Text 4: The Fifth Day of a Hunger Strike (2021)

“Provoked the public against the regime”, “encouraging the public to advocate the superiority of a class over another class”, “Provoking naval soldiers to rebellion”, and many other accused of made Nazim Hikmet, a Turkish poet who was sentenced a number of times by Turkish courts because of his poetry, in and out of jail for much of his life. The sum of the sentences he had been charged and judged, roughly saying, was over 50 years in prison.  

Poems, the collected writings, were partly written while he was in jails between 1938-1950. The poems he wrote were smuggled out of prisons and passing from hand to hand throughout Turkey and was published in 1954. The Fifth Day of a Hunger Strike is also one of writings written in the last year of his imprisonment, also, the year Nazim was being on a 17-day hunger strike to obtain his rights for his acquittal.  

What I wrote above is a brief introduction I would like to let you know about Nazim Hikmet. As I felt special with his charming torment throughout his poems and, in my point of view, his writings straightforwardly reflect the historical reality of the world which, at the moment, relates to my surrounded present-day situations. There are 25 short poems in the book Poems. Optimism and Perhaps are, also, the other poems I really like. 

There are 9-page website with Nazim Hikmet’s biography and the 46-page book, Poems, that I sincerely encourage you to read.  

Here are the links you can find them:  
http://nazimhikmetran.biz/english/pages/biyografi.html  
https://www.scribd.com/doc/16093710/Poems-by-Nazim-Hikmet-New-York-1954