Türk Halk Şiirinde Toplumsal Doğalarin Trajedisi: ‘Çitleme Ağitlari’
The Tragedy of Socialnatures in Folk Poetry: ‘The Turkish Enclosure Elegies’

Summary/Abstract: One of the main aspects of human-nature relationships is emotional and poetic responses to the socioecological changes and losses. This paper is about ecopoetry on the destroyed socialnatures, enclosure elegies in the Turkish grassroots environmentalism against the results of the seizure of commons (eg; water and land) by either state or corporate powers or the ecological despoilation and devastation of globalised industrial capitalism. In literature, as universal language of grief, an elegy is a poem of loss or mourning written after a death in order to express grief. The enclosure elegies is a group of poem of social protest and lamentation regarding the inconsolable effects of enclosure on the landscape and its people. Enclosure seems to represent a special threat to the people and nature. Because of the characteristics of the genre, the enclosure elegies show the deepest socioecological sensitivity and the strongest awareness in folk poetry. Although there is a complaint and anger about the loss and devastation of nature in every kind of nature writing, the ecological grief and revolt of the mourning reaches its peak in poetry and especially in the enclosure elegies. Every elegy casts a regional socioecological crisis, tragedy and sorrows created by industrial encroachment on our natural, human and non-human world. These poems contain striking images of suffering natural and human life at the margins of society and present social criticism, and different understandings of the relationships between people and ecology, inequality and injustice. Social and ecological concerns are constant and obvious features of all elegies. The poet documents both the destruction of a place and people and a life before and after the social and environmental collapse-the destruction caused by enclosures. This study, which aims a systematic analysis of the ecological dimension of a new category of Turkish folk poetry as a literary genre, the enclosure elegy, which has not been examined so far, attemps to discuss the local nature and ecological poetry from an ecopolitical, ecocritical and the new folkloristics perspectives. Total seven elegiac poems evaluated, collected through virtual snowball technique from different localities in Turkey.

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