Close Reading: They Burn the Thistles

Social justice and retribution on the vibrant plains of south-central Turkey

Last year I wrote a post about Turkish readers’ fascination with the American writer, John Steinbeck. My reading in 2025 has given me a very clear explanation — after I spent a few weeks reading Yashar Kemal’s book, They Burn the Thistles.

For Steinbeck fans like myself, They Burn the Thistles (TBT) reads like a novel-length version of the short story, “Flight,” or the last act of the book, The Pearl, when Kino and Juana are fleeing the trackers bent on arresting their trip to the capital. For TBT portrays a hunted, haunted man — the brigand, Slim Memed — and hides him among the dry thistle fields and swampy marshes of the Anavarza Plain until he can inspire the peasants of the valley to rise up against the injustice of the landowners or aghas.

TBT is an exemplar of a genre known as the Village Novel, made popular in the 1950s but set in the 1920s in the early years of the Turkish Republic, when the impact of reforms was trickling down to village communities and land-owning aghas still meted rough justice. For these landowners, Ottoman times had never ended.

Just as Steinbeck elevated the underclasses in his novels about migrants (Of Mice & Men, The Grapes of Wrath), Kemal elevates the virtures and hopes of the Turkish peasant.

Natural Settings

In Steinbeck novels, the landscapes of California play key roles in stories, either by setting the mood or in providing additional obstacles to the main characters. In “Flight,” a story which was in my high school English textbook, Pepito must escape through the rocky scrub of California’s coastal hills to escape a posse of vigilantes.

Kemal spends his first chapter illustrating the great Anavarza Plain, pointing out its rivers and marshes, and populating these places with all manner of flora and fauna. The language is rich and lyrical, setting up symbols that will arise later in the novel:

Near Anavarza Castle the River Jeyhan forms a great whirpool, like a huge lake where the water revolves without ceasing. The waters whirl round and round at a dizzy speed, forming little hollows and swellings like waterspouts, bubbling and frothing continually. A twig or a leaf that falls into the whilpool is never carried away, but continues to float round and round on the surface of the water. And when a butterfly falls into the water, or as hosts of them flutter over it, sheat-fish, bigger than a man, leap to the surface, opening their wide whiskered mouths. Snapping up a mouthful of butterflies, they drop back into the water, which turns yellow with froth. (pages 1-2)

This description captures the timelessness of the plain, and the cyclical nature of the history there. And the huge, man-sized catfish are the ruthless landowners. The book is crammed full of images like this, which add luster and deep meaning to the actions of the people on the plain.

Into this landscape descends a man, whose tale was told in the book to which TBT is a sequel: Memed, My Hawk. In the previous book, Memed had been the prime actor who suffered the abuses of the landowner, Abdi Agha. He takes to the hills and becomes a brigand/ bandit, returning to first rescue his lover, Hatche, and later to murder Abdi Agha and bring justice to the plain.

But like the whirlpool in the River Jeyhan, the justice that Mehmed introduced in Memed, My Hawk have cycled back to injustice and abuse. Abdi Agha’s brother, Bald Hamza now lives in the mansion and deals roughly with the peasants: confiscating the lion’s share of their harvests and stealing their work animals. Memed bypasses his home village and journeys to the village of Vayvay which is under the yoke of another imperious agha, Ali Safa.

Safa’s goal is to raze the village of Vayvay and create a large farm. To reach this goal, he has traded a prized stallion to one of the villagers, Yobazoghlu, for a large piece of land there. When Yobazoghlu brags about getting the best of the deal, Ali Safa sends henchmen to burn down his house, and later sends the police to beat the poor man nearly to death while launching night raids on all of Vayvay’s houses. (The horse escapes the fire and roams the plains as a potent symbol of freedom and power.)

The Inversion of the Hero

One of the clever elements Kemal adds to the plot of TBT is the role that Memed plays. In the opening chapters, he rides into Vayvay, asks for protection from Old Osman, and goes to rest in a closet.

Memed does very little in Vayvay, but his presence transforms the village. Old Osman begins strutting around with an air of confidence. His pride and confidence is infectious, and soon many woebegon villagers walk with a firmer step. On the next night raid by the authorities, Old Osman lies in wait and unloads an shotgun blast on one of the assailants, a police sergeant, sending the other raiders scattering.

“If we’d all done what I did last night instead of crouching like scared rabbits, do you think Ali Safa would ever dare raid the village again,” Old Osman asks the village imam, Ferhat Hodja, the next day.

“A frightened man does not find favour with God,” the imam answers (80).

The first word of this book’s title, They, indicates the new direction Kemal has taken here. This isn’t a book about a brigand named Memed (the first word of the first book’s title), this is about the people and how they can rise up.

In fact, Memed spends most of the book laid up with exhaustion or with doubt: he had seen the rise of Bald Hamza in the wake of Abdi’s murder; Hamza was just as worse, so what was the point of dealing with injustice if it was just going to whirl back into place again?

Memed cannot get past the cycle of injustice that he has seen. He is reluctant to bring worse landowners into the plain with violence against the Bald Hamza or Ali Safa. The villagers must help him heal. They will also take the lead.

With Memed present on the plain but reluctant to take the fight to the aghas, his legend does the work for him. The aghas and their henchmen react with terror to his arrival, elevating Memed’s reputation. Sergeant Asim, a veteran of shootouts with the bandit, tells Bald Hamza,

He disappears, and nobody can be certain where he’s going to appear again…. Today he’ll be in Chukurova, you think, and then before you know where you are, tomorrow the fellow is Alidagh…. He can walk like the wind for three days and nights, without rest, without sleep, without food. If he wants, he will show himself, it he doesn’t, he won’t. He’s a strange fellow.”

While Memed is laid up, retribution begins. Ali Safa’s fields are burnt, and assailants use darkness to shoot at his mansion. Bald Hamza is nearly driven mad with fear. The landowners blame Memed, but the truth is a far greater threat: the villagers of the plain are taking things into their own hands.

Symbols

Ali Safa’s stallion escapes the fire meant to burn down the barn and house of his new owner and roams the plain, stalked by Ali Safa’s best hunter, Adem, providing a fascinating motif that carries the story on its back.

Adem, driven mad by the sun and the hunt, believes the stallion is a genie, but he cannot give up on the hunt, even after many weeks away from home. Gradually the stallion glides closer to the hideout in the marsh where Memed is once again recuperating. It grows less wild, and aids in the final scene to bring justice to the plain once again.

A white hawk follows Memed, circling above him during two shootouts with police. It symbolizes the brigand as well as his lofty aspirations.

A final symbol is the burning of the thistles. This indicates a festival that the peasants hold prior to the planting season, when they cut the weeds of the plain and set fire to the thistles to prepare the land for cultivation. During the years of oppression under the aghas most land is left fallow — it makes no sense to break one’s back to plant grain that will just go to a landowner. The burning of thistles is a sign that justice reigns, the plain is ready to produce grain, that hope has returned.

In the final scene of the book, the villagers go out into the fields to burn the thistles (I hope this doesn’t count as a spoiler). They are beckoned to the fields by a fife and drum, emphasizing the rhythm of nature in their agricultural traditions:

The Abdal’s drum resounded all over the Plain of Thistles and drums began to beat in the other villages too. All the five villages set out for the thistle-fields, and assembled where the fields came to and end to the east, on the slopes of Alidagh. The youths took out their sickles and cut the thistles, and the girls collected the cut thistles and piled them in big heaps. The Abdal leapt on to one of the heaps with his drum, and embarked on a dance such as the villagers had never seen before. It was an old-time dance, in which he stretched and bent, turned and twisted, with sinuous movements of the hands and arms. As he danced, the peasants, at a sign from him, set fire to the heap beneath him. And for a time the Abdal danced in the middle of the fire, in harmony with the billowing flames. Then he jumped down, very straight, and mingled with the crowd.

The flames spread from the thistle heaps and in an instant, the whole, dry, thistle-covered plain was on fire. A north-east wind was blowing. It took the flames and scattering them, carried them to the south. Crackling sounds rose from the thistle-fields and cries filled the night, as the flames raced over the plain. Towards morning the whole plain glowed as though flooded with fire.” (411-12).

Parable

Kemal also uses parable to convey the themes of the book. One of the funniest characters in the novel is Governor Vali, a conservative holdout, hoping for a return of the Ottoman Sultan and an end to modern ways.

At a meeting with the aghas to discuss Memed, Murtaza Agha discusses ways to kill a snake.

“How else can [a snake] die, you ask. Well listen, Your Honour. If a snake is wounded just a tiny wound, no bigger than the point of a needle… If a person or an animal gets a tiny scratch what happens? Nothing happens, you don’t think about it, it gets better at once. And yet if a snake is wounded, however tiny the wound, it dies. How can it die, you will say, and if you never saw it, you can’t know about it. I do. When a snake is wounded, even if it is only a tiny scratch, the yellow ants swarm over the wound. In one day they eat the snake and finish it off. Do you understand now, Your Honour?”

Veli thinks he understands. The clown. An aristocrat lost in the sea of the republic.

“Well, Slim Memed is the tiny wound that has been inflicted on the snake,” Murtaza explains (p 307).

Conclusion

Murtaza adds that the wound on the snake, i.e. the cabal of land-owning aristrocrats, has already been made by Memed’s murder of Abdi Agha in Memed, My Hawk. This may be true, but at the beginning of TBT, the cycle of injustice seems to be firmly restored.

I think that leads to the point of this great work — and why Kemal returned to the topic after the success of Memed, My Hawk. It’s a message I have often heard in Turkey, most recently at an oratorio in honor of the nation’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

The work of justice may be embodied in — or inspired by — one person, but it is the responsibility of us all to carry it out.

It was the message that Steinbeck carried forward so eloquently in the final chapter of his masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath:

“Well, maybe like Casy says, a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one — an’ then—“

“Then what, Tom?”

“Then it don’ matter. Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be everywhere — wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’ — I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build – why, I’ll be there. See?”

Why do they burn the thistles in They Burn the Thistles? It’s because people are about to eat the food they raise and live in the houses they’ve built, unburdened by the landowners. Memed is a spirit in this novel, more than a brigand. The cycle has been reset, and justice will henceforth rule the Anavarza Plain.