Diasporic Consciousness in Turkish Children's Literature: Focusing on the novel If I were a bird, I'd fly home

For more than a decade, Syria has been embroiled in a civil war that has pitted Syrian rebels against government forces. Syrian refugees who have crossed the border have found shelter in neighboring countries, including Türkiye. As the country hosting the largest number of Syrian refugees in the world, 21st-century Turkish literature has seen the emergence of a significant body of diasporic literature that explores the lives and stories of Syrian refugees. In this study, we wanted to examine various refugee issues, focusing on the novel If I were a bird, I'd fly home, which vividly depicts the pain and inner conflicts that Veşir, a refugee boy who fled from Syria to Türkiye, experiences in diaspora. The novel describes the search for a new identity as a refugee, the lack of basic human needs such as food, discriminatory attitudes towards refugees and economic poverty. In particular, the novel explores the difficult lives of refugees who have been forced to flee their homeland due to civil war and are now in an unfamiliar environment through the unadorned eyes of a child.