Transmission of Ecological Memory: Lebib’s Kahtiyye on Famine in Diyarbakır

Abstract

Due to a severe famine in 1803, Timur Paşa, the governor of Diyarbakır, demanded either food supply or his reappointment to another city by a petition including a poem on the famine of 1757. Timur Paşa’s tendency to keep himself away from the famine was considered a lack of human agency by Ottoman historians. However, as this article argues, local officers were active agents in expressing the impact of famines to the center and preserving the memory of famines. To illustrate, this article employs Diyarbakırlı Lebib’s poem included in the petition and its circulation through the petition as a case study. For conceptualizing Timur Paşa’s petition and Lebib’s poem as an illustration of their agency, this paper uses concepts of memory studies informed by literary theory. Utilizing a theoretical toolkit provided by memory studies, this paper argues that to keep a record of the social and ecological impact of famines and preserve their memory, poets employed and formed narrative structures that framed traumatic environmental experiences. These structures of famine narratives in Divan poetry formed the kahtiyye genre. The formation process of kahtiyye as a genre was not independent, but intertextual, as the case study illustrates.