Aklım Kendimde

Aklım Kendimde

Cumhuriyet Gazetesi — 4 July 1999
Interview by Zeynep Güven

This interview is one of the most personal portraits of Teoman from the late 1990s.

Rather than concentrating mainly on albums or concerts, Zeynep Güven follows Teoman backward into childhood and then forward into the strange psychological effects of becoming successful.

The result is a portrait of someone who divides his own life into two figures:

Child Teoman and Old Teoman.

That division becomes the key to understanding the interview.

The Orhan Pamuk Comparison

The interview begins with an unusual cultural comparison.

Teoman had been compared to Orhan Pamuk because of his way of speaking, constructing sentences and describing events.

He appreciates Pamuk but does not particularly enjoy being compared to him.

The comparison is nevertheless revealing.

Even before Teoman became strongly associated with literary songwriting, journalists were already noticing something unusual in the way he spoke.

His answers rarely operate only at the level of information.

They contain distance, irony and self-observation.

These would later become central features of his public persona.

A Career Found Late

Teoman says that until around the age of 27 he did not really know what he wanted to become.

He considered many possibilities.

Journalism.

Radio.

Advertising.

Film directing.

Publishing.

He looked at people already occupying those professions and sometimes felt that he could do the job better.

What was missing was not ambition.

It was direction.

Eventually he returned to something that had existed since childhood: music.

This makes his later success look less like the execution of a lifelong professional plan and more like the end of a long period of uncertainty.

Childhood Without a Father

The most important biographical section concerns Teoman’s father, Hasan Basri Yakupoğlu.

His father died when Teoman was around two and a half years old.

Teoman therefore remembers him less as a person than as an absence.

Around him were women who continued to grieve: his mother, grandmother, aunt and other relatives.

The atmosphere of the household was marked by loss.

This seems to have influenced Teoman deeply.

He describes growing up surrounded by what he perceived as emotional weakness and deciding that he did not want to resemble it.

Instead, he chose heroes from comic books.

This is significant because it suggests that his idea of masculinity was not inherited directly from a father.

It was partly constructed from imagination.

A Difficult Child

Teoman remembers himself as a child who did not enjoy being treated like one.

He felt unusually mature and disliked adults making decisions on his behalf.

Even ordinary childhood routines irritated him.

He remembers objecting to school exercises because he believed he had gone there to learn reading and writing, not to draw simple shapes.

Whether remembered exactly or reconstructed later, the story fits the adult Teoman’s self-image:

someone who dislikes being told what to do.

The desire for control visible in the 1996 interview therefore appears here not merely as a professional preference.

It may be connected to a much older personality trait.

University and Uncertainty

After Kültür Koleji, Teoman entered İstanbul University’s Business Administration program and later studied mathematics and sociology at Boğaziçi University.

During these years he continued making music with amateur groups.

For a long time this seems to have been enough.

Then, around the age of 25, the question of adulthood arrived:

What am I going to become?

He describes the resulting crisis as unusually long.

He believed he was capable of many different careers but could not decide which one should become his life.

That uncertainty is important when compared with the very strong artistic identity he would later develop.

The person who eventually became “Teoman” first spent years not knowing what Teoman should be.

His Mother

The interview also contains a humorous portrait of his mother, Şaziment Hanım.

Teoman describes her affectionately as someone who often interprets things in unexpected ways.

Because she thought his voice was good, she initially wanted him to become an announcer.

Even after he released successful albums and became famous, music did not completely satisfy her idea of a respectable career.

According to Teoman, she would have preferred something closer to becoming a television news presenter like Ali Kırca.

The anecdote is funny, but it also reveals the gap between conventional professional success and the uncertain world of popular music in which Teoman had chosen to live.

Child Teoman and Old Teoman

The central idea of the interview comes when Teoman divides himself not into famous and unknown versions, but into child and old versions.

Child Teoman had passions.

He could wait all week for a music magazine.

He could become absorbed in books, films and relationships.

The adult version has lost some of that outward intensity.

Instead, his attention has turned inward.

He says:

“Şu dönemde kendimle yoğunlaşmış durumdayım.”

This is the meaning of the title, Aklım Kendimde.

His attention is increasingly centered on himself.

Concert production, career decisions and personal concerns can become more important than larger questions.

He even recognizes that excessive self-concentration may make someone a worse person.

The striking thing is not simply the narcissism.

It is his awareness of it.

Fame as Self-Concentration

Earlier interviews show Teoman worrying about fame from the outside: newspapers, relationships and public image.

Here we see its internal effect.

Success gives a person more reasons to think about himself.

How was the concert?

How did I look?

What will I do next?

How is my career developing?

The more important Teoman becomes professionally, the more Teoman becomes the subject of Teoman’s own attention.

This is a subtle but important transformation.

Fame does not merely change how other people see him.

It changes what occupies his own mind.

Relationships

Teoman is also unusually unsentimental about his romantic life.

He admits that he does not consider himself a particularly good partner.

He can love someone while failing to invest much thought in improving the relationship.

For him, a relationship can sometimes function as something stable in the background rather than as a project requiring constant work.

This is another example of the analytical self-criticism already visible in the June 1999 interview.

He can describe his limitations clearly.

That does not necessarily mean he intends to eliminate them.

Former Lovers

One of the more surprising passages concerns his former girlfriends.

Teoman says that several of his serious relationships had lasted years and that many of these women had later become close friends.

The jealousy and conflict of the relationship had disappeared.

What remained was affection.

His language here is exaggerated and provocative, but beneath it lies an interesting idea:

a failed romantic relationship does not necessarily mean the disappearance of love.

The form of the relationship can change while attachment survives.

Wanting a Child

The interview becomes more existential when Teoman talks about wanting a child.

His reasoning is unusual.

He feels that much of adult life consists of inventing goals for oneself.

A person creates objectives, fills life with projects and then works toward them.

A child, he imagines, would create a different kind of desire.

Caring about the child’s future would not require artificial motivation.

The direction of love would come naturally.

He describes himself, at 32, as already moving downward in life and says that he wants something moving upward to love.

That upward-moving thing would be a child.

This is one of the most revealing early statements in the archive.

It connects aging, meaning and parenthood long before Teoman actually became a father.

Cinema

The interview also arrives at a moment when Teoman is beginning to enter cinema.

He is preparing to act in a Sinan Çetin film.

His attitude is surprisingly relaxed.

Because he does not define himself primarily as an actor, failure in cinema does not threaten his identity in the same way failure in music might.

This allows him to approach acting almost experimentally.

Again we see the distinction between the fields in which Teoman’s identity is invested and those in which he feels free to play.

Why This Interview Matters

This interview deepens several themes already emerging in 1999.

But its most important contribution is the division between Child Teoman and Old Teoman.

Child Teoman represents:

• passion,
• curiosity,
• obsession,
• emotional intensity,
• books,
• films,
• music,
• and the ability to become absorbed in something outside himself.

Old Teoman represents:

• career,
• self-observation,
• control,
• fatigue,
• fame,
• and increasing attention to his own life.

At only 32, Teoman already describes himself as “old.”

This is not really about biological age.

It is about the loss of intensity.

That makes this interview particularly valuable when placed beside his much later conversations about aging.

The 1996 interview showed Teoman before fame.

The June 1999 interviews showed Teoman encountering fame and examining himself beneath it.

This July interview adds another transformation:

Teoman begins to wonder whether becoming successful has also made him less capable of being passionately interested in the world outside himself.

Source Note

Original publication: Cumhuriyet Gazetesi
Date: 4 July 1999
Original title: Aklım Kendimde
Interviewer: Zeynep Güven
Verification: Archived transcription
Confidence: Medium

A detailed transcription survives in the Teoman Röportajları archive. The archived text explicitly identifies Zeynep Güven as the writer and Cumhuriyet Gazetesi as the original source.

The original Cumhuriyet newspaper page has not yet been independently located in an accessible digital archive. For that reason, the interview’s existence and content are well documented, but the surviving online version should still be considered an archival transcription rather than a verified digital original.

This page is an archival summary and commentary. It does not reproduce the original interview in full.