence and the birth of the new republic, left their mark on the youthful Rifat Ilgaz. The young teacher who had influenced him was Hilmi Erdem , father of Kaya Erdem the former parliamentary speaker in the 1980s. Rıfat Ilgaz reminisces about the early years of the young republic: "When I was in junior school in Kastamonu, I replaced the kalpak with a hat on the orders of Mustafa Kemal. So the fez and the kalpak had gone. Then a few slaps sent the old alphabet (the ottoman, based on Arabic script) flying out of my head. In came the Latin alphabet instead. Reform followed reform. While I was in the Yakacik Sanatorium suffering from tuberculosis, Mustafa Kemal died and the reforms lost their momentum. "The Second World War had begun and I was a poet. A pragmatic, socialist, revolutionary poet. Handcuffs and chains were the authorities' reaction to that. The war finished, and the Missouri's arrived." Rifat Ilgaz has spent altogether 8 years of his life in sanatoriums trying to beat tuberculosis. In between two different kinds of spells of confinement he was first a teacher, then a journalist. In 1930 he graduated from Kastamonu Teaching College and taught Turkish at schools Adapazari and Istanbul. In 1938 he graduated from the Department of Literature of Gazi Institute of Education. Throughout all these trials and tribulations . Rifat Ilgaz has transformed sorrow to laughter. Amidst suffering and adversity he has always sought the funny side of life. When he gave up teaching and came to Babiali, the Turkish Fleet Street, he started his journalistic career on the bottom rung as a typesetter, before going on to writing for humorous magazines. As well as Markopasa and Adembaba, the most famous of those years, he wrote hundreds of humorous articles for others, such as Tas, Dolmus, Karikatür, and Saka. Today he lives in a flat in one of the huge apartment blocks in Atakoy with his son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren. After a traffic accident in Cyprus a few years ago he has trouble with his leg, and complains about not being able to get out and about much any more. Otherwise neither his faculties nor his humour have been blunted by the years. As a writer who has made generations of readers laugh, I cannot resist asking Rıfat lgaz to define humour. "There is no literary form as humorous writing. Literary forms are novels, stories, articles and memories. Even letters are a literary form, but humour is not. If it was, it would have a chniique of its own. Humour is a style, a way of looking at society. Humour can come in the form of poetry, stories or novels. It is an attitude deriving from our disposition. Literary forms need skill and technique. If you get those right, then you succeed. But what does humour require? Since humour is innate in a person's temperament it is not a skill which can be acquired. Only if humour is in your nature can you be funny." "Hababam Sinifı" is Rifat Ilgaz's most famous humorous novel. His son's stories of their exploits at school were the inspiration for it. At weekends Aydın would come home and recount that week's happenings, and Rıfat Ilgaz began to put them into story form, adding his own experinces and memories from his teaching years. The careful reader can learn a lot from Rifat Ilgaz's stories:bow to conceal your tax evasion from the most hawk-eyed tax inspector, or discover the complex workings of an international loan. Reading them you wonder how he discovered about subjects which even experts might be hard put to explain. When I asked him, he replied with a smile: I go and sit in the Cicek Pasaji. As I drink a beer people come and go and conversations start up. I order them a beer, and we chat. With a bit of encouragement they will talk for an hour or two. I also learnt a lot from the more sophisticated sort of thieves and gangsters when I was in prison, and from my fellow patients in hospital. I have known all kinds of people." His novel "Yildiz Karayel" won the Madaralı Prize and the Orhan Kemal Prize for fiction in 1982. "Hababam Sinifı" has been adapted for theatre, and (without his permission) for a . "Karartma Geceleri" (Nights of Blackout) became a film which won several awards. Today his books are published by Cinar Yayinlari, a publishing house established by his son. Many of his stories and articles were never returned by publishers or the police after raids. The conversation diverged into a new global perspective. In 1968 Rifat Ilgaz visited Özbekistan, travelling to Moscow by train, and from there by air to Ozbekistan and back. "Flying is all right, but the time barely changes despite the distance. Then on your return you lose a day. Time gets its revenge." So what about the world appearing like an orange below? "The world today is no longer dominated by the regionality, but by universality. Mankind has a common destiny, although there are those who seek to separate people on the grounds of faith, language and race. Let us take environmental pollution. No national boundaries apply there. World states are bound to one another as tightly as if they were district councils. In time a single world view will predominate. That will come about through friendship and culture." (Skylife - February 1993 - Number 118) www.cinaryayincilik.com.tr, www.habbamsinifi.com.tr