To Be the Poet of a Story

Is it possible to be a the story's poet?

Historiography is often presented as a regular response to the question “what happened?” Documents are found, events are ordered, people and dates are placed in their proper context. This framework is not entirely wrong; but it is incomplete. Because historical text is not merely a conduit for information. We cannot access the past directly; the past reaches us mostly through texts, records, labels, and other media. Therefore, just as much as the “event,” the language that makes the event possible and comprehensible to the reader lies at the heart of the matter.

The postmodern approach, particularly that of Derrida, begins its intervention in historiography precisely here: meaning is not a fixed core already present in the text. Even when words stand alone, they carry a past; when they enter a sentence, that past becomes dynamic. An expression operates not only by “what it says” but also by “the context in which it circulates.” Thus, even when the historian believes they are simply reporting “what happened,” they are in fact making a choice: deciding which concepts to use, which terms to center, which to explain, and which to leave as they are. The postmodern objection is not meant to devalue historiography; it is essential to make these textual decisions visible.

At this point, a small distinction proves useful: “word” and “word.” In everyday language, they are often synonymous; but in historiography, the tonal difference between them becomes more pronounced because language carries its own history. When we say “word,” we usually mean the unit appearing in the text—a term, a label. When we say “sözcük,” we are more likely to think of how that same unit functions within a sentence, what associations it carries, and which usage habits accompany it. At least, that is how it comes to mind in my own thinking. A similar nuance can also be observed between “meaning” and “mana.” “Meaning” tends to suggest something more explainable, closer to a dictionary definition: what does the expression say? “Mana,” on the other hand, reminds us of a word’s historical-cultural weight, its social resonance, and the direction it opens within a sentence: what does this word normalize? What does it exclude? What values does it align with? Of course, both are context-dependent; but within historiography, the concept of “mana” makes the historical layers of language more visible.

^{Depiction of the Person Seeking Knowledge (Generated by Artificial Intelligence)}

We arrive now at the question of word choice. In historiography, word choice is often subsumed under the category of “style”: “We would write this better in a different way.” But often the issue is not about writing “more beautifully,” but about constructing a “more accurate” framework; even that is not quite right. There is more than just a tonal difference between calling an event a “rebellion” versus an “uprising,” a “rebellion,” or a “resistance.” These words position actors differently, distribute legitimacy differently, construct state-society relations differently, and define violence differently. The reader begins to interpret the same phenomenon within a different framework. This situation continuously raises two questions: What does this naming make visible? What does it render invisible? From whose perspective is this text constructed?

Notice that after saying “two questions,” I listed three. When I first thought about this, there were truly only two questions in my mind; but as I constructed the text, a third emerged naturally. I could have gone back and corrected it, reshaping the text to fit “two questions.” But I chose not to. Because does not the flow of thought often proceed this way in real-life communication? When speaking, we rarely say exactly what we planned; thought expands, diverges, takes on a new direction as it moves. And from that point on, it is impossible to erase everything that passed through our minds as if it had never happened. What can be done, then, is exactly what I did in this paragraph: add a clarification: “I said two, but there are actually three questions.” This clarification does not serve as an error correction so much as it makes visible how thought progressed. A small inconsistency within the text becomes an imprint of the natural flow of thinking. This small example also illustrates the process of filtering and revision that historians and other writers undergo when preparing texts. Writing is rarely the flawless transmission of a smooth thought; it is the sum of the paths thought took, the choices made, and the traces consciously left behind. What matters here is not eliminating every trace, but understanding why certain traces were left. Therefore, when reading a written text, one must take this process into account.

Now let us return to the main thread of this text. We will explore this topic further in another essay and discuss it at greater length.

From Derrida’s perspective, this is not saying “there is no truth.” Rather, it is an invitation to trace how truth is constructed within the text. The foundational act of a historical text is often “selection”: among documents, among quotations, among sentences, among concepts. Moreover, the appearance of neutrality in a choice does not remove its status as a choice. Footnotes, bibliographies, and archival references strengthen the text; but they can also function to present the framework constructed by the text as “natural.” This is not an accusation; it is simply how writing works. Postmodern reading opens a discussion about this mode of operation. It is precisely here that the question of the “archive” becomes crucial. The archive is not merely the sum of what is preserved; it is also the space of what is organized, classified, and excluded. Which documents remain, which are lost, which are accessible; the language of the institution that produced the document; the type and purpose of the document—all of these provide historiography with a framework from the very beginning. Thus, the historian’s choice of words does not begin solely at their writing desk; it is often nourished by the language of the archive and the document itself.

^{Reflections of a Phenomenon in Different Narratives (Video: Mehmet Salih Çoban)}

This nourishment has a very concrete manifestation in the Turkish context: the rupture between Ottoman Turkish with its Arabic-Persian borrowings and the language reform and simplification movements of After the Republic language reforms. The reason the “word/sözcük” duality sometimes evokes this rupture in historiography is precisely this. The term “word” may conjure a linguistic climate rich in Arabic and Persian vocabulary, saturated with compound constructions, and connected to bureaucratic and madrasa writing traditions. “Sözcük,” by contrast, evokes more strongly the post-Republic Turkish emphasis on simplification and Turkification. This association, even if unintended, generates a directional sense in the text: which linguistic regime is the historian closer to? Which one do they consider more “valid”?

We observe this not only at the level of “word/sözcük,” but also in more visible examples: pairs such as “mukavele/sözleşme,” “münasebet/ilişki,” “teşkilat/örgüt,” “müsadere/el koyma,” “tahkikat/soruşturma,” “tebaa/vatandaş,” “asayiş/kamu düzeni,” and “muhalefet/karşıtlık.” Choosing one term is rarely merely about enhancing intelligibility or making the text appear “older.” That word also evokes a specific its historical circulation; it determines which historical conceptual world we are anchoring ourselves in, which institutional language we are aligning with, and which reading habits we are reinforcing.

The difficulty lies here: translating the language of Ottoman documents into today’s Into Turkish modernizes the text; but it also transforms the document’s own categories. Some concepts in the document do not function identically to their modern equivalents; they merely appear to carry a similar “meaning,” but their “mana” has changed. Conversely, preserving the old Turkish terms unchanged is also problematic: this presents the document’s language as a “legitimate” framework, potentially legitimizing the power discourse within the document—whether intentionally or unintentionally, willingly or unwillingly. Thus, the historian must make a decision no matter which direction they turn: either they transform and make visible, or they preserve and sustain the weight it carries.

^{Recognizing the Weight of a Word (Generated by Artificial Intelligence)}

Here again, the distinction between “meaning” and “mana” proves useful. Finding a dictionary equivalent for a term often provides a solution at the “meaning” level; but grasping its “mana” becomes difficult without understanding its usage in its historical period, its legal-administrative context, its everyday language counterpart, and its position within the social hierarchy. Historiography, therefore, must read not only words but also the world through which those words circulated.

In this framework, the question of “narrative” becomes clearer. A historical text works not only by selecting and ordering events, but also by choosing and positioning concepts. Where does it begin? Where does it end? Which relationships are framed as cause and effect? Which are relegated to background? Which actor is accepted as “central”? All of these occur within language. Thus, word choice in historiography is not a simple stylistic preference; it is the epistemic and ethical responsibility of the text.

When we place all of this side by side, the controversial phrase from literature finds a new place: “To be a poet of a story.” Those who object to this phrase usually wish to distinguish genres: story is one thing, poetry is another. But from the perspective of historiography, the issue is not the boundary between genres; it is how narrative is constructed through language. If we read the word “poet” here not as a title but as a mode of attention, the sentence takes on a different function: it points to a writing discipline that values the weight of language, the power of naming, and the consequences of representation. For the historian, this is not “writing poetry”; it is attending to the “mana” of concepts as much as their “meaning,” accounting for the historical weight of words, and making the invisible choices of the text as transparent as possible.