Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Translingual Poetics in Mutterzunge

With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the increasing prominence of transnational economic, cultural, and population flows, the idea of a homogeneous national identity looks more like fantasy than reality. Diasporic communities reconfigure the nation and national identities through their transnational interventions, and are often in a productive tension with both their homelands and hostlands. In this article, I develop an understanding of this tension as it appears in the literature of the Turkish diaspora in Germany. I focus on a 1990 collection of stories entitled Mutterzunge, written by the Turkish-German author Emine Sevgi Özdamar. First, I will situate Özdamar’s work in the context of the Turkish immigration to and settlement in Germany and briefly discuss the critical reception of her work. Having established the social framework of the Turkish diaspora in Germany, I will use the first three stories in Özdamar’s collection to illustrate how such a transnational literary text exhibits a critical double consciousness. The fourth story from the collection, “Karriere einer Putzfrau: Erinnerungen an Deutschland,” will be left out as it is not specifically about translinguality. My goal will be to demonstrate that, on the one hand, Özdamar questions aggressive and insular identitarianisms that essentialize cultural difference to promote nationalist agendas; on the other hand, she cautions us against a universalizing tendency, which flattens out all claims of difference under the pretence of a free-floating hybridity. As other scholars of diaspora have noted, “To affirm that diasporas are the exemplary communities of the transnational moment is not to write the premature obituary of the nation-state” (Tölölyan, “The Nation-State” 5). Nations – both the land of ancestry as well as the land of residence – and diasporas are social formations that reciprocally inform and maintain one another. Özdamar elaborates on the tensions that diasporic subjects embody, by representing “identity as culturally hybrid and unstable, but at the same time historically located, embodied, and gendered” (Haines and Littler 138).

I argue that Özdamar’s work expresses both the pain of dislocation that Turkish immigrants suffer and the inevitable interlacing of the Turkish and German cultures. This can be seen from the ways her characters participate simultaneously in multiple national and linguistic identities while escaping a sense of belonging to a singular, homogeneous national culture. This multiple participation without singular belonging is characteristic of a diasporic subjectivity. Özdamar’s writing both reveals an attachment to the narratives of nationhood and accentuates the ever-shifting nature of these narratives. She articulates emerging border spaces of culture and language in which insular tropes of nationalism are displaced and transformed. I contend that Özdamar thinks of the Turkish diaspora in Germany as a transnational social community and a cultural subjectivity that privileges neither continuity nor rupture, for it displays both tendencies at once. Özdamar’s characters embody the tension between what is lost and gained, forgotten and remembered during migrations across diverse geopolitical contexts. They reimagine both German and Turkish national identities by retaining nationhood as a set of malleable sociocultural characteristics that can and should be redefined as the communities that make up these nations shift and change. At no point does Özdamar transform diaspora into a deterritorialized or free-floating subjectivity; instead, she grounds the tension between nations and diasporas, invoking various expressions of the interaction between the Turkish and German communities, which necessarily overlap and involve one another.

The roots of the contact between Germany and Turkey can be traced back to the first decades of the Turkish Republic when several educational reforms were implemented with the aim of introducing a secular education system. The enactment of these reforms in Turkey “coincided with the National Socialists’ rise to power in Germany and with the exclusion of German-Jewish academics from German universities” (Konuk 34). During this period, a considerable number of German-Jewish academics in exile were invited to Turkey and appointed to Turkish universities as their influx was seen as an opportunity that could greatly contribute to the modernization of the university education system. The relationship between Turkey and Germany, marked by this intellectual and cultural exchange...