We Humans (Book)

Peyami Safa’s novel Biz İnsanlar was first serialized in 1937 in the newspaper Cumhuriyet but was never published as a book due to various reasons long duration. The novel was finally published in book form two years before the author’s death, in 1959, becoming Safa’s last published novel. Work, Orhan and Vedia’s relationship conveys the Turkish societal conflict between East and West.

Roman is set in Istanbul during the Armistice period immediately before the National Struggle. The story begins with Orhan, a primary school teacher, who is sensitive to class discrimination. The narrative escalates when the wealthy and spoiled student Cemil insults the poor Tahsin by calling him “Donkey Turk,” and Tahsin responds by throwing a stone from the ground at Cemil’s head. This incident deepens through Orhan’s interventions and culminates in his departure from the school teacher, event on. Following this event, Orhan contacts Cemil’s family and thereby meets Vedia, whom he will later become emotionally involved with.

The central conflict of the novel is the East-West dichotomy. Orhan is portrayed as a traditionalist, nationalist, poor and conservative figure, while Vedia is an indecisive character raised in the superficial aspects of Western culture but unable to internalize its meaning complete affiliation. Vedia’s hesitation between two men—the Westernized Rüştü and the Eastern-oriented Orhan—aims to provide a psychological analysis of an individual torn by identity conflict between East and West. In this context, Vedia is not merely a only character but also Safa’s intellectual allegory of the clash between civilizations.

Additionally, the novel contrasts the lives of those residing in the yalı—highlighting Westernization through their entertainment, conversations and even the instruments they play, such as Samiye Hanım and Besi Aunt—with the customs and behaviors of those living in the countryside, which represent the East author state.

The novel’s settings—Beyoğlu representing the West, school symbolizing the existing order, the yalı embodying moral decay, the quiet edge of the hospital facilitating inner reflections stage sea, and the hospital itself where both the beginning and end unfold—are all symbolically charged. Particularly Halim Bey’s yalı serves as the center of Western lifestyle, where characters who speak French and have become alienated from Turkish are prominently featured.

The novel is generally written in the third-person omniscient narrative voice. However, at certain points the narration shifts to first-person singular, especially through Vedia’s diaries, which directly expose her inner world to the reader. This technique aims to enhance the narrative’s polyphony and psychological depth.

The novel’s central theme is the conflict between East and West not only on a cultural level but also on social and moral planes. While the author criticizes characters who blindly idolize the West, he does not merely defend traditional Eastern values; he also offers suggestions on how these values might be preserved during the process of modernization. Cemil’s insult to the poor Tahsin and Tahsin’s violent response are interpreted as reflections of the suppressed anger of the masses against an elite that has lost its national identity:

“In the stone thrown by this child, there was not only the violent legacy of hatred passed from father to son but also the national conscience’s reaction against a cosmopolitan family and the popular fury against a privileged class.”^【1】

This emphasis reveals that what appears to be an individual incident reflects deeper fractures within collective consciousness like historical.

Peyami Safa employs a plain and unadorned language in the novel. Particularly through internal monologues and dialogues, the psychological states of the characters are continuously explored. This stylistic feature, evident in Safa’s other works, serves in Biz İnsanlar to deepen the novel’s psychological complexity.

Biz İnsanlar is a novel that seeks not only to depict conflicts between individuals but also to lay bare the pains of a nation undergoing Westernization. In this work, Peyami Safa addresses the East-West conflict in a multidimensional manner, arriving at social and cultural analyses through individual dramas.