The Perception of the Physical World by a Visually Impaired Folk Poet: The Case of Fehmi Gür

Abstract

Visually impaired people have an important place in different fields of science and art. In Turkish culture, there are many scientists and artists who enlighten the society with their creativity and works despite being visually impaired. In Turkish Folk Literature, elements related to nature have generally been preferred to describe the beloved with abstract expressions. While talking about the beloved in their works, bards have used elements of nature and then directly included nature as the subject of their poems. It is noteworthy that visually impaired bards produce works related to nature despite losing their ability to see at a certain stage of their lives or being visually impaired from birth. In this study, the poems of visually impaired bard Fehmi Gür have been examined in terms of vocabulary, and it has been tried to determine how he perceives nature and how he describes it despite not being able to see it. The study was conducted using a qualitative research method and a descriptive scanning approach. The research was limited to the poems in the book titled Arapgirli Folk Poet Fehmi Gür prepared by Ramazan Çiftlikçi. Fehmi Gür lived in the Arapgir district of Malatya, wrote his poems in syllabic meter and used his name as a pen name. He intensively dealt with the flaws, mistakes and social corruptions in society in his poems. The fact that intuition and feeling replace the ability to see in the works of Fehmi Gür, who is visually impaired, and his ability to describe nature with emotional intensity are remarkable. This situation reveals that not being able to see can turn from an obstacle into a source of motivation for artistic production. It has been determined that Fehmi Gür reflects the physical world in his works by feeding on the perception of nature or tradition he establishes in his inner world.