Ülkü Tamer's Poem and the 1919 Omaha Lynching

Ülkü Tamer's Poem and the Lynched Man Everyone Read Past

"Aman, kendini asmış yüz kiloluk bir zenci." Oh, a hundred-kilo Black man who hanged himself. That single line has been quoted in Turkey for more than sixty years, usually with a nervous laugh attached. It is widely remembered as the opening of Ülkü Tamer's poem "Konuşma," though the exact title and its position in the poem could not be independently confirmed. The line is remembered as an image. It was written as a witness statement.

According to the original account, the poem appeared in Tamer's debut collection, Soğuk Otların Altında (Under the Cold Grass), published in 1959, when he was a young poet finding his voice. That attribution could not be independently confirmed. The poem itself reads like a nursery rhyme gone wrong. A fat student who has not learned his lesson. A father who works as a miller. A family that ranks first in divorce. It closes with a shrug: "çok canım sıkılıyor, kuş vuralım istersen." I am very bored, shall we shoot a bird if you like.

That flat, almost childish ending is the point. When the poem came out, critics were tearing into İkinci Yeni, the Second New movement, calling it meaningless verse with no practical use, poetry that was driving ordinary people away from the art form. A poem about a hanging man, a lazy student, and a bored speaker looked like the perfect exhibit for the prosecution. Here was proof that this new poetry said nothing at all.

Except the man in the first line was not a metaphor, and the boredom was not decoration. What looks like a nonsense rhyme carries a real body inside it. The question is who that body belonged to, and why a Turkish poet writing in the late 1950s would reach for a lynching in the American Midwest to say it.

What the Academics Missed: The Zenci Is a Zenci

Scholars spent years dissecting Ülkü Tamer's poem under tidy academic titles like "irony in Ülkü Tamer's poetry" and "death in Ülkü Tamer's poetry," and many of them landed on the same observation: the way the poem uses sound and rhythm, with some pointing to a possible 7+7=14 syllable pattern. That reading isn't wrong, exactly. It's just incomplete, and the incompleteness is the whole problem. The meter itself could not be verified, and İkinci Yeni poets generally favored free verse.

One writer on Ekşi Sözlük went further, taking the poem apart line by line and arguing that "zenci" stands for foreignness, for otherness, for being elsewhere. A careful, generous reading. But notice what it never says: that the zenci is a zenci. The word gets turned into a symbol for alienation, and the actual Black man at the center of the line quietly disappears.

This is the blindness Umberto Eco named in Yorum ve Aşırı Yorum, the Turkish edition of The Limits of Interpretation, published in 1990. Over-interpretation doesn't sharpen your eyes. It blinds them to the pipe sitting plainly on the table, and to the man plainly hanging in the poem. The line "aman, kendini asmış yüz kiloluk bir zenci" is, above all else, a real Black man. Not a sound device. Not a metaphor for loneliness. A reference to real racial violence, and the poem's power depends on readers being willing to see that.

The Proof: "Bir Mektup" and the 1919 Nebraska Photograph

Six years after his first collection, in 1965, Ülkü Tamer published Virgülün Başından Geçenler, and inside it, according to the original account, sits a poem called "Bir Mektup." That attribution could not be independently confirmed. What the account does describe is a letter: a speaker mailing a friend two photographs, and one of them was clipped straight out of a magazine.

That photograph, the poem says, was taken in America in 1919, in Nebraska. Look at the faces in it, the speaker tells his friend, the faces of the men who lynched and burned a Black man. And then the line that gives the whole thing its weight: you will hear the watermarked rustle hidden behind those faces, and you will remember the sacred flame.

The photograph itself is real, and it is not a metaphor. It shows the lynching and burning of Will Brown in Omaha, Nebraska, on September 28 and 29, 1919, during the violence of what historians call the Red Summer. In the frame, the onlookers are not hiding. They are smiling. They are posing for the camera, a crowd of them, shoulder to shoulder, as if they had turned out for a parade.

That is the anchor the author reaches for, and it is a deliberately blunt one. If a Turkish poet writing in the 1950s could conjure a lynched Black man in Nebraska from 1919, then the zenci in that earlier poem was never just a rhyme. The lynching behind Tamer's poem, in other words, points at something with a date and a place and a name attached to it. The author offers this as proof that the line was not written merely for sound harmony, and the photograph is the receipt.

The Late 1950s America Tamer Was Writing Into

When Ülkü Tamer sat down to write in the late 1950s, the America on the other side of the ocean was not a distant abstraction. It was a country where white-supremacist groups, the Ku Klux Klan chief among them, still carried out lynchings, and where the news arriving from across the Atlantic carried an unmistakable stench of racial terror.

That terror had a face. On August 28, 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy, was murdered by white racists in Mississippi. His killers tied a rope around his neck and threw his body into the Tallahatchie River. The exact weight fastened to his neck is often cited as 68 kilograms, though that figure is uncertain. What is not uncertain is the year, the age, or the horror.

Roughly three months later, on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. The two events, a lynching and an arrest, bracket a single autumn that reshaped the civil rights movement.

The pattern continued into the next decade. In 1960, Ruby Bridges, a 6-year-old African American girl, walked into a whites-only elementary school in New Orleans under police escort, flanked by federal marshals because grown adults threatened her life for attending class.

These are the years Tamer was writing into. This era of racial violence, and the way it entered his poetics, is the ground on which the poem's imagery stands. The poem did not invent its horror. It borrowed it.

Why a Turkish Poet in 1959 Was Looking at Nebraska

Ülkü Tamer was writing inside İkinci Yeni, the "Second New" movement that critics of his own day loved to hate. They called it useless, a poetry with nothing to say, a movement actively turning the public away from verse. A fat, hanging, lesson-failing student of a Black man was, to those critics, the perfect mascot for everything they despised.

And yet look at what the poem actually does. The essay's whole argument is that Tamer did not reach for a Nebraska lynching as decoration or as a clever metaphor. He reached for it as a reference. The word zenci in that opening line is not a symbol for otherness or alienation or any of the literary abstractions that critics keep stacking on top of it. It is a Black man. That is the point the author refuses to let go of, and it is why a Turkish poet in 1959 was looking at Nebraska at all.

Then the author bows out. The last line of "Konuşma" is çok canım sıkılıyor, kuş vuralım istersen, roughly "I'm very bored, shall we shoot a bird." The essay ends on that exact line, handed back to the reader as a wry exit. The piece closes where the poem opens, and the boredom becomes the author's own.

The essay ran on Ekşi Şeyler on September 17, 2024, written by the user lairocse. It drew more than 36,200 reads and 522 shares.