Come See What Love has Done to Me

The Deep Arts of Storytelling in Yunus Emre

Review by ANNOUCHKA BAYLEY

From SUFI Journal Issue 101 | July 2021

“Come see what love has done to me.”

The Special Trailer for Mehmet Bozdag’s 2015 series, Yunus Emre, set in Nallihan, 13th century Turkey, and screened recently on Netflix, overdubs the excerpts it shows with this short line from Emre’s original poem Come See What Love Has Done to Me.

The title acts as a refrain, drawing the viewer towards a glimpse of Yunus’ state as he battles with a powerful, unpredictable lord, a desperate and clever seductress, his fellow dervishes and of course, ultimately himself, as he traverses the path. The involvement with money, sex, power and religious superiority–these are all highlighted in the trailer–are games that ultimately lead to the cul-de-sac of nafs on the journey of the seeker. But over each clip shown, we viewers still hear that refrain: come see what love has done to me, come see what love has done to me, until it finally displaces these in the attainment of Love; the blaming nafs becomes subdued on this gorgeously realised production.

And that’s just the trailer!

The Special Trailer, brought out by the series’ production company mist, ultimately points to what the series does. To my mind, a good story doesn’t just describe a journey, a narrative arc that carves a niche in time and space, or a transformation from one thing to another. A good story does more than that. It does what it tells. Stories aren’t just representations alone. Stories are practices and the recipients of stories go on to unfold them in new ways, telling new tales, creating new practices that become relevant to our contemporary lives. Representational stories – especially the ones that get made into popular Netflix series–usually detail a hero’s journey. After all, these are what sell. We sell heroic arcs in droves. They appear in our news feeds, our adverts and commercials and our own performativities on social media. We have been accustomed to the heroic arc since the Greek and Roman Empires sent these kinds of stories whirling around the globe.

The great Netflix media empire continues these age-old traditions, carefully constructing the adrenal journeys we take as viewers to keep us hooked on the stories we consume. Cliff-hangers and moments of relief along the hero’s journey are carefully scripted into the timing of popular long-form series, almost down to the second. The formulae of screenwriting are nothing less than practiced arts. They are designed not just to capture our imaginations, but to capture the flow of chemicals through our bodies–to keep us watching online: to keep us invested and subscribed. The ‘next episode’ toggle gives us it’s five-second countdown until auto-cuing the following instalment of the journey, counting on us to be so adrenally invested that before we know it, another forty-five minutes has gone, eaten up by the ever-hungry Moloch of the 21st century digital attention economy.

But what the series Yunus Emre does is much more interesting than this. We do get a heroic journey for sure. We watch Yunus outwit the lord of the land, suffer his desire for the forbidden woman, battle his own innate need to judge the actions of his fellows as he drops his former identity of Cadi (local judge), and even endure the hard inner and outer tasks set by his Sheikh. But we also get a lot more than that. We get introduced to a different kind of storytelling: a storytelling that does something to the way we listen and construct ourselves differently inside the story of the world. Running in parallel to the heroic journey, Yunus’ sheikh introduces the decidedly unheroic core of come see what love has done to me; because love dissolves heroisms. Love dissolves the narrative of needing to battle at all. Love unravels engagement with the nafs-e lawwama–the part of the self that is aware of its negative attachments, compulsions and delusions–from the inside out. So, how does the series do this? Each episode includes a talk given by Emre’s Sheikh–here assumed to be in the personage of Tapduk Emre. Tapduk’s simple stories take the form of fables and parables. The fables are utterly mundane, but inside them are the seeds of a vast set of practices that undo the heroic self. Each story Tapduk tells has meaning in the context of the world of the nafs. The unheroic practices implicit in the stories offer a hatch or doorway out of the heroic journey.

Ursula Le Guin discusses the art of storytelling in her beautifully concise essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. For Le Guin, the idea of the hero is problematic, not least because heroes require a battle–usually a battle to the death, and not in the sense of a spiritual battle, but one that involves actual blood. In her inimical, almost comic style, Le Guin talks of how hunter-gatherer stories of old tend to be more about the heroic journey of the hunters and less about the gatherers. After all, in Le Guin’s words:

“It’s hard to tell a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another…No it does not compare, it cannot compare with how I thrust my spear into the titanic hairy flank, while Oob, impaled on one huge sweeping tusk, writhed screaming...” (1988, p.27)

The point Le Guin makes is that as we repeat the hero’s journey “[b]efore you know it, the men and women in the wild-oat patch and their kids and the skills of the makers and the thoughts of the thoughtful and the songs of the singers are all part of it, have all been pressed into service in the tale of the Hero. But it isn’t their story. It’s his.” (27-8). Through this approach to storytelling, it’s easy to see that Yunus Emre’s Tapduk is wresting the innate heroism and struggle perhaps associated with the nafs-e lawwamaaway from Yunus’ consciousness. At every moment, Tapduk–describing himself as merely a builder and spoonmaker–advises through humor, through punishment, through criticism, through little ingenious games, that humble and anti-heroic action is the best practice to undertake to get the heroic forces of the nafs under control. Over some forty-eight episodes we watch Yunus and the other disciples have their self-importance whittled away through Tapduk’s varied and most beautiful everyday practices. Dreams, visions and revelations also emerge, but these are secondary to the real ‘story’–the story of how to become unheroic as a vital part of the path.

At the start of the series, Yunus is framed as hero–a deeply respected judge obsessed with law and justice in the world. But as he travels the path he changes more and more into a recipient of his Sheikh’s teaching. A listener, or as Le Guin might have called it in narrative terms, a carrier bag or vessel made of flesh and bone, inside which the lived, practice-based teachings of Tapduk are stored, changing Emre’s inner and outer world. In a similar way, in one move, we the audience are transported from watching a story about the hero Yunus, to watching a story about Yunus the non-heroic recipient of Sufi teachings. Le Guin describes this kind of a move in her understanding of radical storytelling:

Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative conceived as carrier bag / belly / box / house / medicine bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterised either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process. Finally, it is clear that the Hero does not look well in this bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like a potato. (ibid. p.35)

The series, arguably much like a life working on the nafs, holds both spaces together and soon the heroic struggles of Emre do not ‘look well’ in the second, carrier-bag-like narrative driven by Tapduk. In a delightful paradox, Tapduk disengages Emre from his quasi-mythological, heroic impulses of inscribing justice in an unjust world by using stories. These aren’t heroic stories, but simple accounts–everyday, childlike tales. Tapduk gives Emre–and by extension us, platform streaming the story into our homes–new stories to work with. Stories that turn us from heroes to recipients: never passive, but alive differently within the stories of our own lives.

The role of active recipiency is also foregrounded and shown in three main ways throughout the series.

Firstly: It’s not an intellectual engagement with stories alone that the series shows, but a vitally alive, participatory one. Each story offers Emre (and other cast members) a key to dealing with the problems presented by conflicting desires and repentances, which they live out, becoming more and more messily embroiled with each other in the Sufi community as well as with the troubles of the world. Emre follows Tapduk’s story-based teachings with all his heart, but when it comes to dealing with his nemesis, another dervish in the order called Mulla Kasim, the heroic quarrel rages with events often as violent and disastrous as they are unanticipated, even by the perpetrators themselves. The story of the nafs doesn’t just exist outside in the world but right in the heart of the tekke (sufi house) itself. Each time a complaint is raised, Tapduk reminds the complainant, “Don’t break the Unity”. In finding strategies to break himself (his nafs) rather than the Unity, and by listening as a recipient to Tapduk’s deep wisdom, Emre becomes a container of wisdom rather than a heroic agent of nafs.

Secondly: Tapduk himself is featured listening as the recipient to what he calls ‘the Universe-Book’. By this we see he means small, tiny incidents involving his dervishes or even the natural world in its endless flow. Tapduk listens in a way the others, and by extension we observers of the series, cannot. Tapduk invites us to listen differently, with him, not just to him. To structure ourselves in the quiet so that, in the inner silence that follows, we might hear what the world ‘sounds like’ (how it functions and unfolds) when the nafs quietens down a little. This is a subtle intelligence that requires a new relationship to quiet and silence against the noise and rush of the nafs.

Thirdly: In four key moments across the series, Tapduk changes Emre’s remembrance (zekr, the name of God that Sufis repeat in meditation). Here, the listening Emre is transformed at the deepest level. It’s quite shocking to me that the series’ writers actually write in the remembrances Tapduk gives – after all this is a Netflix series and things such as remembrances tend to be closely guarded secrets by the different Sufi orders that make use of such practices. Nonetheless, as Tapduk is featured literally whispering the new zekrs in Emre’s ear, Emre’s inner landscape starts to change, forming new relationships with nafs in a flow of continual transformation and inner movement. Representing these movements is closely in keeping with the poet Emre’s world:

Now and then like the winds I blow,

Now and then like the roads I go,

Now and then like the floods I flow,

Come, see what love has done to me

(2019, p.84)

The series, to my mind, represents the path in respect to all its heroisms and nonheroisms. The actors are quite frankly second to none given the complexity of subtly depicting deep inner discoveries and changes without becoming ham or falling too far into a ‘miraculous’ depiction. The location shots are breath-taking, transporting us into 13th century Turkey, with stunning palaces and astonishing natural beauty (though occasionally not entirely historically accurate) and the music is a sublime ensemble of oud(stringed instrument), daf (hand drum) and ney (reed flute), written by Zeynep Alasya, Alpey Goltekin and Caner Ozkan. Unfortunately, the English subtitles are extremely poor. The positive aspect of this is that the English-speaking viewer needs to actively engage with them to construct clear meanings from time to time, so falling asleep in front of Yunus Emre is not really an option!

The final point to make, is that very little biographical information is actually known today about the poet Emre’s life. That the writers could extrapolate so much and construct such a richly detailed narrative of the Sufi path through the figure of Emre, is testimony to their art. From the perspective of speculative fictioning and historical drama, it is perhaps possible to say that just because a story is fiction, doesn’t mean it’s not true on a deep, inner level. Perhaps the same can be said of the way the writers of this series create Tapduk’s nonheroic stories; the power of storytelling is not necessarily the historical validity of the subject it represents, but what it unfolds in you as you listen.