Özel Röportaj — Teoman

Özel Röportaj — Teoman

Habertürk — 28 June 2024
Interview by Didem Arvas

This interview is particularly valuable because several themes that had appeared separately in Teoman’s recent public life are brought together in one conversation.

His first novel.

The fictional character Timur.

His changing public image.

The controversy surrounding Necip Fazıl Kısakürek.

Political polarization in Turkey.

Gaza.

And the increasingly difficult problem of saying anything publicly in a world where one sentence can reach millions of people within hours.

The result is a portrait of an older Teoman trying to use his public visibility more deliberately than before.

“I Wrote to Repair Myself”

The central phrase surrounding the interview is Teoman’s explanation of why he writes.

He says writing has a healing function.

Like reading, it helps him repair himself.

This is an important development from the 2018 Fasa Fiso period.

At first, writing had been a new creative challenge.

By 2024, it has become something more personal.

Writing is not merely production.

It is psychological maintenance.

From Songwriting to Self-Repair

This changes the role of artistic work.

Young Teoman wrote songs partly because he wanted a career.

Later, songs became a way of organizing emotion.

Writing prose now provides another function.

It gives him a structure in which thoughts can be examined slowly.

Unlike social media or interviews, a book allows revision.

A sentence can remain unfinished until it says what the writer actually means.

For someone increasingly frustrated by the speed of public interpretation, that matters.

The Childhood Dream of Writing

Teoman says that becoming a writer had actually been one of his childhood ambitions.

Rock music came later.

This reverses the usual narrative.

The famous musician is not simply trying a completely unrelated late-life hobby.

In his own account, writing returns him to an older desire.

The career may therefore be moving forward by returning to something that existed before the rock star.

Timur

Didem Arvas asks whether Timur, the central figure of Sayın Bay Rock Yıldızı, is Teoman.

The question is inevitable.

Timur is an aging rock star.

Teoman is an aging rock star.

The overlaps are obvious.

Yet fiction allows the differences to matter as much as the similarities.

Timur can contain fragments of Teoman without functioning as coded autobiography.

The Third Teoman-Like Figure

This makes Timur especially interesting within the archive.

There is now a sequence:

Teoman → Ruhi → Timur.

Ruhi allowed the younger songwriter to transform autobiography into song fiction.

Timur allows the older writer to transform the public mythology of Teoman into prose fiction.

The technique is similar.

The object has changed.

Public Statements Travel Faster Than People

Teoman makes an important observation about contemporary communication.

A person changes gradually.

The world changes around him.

But a sentence can now travel to millions of people almost instantly.

This creates a mismatch.

Complex people develop over decades.

Public statements are processed in minutes.

A sentence can therefore become a permanent label while the person who said it remains much more complicated.

A World Without Distance

Teoman describes the contemporary environment as essentially distance-less.

Social media removes the old separation between speaker and audience.

An interview statement once passed through an editor, a publication schedule and a relatively limited readership.

Now one sentence can circulate independently within hours.

This changes the risks of public speech.

The Necip Fazıl Controversy

The interview gives one of Teoman’s clearest explanations of the controversy surrounding his announcement that he was preparing material connected with Necip Fazıl Kısakürek’s Kendi Vatanında Parya.

From the outside, the gesture looked politically surprising.

Teoman’s established audience largely associated him with secular urban culture.

Necip Fazıl occupies a central place in the cultural history of Turkish conservatism.

The apparent contradiction guaranteed attention.

That attention was deliberate.

“A Kind of Trolling”

Teoman admits that the announcement contained an element of trolling.

But the aim, he argues, was not to humiliate a political group.

He wanted to exploit the logic of social media.

A predictable statement from Teoman would remain inside his own cultural echo chamber.

An unexpected reference to Necip Fazıl would break through it.

The controversy itself became the distribution mechanism.

Using Surprise as Communication

This is a surprisingly strategic view of public speech.

Teoman understood that simply saying:

“We should have social peace.”

would produce little attention.

Connecting that idea with Necip Fazıl produced cognitive dissonance.

People stopped.

Argued.

Shared.

Reacted.

The controversy dramatically increased the reach of the underlying message.

No Actual Political Conversion

Teoman is explicit that Necip Fazıl does not represent him politically.

Neither, he says, does Nâzım Hikmet completely represent him politically.

Instead, he treats both as major cultural figures.

This distinction between cultural inheritance and political allegiance is central.

A person can value a writer without accepting the writer’s ideology.

Cultural Brothers

Teoman effectively places Necip Fazıl and Nâzım Hikmet within a shared cultural inheritance.

Their political positions may oppose one another.

But both belong to Turkish cultural history.

The younger Teoman often discussed belonging through language.

The older Teoman expands that position.

Cultural belonging can include writers whose politics one rejects.

“Kendi Vatanında Parya”

What attracts Teoman particularly is the emotional power of the idea of becoming a pariah in one’s own homeland.

He believes this feeling can be understood across political camps.

Conservatives have historically used it to describe their own exclusion.

Modern secular people can also recognize the fear of cultural displacement.

The phrase can therefore potentially create a bridge.

Nobody Should Feel Like a Pariah

Teoman’s desired conclusion is relatively simple.

No citizen should feel like a stranger in his own country.

Not conservatives.

Not secular people.

Not some idealized majority at the expense of another group.

This brings him back to the concept he repeatedly emphasizes:

toplumsal barış — social reconciliation.

From Pessimism to Intervention

This is especially interesting when compared with 2016.

In the Tempo interview, Teoman sounded close to despair about whether Turkish people could learn to like one another.

By 2024, he has not necessarily become optimistic.

But he is trying to intervene.

Even if the intervention is small.

Even if it requires a publicity trick.

Pessimism has not completely eliminated responsibility.

The Older Brother Position

Teoman describes himself, somewhat humorously, as an older brother to younger generations in Turkey.

At fifty-six, he no longer sees himself primarily as the rebellious young outsider.

Age produces another possible social role.

The older person can offer advice.

Not as an authority who possesses absolute truth.

More as someone who has watched the same cultural conflicts repeat for decades.

The Right and Left of His Childhood

Teoman connects his desire for reconciliation with his childhood memories of political violence.

As a child, he had watched young people from the right and left kill one another.

He says even then the situation seemed absurd to him.

This is consistent with the philosophy behind İki Çocuk.

Ideology turns young people into representatives of opposing camps.

Death reveals that they were human beings first.

Avoiding the Political Camp

Teoman says he does not want to imprison himself inside a political pole.

His reasoning is psychological.

Once someone becomes completely identified with one camp, perception changes.

Everything begins to be interpreted according to loyalty.

The other side appears automatically wrong.

He compares the effect to damaged vision.

Political identity can make a person intellectually myopic.

The Vicdan Side

Rather than identifying himself through a conventional party or ideological flag, Teoman says he has generally tried to stand on the side of vicdan — conscience.

This is deliberately vague.

But that vagueness is part of the position.

He wants moral response to come before camp loyalty.

Whether that is always possible in practice is another question.

But it clearly describes how Teoman wants to see himself politically.

Gaza

The conversation becomes much more concrete when Didem Arvas asks about Gaza.

Teoman’s answer refuses a simple binary.

He describes Hamas’s 7 October attack critically.

At the same time, he believes the scale and logic of Israel’s response to Gaza are horrifying.

His focus again moves toward human consequences rather than camp loyalty.

Trying to Understand Desperation

One particularly important distinction appears in his discussion of Hamas.

Teoman does not say that a desperate action becomes morally correct.

Instead, he asks what level of desperation leads people to accept their own likely deaths in an attack.

This is consistent with his sociological instinct.

Condemnation alone does not explain behavior.

Understanding the conditions producing behavior is a separate intellectual task.

Netanyahu and the Israeli Right

Teoman is sharply critical of the Israeli government’s approach.

He refers to the power of hard-line political forces in Israel and the dehumanizing language directed toward Gazans.

For him, the idea that another population must either accept one’s preferred way of living or die represents an especially frightening political mentality.

Again, the underlying concern is dehumanization.

Western Double Standards

Teoman also criticizes what he sees as Western inconsistency.

He compares reactions to Ukraine with reactions to Gaza.

His point is that European identification with Ukrainian victims can be stronger partly because those victims appear culturally and physically closer to Europeans.

The implication is uncomfortable:

some victims are more easily imagined as “people like us” than others.

Empathy Is Uneven

This connects the Gaza discussion to the broader theme of the interview.

Human beings divide the world into groups.

Our people.

Their people.

People like us.

People unlike us.

Political polarization inside Turkey and international responses to war operate on different scales, but the psychological mechanism can be similar.

Empathy becomes selective.

Teoman’s Politics of Humanization

Across İki Çocuk, the 2016 Tempo interview, the 2023 Fatih Altaylı conversation and this Habertürk interview, a consistent political instinct becomes visible.

Teoman repeatedly tries to move from category back to person.

Soldier → young man.

Revolutionary → young man.

Conservative → citizen.

Secularist → citizen.

Gazans → people.

Israelis → people.

The political labels do not disappear.

But they should not erase the humans beneath them.

Is This Enough?

There is an obvious limitation.

Humanization does not automatically solve political conflicts.

Power matters.

Institutions matter.

History matters.

Responsibility matters.

Teoman is not offering a political theory capable of solving these issues.

He is offering something smaller:

a resistance to total dehumanization.

That limited ambition is consistent with his later politics.

From Changing the World to Reducing Cruelty

Young political cultures often imagine transformation.

Change society.

Win.

Defeat the opposing system.

Teoman’s later political language is much less ambitious.

Do not hate each other so much.

Do not humiliate each other.

Do not assume disagreement makes someone a traitor.

Do not allow cultural identity to erase empathy.

This is politics after grand ambition.

Writing and Politics Meet

There is an interesting connection between Teoman’s political position and his writing.

Both depend on creating distance from fixed identity.

Fiction allows him to leave Teoman and become Timur.

Sociological imagination allows him to leave his own cultural camp and imagine how another group experiences the country.

The underlying skill is similar:

temporarily inhabit another perspective.

Why This Interview Matters

This is one of the strongest later-period documents because it joins the literary and political Teoman in the same conversation.

Several developments become clear:

• writing has become a method of psychological repair,
• Timur allows Teoman to convert public biography into fiction,
• contemporary social media radically changes how his statements are interpreted,
• the Necip Fazıl announcement was deliberately designed to break through cultural echo chambers,
• Teoman distinguishes cultural respect from political allegiance,
• social reconciliation has become one of his clearest public concerns,
• he continues resisting rigid ideological identification,
• and his response to Gaza follows the same human-centered instinct visible in earlier political discussions.

There is also an important evolution from 2016.

The Teoman who once said he had little hope that people in Turkey could learn to like one another is now trying, however modestly, to influence that problem.

He is not proposing a movement.

He is not entering party politics.

He is not claiming leadership.

Instead, he uses the resource he actually possesses:

attention.

The old rock star spent years learning how fame distorts identity.

The older Teoman is now asking whether the same fame can occasionally be used deliberately.

Not to make himself larger.

But to make one idea travel further:

Nobody should become a pariah in their own country.

Source Note

Original broadcaster: Habertürk
Program: Özel Röportaj
Date: 28 June 2024
Interviewer: Didem Arvas
Document type: Video interview
Verification: Primary source
Confidence: High

Habertürk’s own website independently preserves the complete Özel Röportaj and explicitly states that Didem Arvas asked the questions and Teoman answered them.

Habertürk also published a separate written feature on the same day titled Teoman: Kendimi onarmak için yazdım. It preserves extensive direct material from the interview concerning Teoman’s changing identity, Sayın Bay Rock Yıldızı, the Necip Fazıl strategy, social reconciliation and Gaza.

The Necip Fazıl episode is further supported by Habertürk’s own August 2023 coverage, which preserves Teoman’s contemporary explanation that his intended work should serve social reconciliation rather than party politics.

Because the full original broadcast, original broadcaster webpage and accompanying written feature are all still accessible, this record is primary-source verified with high confidence.

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