The Predicament of In-betweenness in Denis Devlin’s “Memoirs of a Turcoman Diplomat

Denis Devlin (1908-1959) is regarded as one of the most important representatives of Irish modernist poetry. After joining the Department of External Affairs in 1935, he spent most of his life undertaking diplomatic missions for his country in Washington, New York, Rome and London, and in 1951, he served as an accredited ambassador in Istanbul, Turkey. Devlin, as a poet-diplomat, included the codes of the countries he worked in his poems. Among them, “Memoirs of a Turcoman Diplomat” has a special place. Here, a retired diplomat, watching the city from the terrace of a hotel in Istanbul, is depicted to contemplate the profound differences between the Ottoman State he served in the past and Turkey which turned its face to the West after the proclamation of the republic. On the one hand, he is the man of a civilisation against which Europe historically positioned itself, and on the other, the citizen of the republic which has set its target to reach the level of contemporary civilisation and implemented a series of reforms for that cause. He is stuck in between the world of the old, which was Islamic, multi-ethnic, and mighty and the world of the present, which is secular, monolithic, and shaped by the new ideology. The poem conspicuously, to a large extent, focuses on the tension caused by this stuckness and emphasises the state of in-betweenness of the poetic persona. The aim of this study is to explore how the diplomat in the poem, as an intellectual of his society and a representative of the old regime, meets the tension stemmed from the sharp conversion of his country, and to examine the dilemmas he has experienced due to his crisis of belonging through the concept of “in-betweenness”. It also discusses if there is a possibility of another space which can create a healing alternative for the poetic persona away from all tensions and problems. Furthermore, it questions how this poem reflects the historical, cultural and political similarities between the Republic of Turkey and the Republic of Ireland, and asserts that the Turkish diplomat of the poem is partly the poet-diplomat Denis Devlin himself.