Review of One Thousand and One Kisses: The Most Joyous and Flirtatious Stories (2025) Toronto: Translation Attached, translated by Burcu Karahan

by Jenny White, Professor Emerita, Stockholm University

The daring and delightful erotically charged short stories in this book, elegantly translated from Ottoman Turkish by Burcu Karahan, were published between 1923 and 1924 as installments in a widely read magazine. They are witty and sensual, with interesting, socially incisive plot twists that are charming and occasionally tragic. Mostly, the stories are playful, sometimes funny, occasions where “men and women meet in mischief”.  Written between the end of empire and the new Republic, they embrace female pleasure and autonomy in a brief flowering before Republican norms closed the door to the bedroom.

In her introduction, Karahan explains the social and literary context for Ottoman erotica. Pre-nineteenth-century erotica existed in the form of folk tales, poetry, shadow theater, and treatises on sex that referred to extramarital sex and same-sex relations, sometimes using explicit language. The nineteenth century brought Westernizing modernization along with a Victorian moral code that saw heterosexual sex within marriage as the only acceptable norm. It also introduced the novel as a literary form in which female desire was stereotyped as either virtuous or loose. In both periods, it is assumed that erotica was produced primarily for male consumption. Depictions of women’s sexuality were designed to fit male fantasy.

With the deposition of Sultan Abdulhamid in 1908 and the lifting of his severe regime of censorship, a space for a new transgressive form of literature emerged, primarily heterosexual. In One Thousand and One Kisses, women of all ages actively seek pleasure and follow their desires. They are confident, self-possessed actors in society, marriage, and the bedroom, by turns witty, risqué, bawdy, or even vulgar, without shame or moral reckoning. They see themselves as leading modern, urban, European-style lives; sometimes the story is a spoof on that modernism. Desire is a part of life, lust is acknowledged, men’s abilities to satisfy are judged, innocence is betrayed. Both men and women can be clueless and naive about the act of love.

The stories are by unnamed authors, probably male, but without the Ottoman and later Republican tendency to idealize or criticize female characters. While it is impossible to know who the readers were, Karahan provides some evidence that erotica during this short period was also read by women. With the 1928 change from Ottoman to the Latin alphabet, these stories became unreadable for future generations and, perhaps not surprisingly, were not translated into modern Turkish until recently.

With the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the Republican nationalist narrative cast the regime as the liberator of women, and women as the moral foundation of modern Turkish society. This came with a severe responsibility. Women were expected to devote their energies to their families and to the state’s modernization project. There was no room for personal indulgence. The sexual honor of the family was made synonymous with honor of the nation. (White 2013: 149-162) The state jealously guarded the morality of its female citizens in sometimes intrusive ways, such as state-mandated virginity tests. (Zengin) Legally and socially, women were divided into “family girls”, focused on the social and biological reproduction of the nation, and prostitutes, who had no social context, their only role being to service (male) individual pleasure. There wasn’t much room for sexual fantasy, play, humor or female desire that wasn’t somehow punished.

This changed in the 1980s as Turkey’s feminist movement moved away from state feminism to embrace individual rights, agency and women’s sexual pleasure. In 1987, Duygu Asena’s novel, Kadının Adı Yok (The Woman Has No Name), caused an explosion of excited interest and condemnation for publicly espousing female pleasure, desire, and freedom to act. The character chooses to remain unmarried while being sexually active and pursuing a career. I remember long lines at bookstores of women waiting to buy multiple copies to give to their male and female friends. As a result of women’s activism, the Penal Code was changed in 2005 to reflect women’s self-ownership of their bodies regardless of social context, at least in theory, less so in judicial practice. For women in every era, social freedom, legal rights and an atmosphere of liberty were more rhetorical than practical.

This brings me to an observation about the social class status of the characters in these stories. Despite the variety of women and their situations, they, like the men, are mostly elites. At the time, it wasn’t unusual for wealthy older men to wed younger women in arranged marriages and to have mistresses. Married women retained their personal wealth if the marriage was dissolved or they were widowed. In other words, elite men and women both had motive and opportunity to act on their desires. Elite women, even in Ottoman times, had more opportunity to embrace pleasure and autonomy on their own terms. Lady Wortley Montagu, in her letter from Adrianople in 1717, describes Ottoman women of rank, disguised under their veils, arranging appointments with their lovers and concludes, “I look upon the Turkish women as the only free people in the empire.” (Rhys 1934:115-116) Aside from Lady Montagu’s description, though, literature from and about that time tends to depict women as concubines, adulteresses, or some other figment of the male imagination. One Thousand and One Kisses is the rare book that allows us to experience the rich sensual life of women beneath that veil.

Asena, Duygu (1987). Kadının Adı Yok. Istanbul: Nadir Kitap.

Rhys, Ernest, ed. (1934). Letters from Mary Wortley Montagu 1709-1762, Everyman’s Library. London: Dent and Sons, pp. 113-117.

White, Jenny (2013). Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Zengin, Aslı (2025). “Feminist Approaches to Sexual Morality in Turkey”, In Pınar Dinç & Olga Selin Hünler (eds.), The Republic of Turkey and its Unresolved Issues: 100 Years and Beyond. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 185-196.