Abstract
Post-war transnational labour migration constitutes an important point of intersection between Turkish and (western) European histories of labour, capital and culture. Amongst the many authors of Turkish heritage who have addressed the theme is Emine Sevgi Özdamar, one of the most significant minority voices in Europe. Her Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (The Bridge of the Golden Horn, 1998) deals with migration, identity and political resistance during the student movements of 1966–75. As this essay contends, the spaces of transience in the novel (doorways, bridges, railways stations) disarticulate the purported unity of languages and territories (Turkey, Europe, East, West), while also challenging the vagueness of two of the key terms in globalisation studies, ‘translation’ and ‘flow’.
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Notes
- 1.
Rita Chin, The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 6.
- 2.
Ayhan Kaya and Ayşegül Kayaoğlu, ‘Is National Citizenship Withering Away?: Social Affiliations and Labor Market Integration of Turkish-Origin Immigrants in Germany and France’, German Studies Review, Vol. 35, No. 1 (2012), p. 116.
- 3.
Anon, ‘Population, Key Figures’, Statistisches Bundesamt, https://www.destatis.de/EN/FactsFigures/SocietyState/Population/Migration/Tables_/lrbev07.html?cms_gtp=150354_list%253D2&https=1 (accessed 21 April 2015).
- 4.
Anon, ‘Évolution de la part des populations étrangères et immigrées jusqu’en 2012’, Insee (Institut national de statistique et des études économiques), http://www.insee.fr/fr/themes/tableau.asp?reg_id=0&ref_id=NATTEF02131 (accessed 21 July 2015).
- 5.
See Liesbeth Minnaard, ‘Between Exoticism and Silence: A Comparison of First Generation Migrant Writing in Germany and the Netherlands’, Arcadia: International Journal for Literary Studies, Vol. 46, No. 1 (2011), pp. 199–208; Graeme Dunphy, ‘Migrant, Emigrant, Immigrant: Recent Developments in Turkish-Dutch Literature’, Neophilologus, Vol. 85, No. 1 (2001), pp. 1–23; and Sarah de Mul, ‘“The Netherlands Is Doing Well. Allochtoon Writing Talent Is Blossoming There”: Defining Flemish Literature, Desiring “Allochtoon” Writing’, in Elleke Boehmer and de Mul, eds, The Postcolonial Low Countries: Literature, Colonialism, and Multiculturalism (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012), pp. 123–46.
- 6.
See Dal’s Wenn Ali die Glocken läuten hört (When Ali Hears the Bells Toll, 1979), Ören’s Eine verspätete Abrechnung (A Belated Settling of Accounts, 1988) and Şenocak’s Gefährliche Verwandschaft (Perilous Kinship, 1998).
- 7.
See Leslie A. Adelson, ‘Coordinates of Orientation: An Introduction’, in Zafer Şenocak, Atlas of a Tropical Germany: Essays on Politics and Culture, 1990–1998, trans. and edited by Leslie A. Adelson (1992; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), pp. xxii-xxvi.
- 8.
The only exception to Özdamar’s preference for German-language publication is a collection in Turkish consisting of letters exchanged with the Turkish poet Ece Ayhan and the diary Özdamar kept while accompanying him during his medical treatment in Switzerland: see Ayhan and Özdamar, ‘Kendi Kendinin Terzisi Bir Kambur’: Ece Ayhan’lı Anılar, 1974 Zürih Günlüğü, Ece Ayhan’ın Mektupları (2007).
- 9.
The first novel of the trilogy is Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei, hat zwei Türen, aus einer kam ich rein, aus der anderen ging ich raus (Life is a Caravanserai, Has Two Doors, I Came in One, I Went out the Other, 1992). Told from the perspective of a young unnamed Turkish woman, it describes her life from childhood to early adulthood and culminates in her leaving Turkey for Germany. The Bridge of the Golden Horn and Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde (Strange Stars Stare to Earth, 2003) are also told from a first-person perspective by a narrator that bears striking similarities with Özdamar and who may or may not be the same woman as in Life is a Caravanserai. The final novel, Strange Stars Stare to Earth tells the story of a young woman named Sevgi who comes to East Berlin in 1976 to work at the People’s Theatre under the director Benno Besson, an estranged protegé of the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht.
- 10.
Vedat Demircioğlu was a student at Istanbul Technical University who, in July 1968, fell out of the window of his university dormitory when police cracked down on anti-American student protests at the university. He soon died of the injuries sustained in the fall. Benno Ohnesorg was a student in West Berlin who died of a police gunshot wound during a crackdown on student protests against the visit of the Shah of Iran in June 1967. Both deaths set off new waves of protests and contributed to the radicalisation of the student movements in Turkey and Germany respectively.
- 11.
For an analysis of one or other of these issues, see Karin Lornsen, ‘The City as Stage of Transgression: Performance, Picaresque Reminiscences, and Linguistic Incongruity in Emine S. Özdamar’s The Bridge of the Golden Horn’, Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik, Vol. 70, No. 1 (2009), pp. 201–17; Anil Kaputanoglu, Hinfahren und Zurückdenken: Zur Konstruktion kultureller Zwischenräume in der türkisch-deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur (2010); Beverly M. Weber, ‘Work, Sex, and Socialism: Reading beyond Cultural Hybridity in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Die Brücke Vom Goldenen Horn’, German Life & Letters, Vol. 63, No. 1 (2010), pp. 37–53; Susanne Rinner, The German Student Movement and the Literary Imagination: Transnational Memories of Protest and Dissent (2013); Ernest Schonfield, ‘1968 and Transnational History in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Die Brücke Vom Goldenen Horn’, German Life & Letters, Vol. 68, No. 1 (2015), pp. 66–87; and Monika Shafi, ‘Talkin’ ’Bout My Generation: Memories of 1968 in Recent German Novels’, German Life & Letters, Vol. 59, No. 2 (2006), 201–37.
- 12.
See Leslie A. Adelson, The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 10, 88–90; Claus Leggewie, ‘Hybridkulturen’, Merkur, Vol. 54 (2000), p. 882; and Umut Erel, ‘Grenzüberschreitungen und kulturelle Mischformen als antirassistischer Widerstand?’, in Cathy Gelbin, Kader Konuk and Peggy Piesche, eds, AufBrüche: Kulturelle Produktionen von Migrantinnen, schwarzen und jüdischen Frauen in Deutschland (Königstein: U. Helmer, 1999), pp. 172–94.
- 13.
Özdamar, The Bridge of the Golden Horn, trans. by Martin Chalmers (1998; London: Serpent’s Tail, 2007), p. 53.
- 14.
Ibid., p. 78.
- 15.
Ibid., p. 193.
- 16.
Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. by John Howe (1992; New York: Verso, 1995), p. 94.
- 17.
Ibid., pp. 94, 103.
- 18.
Ette, ‘Urbanity and Literature—Cities as Transareal Spaces of Movement in Assia Djebar, Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Cécile Wajsbrot’, European Review, Vol. 19, No. 3 (2011), p. 367.
- 19.
Ibid., p. 375.
- 20.
Theilen, ‘Von der nationalen zur globalen Literatur: Eine Lese-Bewegung durch die Romane Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn von Emine Sevgi Özdamar und Café Nostalgia von Zoé Valdés’, Arcadia, Vol. 40, No. 2 (2005), p. 321.
- 21.
Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), pp. 143–4. One example of a literal translation can be found in the scene when the narrator’s father asks her, ‘“My child, why are you sitting there as if all your ships have sunk?”’, which is an approximate literal translation of the Turkish expression, ‘Karadeniz’de gemilerin mi battı?’ (Have your ships sunk in the Black Sea?), typically used to ask people if they are upset about something (Özdamar, Bridge, p. 134).
- 22.
Özdamar, Bridge, p. 7.
- 23.
Ibid., p. 9.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 3.
- 25.
Ibid., p. 17.
- 26.
Anon, ‘Proper Names and Descriptions’, in Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. 487.
- 27.
Özdamar, Bridge, p. 29.
- 28.
Ibid., p. 17.
- 29.
Ibid., p. 17.
- 30.
Ibid., p. 17.
- 31.
Ibid., pp. 171, 142.
- 32.
Boa, ‘Özdamar’s Autobiographical Fictions: Trans-National Identity and Literary Form’, German Life & Letters, Vol. 59, No. 4 (2006), p. 534.
- 33.
See Theilen, ‘Von der nationalen zur globalen Literatur’, pp. 324–5; and Azade Seyhan, ‘From Istanbul to Berlin’, German Politics & Society, Vol. 23, No. 1 (2005), pp. 161–2.
- 34.
Özdamar, Bridge, pp. 176–7.
- 35.
See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 36–7; Doris Bachmann-Medick, ‘Introduction: The Translational Turn’, Translation Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2008), pp. 2–3; and João Ferreira Duarte, ‘The Trials of Translation: From Global Cultural Flow to Domestic Relocation’, Journal of Romance Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2011), pp. 51–6.
- 36.
Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 33.
- 37.
Pratt, ‘Reflections on Modernity and Globality’, in Helena Carvalhão Buescu and João Ferreira Duarte, eds, Representações do real na modernidade (Lisbon: Edições Colibri, 2003), p. 70.
- 38.
Ibid., pp. 71, 73.
- 39.
Duarte, ‘Trials of Translation’, p. 52.
- 40.
Adelson, ‘Against Between: A Manifesto’, New Perspectives on Turkey, Vol. 29 (2003), p. 21.
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Arslan, G. (2016). Undivided Waters: Spatial and Translational Paradoxes in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s The Bridge of the Golden Horn . In: Hammond, A. (eds) The Novel and Europe. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_16
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