The Pronoun for a Lost Child
Djinns by Fatma Aydemir, translated from German by Jon Cho-Polizzi. University of Wisconsin Press, 298 pages. 2024.
The family novel is that most modular of genres. While, like crime or realism, there are certain thematic expectations—variations on the theme of intergenerational conflict—it can expand or warp to accommodate all sorts of storytelling. In the German tradition, this might mean nearly 1700 pages of a mother’s and grandfather’s memories embedded in the daily news, as in Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries; or a four-generation saga in which tightly interlocked episodes present history as a labyrinth, as in Eugen Ruge’s In Times of Fading Light. In the hands of bestselling German-Turkish novelist Fatma Aydemir, the family novel is a framework for a heartbreaking, formally experimental examination of identity in which a six-part structure mirrors the divisions diaspora makes between generations.
Family novels traditionally center the younger generation’s experiences; in Djinns, it’s the pater- and materfamilias who have the first and last word. The novel—first published in German in 2022—zeroes in on the older members of the Yılmaz family, suspended between their adoptive home in Germany and Istanbul, even when it’s the children talking. The book covers three decades beginning around 1970, but most of the action actually occurs in a matter of days, during which the Yılmazs dash across the borders of their two homelands to attend a funeral. The book’s six chapters reflect six distinct points of view, from Sevda, the eldest of four children and a profoundly resentful mother of two, to her youngest sibling Ümit, just old enough to be experiencing the first bewildering stirrings of sexuality.
Personal aspirations clash with family expectations in each episode. Sevda, once forced into marriage against her will, has now risen from the ashes of her life as an avenging angel. She is also marked by an early trauma of abandonment: she was left behind with her grandparents in Turkey when her parents emigrated to Germany with her younger siblings. Indeed, the family’s immigration history shapes each of its members, even if by its absence: the younger children, in fact, have forgotten life in Turkey and are nonetheless regarded as outsiders and foreigners, even in the case of Ümit, born on German soil. But fear of rejection by their schoolmates is nothing to that of the German police—including episodes showing precisely why and how that fear is justified, such as when Hakan, caught spraying graffiti as a child, is disproportionately punished, and when, as an adult, he’s pulled off the road by a Bavarian highway patrol who sadistically harasses him—in each case causing harms that trickle down to other family members. Nor is the racism and xenophobia Aydemir describes confined to fantasy; the elections in the East German state of Thuringia last month saw the anti-immigration right-wing party Alternative for Germany win with 32 percent of the vote, while they came in second in Saxony with 30.
In the end, the discrimination Aydemir’s six characters suffer in Germany escalates from snide remarks to a devastating arson attack. But we quickly discover that the Yılmaz family were born into non-belonging, as both parents were members of the Kurdish minority dwelling in mountainous rural Turkey, for decades the focus of Turkish government efforts to “turkicize” the region through a combination of forced assimilation and relocation. Descendants of the Kurds who survived the 1937-38 razing of entire villages by Turkish government forces in response to the Dersim uprising were treated to a new round of violent repression in 1970, when the government renewed its efforts to stamp out separatist aspirations. Before leaving for Germany to find work, patriarch Hüseyin moves his young family from their mountain village to a city, where he forbids his wife, Emine, to speak Kurdish to their children. As a result, the kids grow up knowing little of this erased family history but retain a vague sense that something has disappeared. As one daughter, Perihan, or Peri for short, a university student who tends bar at night, muses:
Hüseyin kept himself so overworked that he never had time to stop and ask why he no longer spoke Kurdish. Why he’d forbidden Emine from speaking Kurdish. Forbidden them both from teaching Kurdish to their children. Why had he wanted things this way?
Peri is flustered to find herself picked up (if that’s what it is) by a young man who asks her if she understands Kurdish. She comes to believe he is somehow affiliated with a group of Kurdish freedom fighters, which she finds vaguely terrifying, though the nature of his relationship to the Kurdish liberation movement is left unexplained. Avdemir refuses the usual articles of omniscience; the past, both ours and other peoples’, is something that must be pieced together and remains incomplete. Much of what we learn about the Yilmaz clan is colored, not through their own narratives, but from the perspectives of others. Emine, in one particularly moving example, locates the source of her husband’s dread of the family’s Kurdish roots in his experience as a soldier in the Turkish army, when he witnessed and possibly participated in violence against Kurds in villages much like theirs. Hüseyin’s abiding shame means we only know his mind in fragments, which it falls to Emine’s section to mend with the missing content. In this way, each section compliments the one before, unpacking lineage and family secrets like Matryoshka dolls.
Though its six perspectives are presented sequentially over the course of its six chapters, narrative arcs span the entire novel, passing through multiple points of view for a sort of Rashomon effect. And since the sections opening and closing the novel are narrated in second-person, who is speaking? The book’s title may be a clue: djinns are spirits that can intervene in human lives. The novel’s most shattering plot thread concerns a lost child, the dark secret at the heart of the novel. Unknown to the family’s children, a source of shame and grief to both parents, this arc is launched so quietly as to be almost invisible in the first chapter (Hüseyin’s), with the observation that “the firstborn child is always an experiment.” Later, Emine will refer to this child using only the genderless Turkish third-person pronoun o, previously introduced to us when Peri, drunk on third-wave feminism, argues with her mother about the tyranny of imposed gender roles. Only during the book’s cataclysmic conclusion do we learn why Emine is unwilling to speak of this secrecy-shrouded child by name.
The many Turkish words woven into the narrative offer a particular challenge for translation—like the aforementioned pronoun o, which exists in several different declensions (onu/ona/onun) depending on the grammatical context of the German (or now English) sentence. The book’s translator, Jon Cho-Polizzi, the 2024 recipient of the prestigious Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, includes a pronunciation guide and crash course for some of these linguistic permutations in his introduction. Throughout the book, he follows Aydemir in creating completely distinct narrative voices for each Yılmaz. Young Peri comes across convincingly rebellious: “Who the hell was still waiting to read another master’s thesis on Nietzsche in 1999? No-damn-body.” Adolescent Ümit’s thoughts swirl endlessly: “Those days when Hakan sat there bleary-eyed and told you not to call the cops no matter what happened. Those days when your mother forbade you to leave the house because she thought the air was poisoned.” And mother Emine is stoically deliberate: “You drink the glass, sip by sip, taking your time. You can feel the water slowly flowing through your body, how it dissolves the bitter knots inside your chest. How it cleanses you, cools you. How it softens you.” Cho-Polizzi rises splendidly to the challenge of making each voice distinct and indelible.
Cho-Polizzi is similarly conscious of the cultural context being delineated; Turks have long been by far the largest immigrant population in Germany. He writes in his introduction, “By the end of 2022, there were nearly 1.5 million Turkish nationals living in Germany, a country of just over 84 million residents . . . and this number does not include the even larger number of German citizens of Turkish heritage (many estimates place this number closer to 3 million).” An agreement between the West German and Turkish governments in 1961 brought nearly nine hundred thousand Turkish workers to Germany through 1973. By that point, with the size of their post-World War II workforce inadequate to meet the labor demands of the West’s postwar industrial boom, Germany had already signed similar agreements with Italy, Spain, and Greece, and went on to sign others with Portugal, Morocco, Tunisia, and Yugoslavia. Of the Turkish workers who arrived during this period, around half a million returned home by 1973; the rest settled permanently in Germany, frequently, as with the Yılmaz family, joined by spouses and children, thus creating a Turkish diaspora community. To this day, Berlin has the largest Turkish population of any city outside Turkey.
Turkish culture and life are an integral part of Germany’s urban gestalt, above all in Berlin, and Turkish has joined the hybrid and plural identities common to every industrial nation with a history of immigration. Unsurprisingly, a well-established tradition of writing by Turkish immigrants and their descendants has emerged. The great Emine Sevgi Özdamar was the first German-language author of Turkish origin to rise to international recognition in the 1990s, followed by Zafer Şenocak, Feridun Zaimoğlu, Yadé Kara, and the younger generation of writers to whom Fatma Aydemir belongs, along with Selim Özdoğan and Deniz Utlu. Some of these writers are represented in the anthology Aydemir coedited with fellow author Hengameh Yaghoobifarah in 2019: Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum (Your Homeland Is Our Nightmare), a collection of essays by fourteen German-language writers of various backgrounds on the subject of marginalization in Germany. An English translation of this volume by several hands, coordinated by Cho-Polizzi, was published in 2021 as a special issue of the online journal TRANSIT, published by the Department of German at the University of California, Berkeley, and reprinted in 2022 by the Berlin-based publishing house Literarische Diverse Verlag.
Djinns is Fatma Aydemir’s second novel. Her 2017 debut, Ellbogen (Elbow)—not yet translated into English, though it was adapted as a film that premiered at the Berlinale earlier this year—focuses on the lives of the younger generation of immigrants. Protagonist Hazal, a Turkish-German teenager, is vaguely aware her mother’s parents spoke Kurdish but doesn’t understand what that has to do with her. The novel illuminates the many indignities (both micro- and macroaggressions) inflicted on young people “with migration background” in Germany. Better to be a criminal than to “be a victim” (the word is used throughout the book as a synonym for “loser”). Seven-year-old Hazal shoplifted for the fleeting sense of power it gave her; on the eve of her eighteenth birthday, she’s accused of shoplifting again after walking out of a drugstore with a mascara in her hand (accidentally, she insists). Hazal is humiliated by the store’s security guard, and the unfair treatment sets the mood for a semi-accidental act of violence that prompts her flight to Istanbul just in time for an attempted coup beyond her cultural understanding.
A powerful, accomplished novel, Ellbogen is a page-turner that asks us to empathize with a character who, pushed aside one time too many, finally shoves back. Djinns is painted with a finer brush. There is less reliance on plot and an emphasis on what is left unsaid, what is all but unsayable. One is the fine work of an outstanding first-time novelist, the other the work of a writer who has hit her artistic stride. Djinns has meanwhile been adapted for the stage by three different theaters in Germany (the Nationaltheater in Mannheim, the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin, and the Schauspielhaus in Düsseldorf), and according to Cho-Polizzi’s introduction, will soon be a film as well. It has been translated into more than a dozen languages and counting.
A brilliant and best-selling German author whose social media followers number in the tens of thousands, Aydemir would appear to be a strong candidate for mainstream publication in English; instead, her book has appeared via a university press not (yet) known for its fiction list. More power to them. I would urge readers not to underestimate the importance and well-established international influence of Aydemir’s voice. She is chronicling an important transitional moment in Germany’s self-definition with intelligence and nuance. Her culturally hyphenated characters are not victims or even morally superior human beings—the typical Aydemir figure has made a complex tradeoff for the sake of survival and is prepared, if need be, to leave nearly everything behind. When Sevda’s disappointing husband loses his job and falls prey to addiction, she kicks him out of the house with calm determination and starts running a pizzeria, tricking her customers into thinking she’s Italian. She has children, after all; and these children, at least, will not be lost.