How well this Independence March suits this nation

These days we are marking the hundredth anniversary of the adoption of our Independence March in the TBMM. Under the conditions of 12 March 1921, when it was read in the Assembly in Ankara that was conducting the War of Independence, no one had the slightest hesitation about the words, the beauty, the poetry of this march. Immediately after its first reading, everyone with one voice asked for it to be read again. Yet in the competition that had been opened earlier, many poems had been read, each claiming to be the independence march, but none of them produced such excitement, such feeling, such acceptance.

The march was, that day, expressing to a great degree everything the people who had come together for that war of independence had lived and felt. I would say it was virtually interpreting their feelings, but in truth it was doing far more than interpreting. The poem was also creating new feelings, opening a new horizon, forming a new atmosphere.

The power of Mehmet Akif Ersoy's poetry was undoubtedly here. Perhaps some people can say a number of back-and-forth things about the poetic nature of his words, starting from the art and philosophy of poetry. They have indeed said them. Yet the greatest witnesses to Mehmet Akif's poethood are the very people who were affected by this poem, people who were able to establish a direct link between this poem and the life they lived. This link is so authentic, so strong, so deep.

Let us return to the part concerning poetry separately later, but let us say that the poet who wrote an Independence March performed the task of his poem abundantly even as a poem. But the Independence March is of course not merely a poem. Nor is it an artistic performance of those bohemian aesthetes who, as expressed in the Noble Qur'an, "wander aimlessly in every valley and say what they do not do," who construct sentences adorned with inspirations they think they have caught, and who pour events, situations or feelings that have no counterpart in their lives into soulless words.

With its 10 stanzas, the Independence March is like a magnificent manifesto of morale, motivation, and political-philosophical horizons opening onto the future, for a nation that has made these lands a homeland for a thousand years, that has for 900 years revived this homeland as an environment of peace, tranquility and justice in which seventy-two nations live together, but which now has to wage a life-and-death struggle against the assaults of the seven great powers.

In an environment where all the lights of hope for salvation were almost on the verge of going out, when Istanbul, İzmir, Sakarya and Afyon were under occupation and the great powers were in full alliance trying to destroy this nation, it begins with the word "Do not fear." Yet there were many reasons for everyone to fear. The advance of the Greek forces on the Bursa and Uşak fronts was continuing in those days. Istanbul was under British occupation and there was no reason or horizon suggesting that they would leave, or could leave, any time soon. Would one expect the poet, affected by what he was living through, to express the feelings the situation caused? Akif, out of such a dark environment, draws the picture of a magnificent bright future in the most beautiful way possible. This picture grows more beautiful with each passing day as it ages.

Perhaps the poem, which at first made its greatest impact with that striking quality, was read shortly afterwards under another, entirely opposite, pessimistic atmosphere. A serious incongruity would arise between the horizon the Independence March drew, the philosophy it displayed, and what was later inflicted on Türkiye. Until the "last hearth" in the country, the hearths that held all the values, claims and philosophy of the Independence March were extinguished. The letters in which the Independence March was written were banned, and war was waged against the characteristics and values of the country it described by the very people who adopted this march. An environment arose in which people like Akif, who had in effect opened a shelter, a counter-front with words against enemy attacks, were excluded, placed under surveillance, purged. It was under these circumstances that Akif was compelled to go to Egypt, which lay within the borders of the very "this country" he had described. Akif, who until then had existed in effect by warbling like a nightingale, who had found the dwelling of his existence in poetry, lived death long before dying, through the deep silence he assumed until the last days of his life.

The subject of the Independence March is independence. The description and depiction of the fact that the most important condition for achieving it is the shackles a person puts on his own feet, and that the power a person needs to break these shackles lies in his faith, are perfectly done in the lines of the March.

But Akif also became an emigrant from that realm he had so carefully worked in the lines of the March.

The incongruity between his stance and the stances of those with a self-colonized mentality against him was in fact displayed on every occasion. For people of this stance, who could not resist the power of his poetry into which he put his own personality and stance, the Independence March was always a march that did not sit well within, performed reluctantly. That is why, in the days of 28 February, those who waged war against this nation's values, beliefs and independence also opened a front against the Independence March.

They tried to replace the Independence March with the Tenth Year March. Thereby they also showed that their horizons had remained precisely in the world and the history of that march. Yet on the day the Independence March was first read, it was read standing by the representatives of this nation, it was embraced without any coercion, and from that day to this it is read standing by this nation. Just as in the folk song, "the faith suits the believer, the haze suits the mountains so beautifully," this Independence March has suited this nation so beautifully.