The warm air, the loud music, the screeching of seagulls, horns, voices and the ezan – for Hüseyin Yılmaz it feels like he has finally come home. He doesn’t even know Istanbul very well. The “magnificent city” that he soon plans to show his four children was once a stopover when he left the village near the Armenian border for southern Germany to earn a living for his family. He’d spent a few days here in the early 1970s, a respite between duties.
Hüseyin worked in Germany for almost thirty years, most of the time at the melting furnace of a metal factory. He worked overtime, worked extra shifts, raised four children. As soon as Ümit, the fifteen-year-old latecomer, finishes school, Hüseyin wants to leave Germany with his wife Emine, “this cold, heartless country” that has only been preoccupied with itself since reunification. Then he would like to move here, to Istanbul, to the newly renovated apartment that he bought with his savings. The family wants to look at the apartment next week, by then everything should be ready.
But suddenly a feeling of uneasiness mixes with the anticipation, his shoulder hurts, his chest tightens. He can still call for the neighbor before he falls to the ground. A week before his sixtieth birthday, Hüseyin died of a heart attack, just before early retirement, for which it was high time.
Not bad if you also hear “jeans” in “Dschinns”.
“Dschinns” is a family novel of extraordinary intensity. Hüseyin’s death prompted the family to arrive in record time. According to the Islamic rite, he must be buried after forty-eight hours at the latest. And so everyone is torn from their everyday lives, have to book flights, take trips, cancel projects. You are in an existential exceptional situation. They suffer, mourn, fall back into old roles. They are emotionally naked from the pain, but also from the pressure of the suddenness of death.
Fatma Aydemir stages this highly condensed moment of sadness as a mixture of chamber play and road novel. And she breathes epic breath into him at the same time. Your German-Turkish family novel, set just before the turn of the millennium, is a marvel of precision and empathy. It is realistically told and sociologically accurate and yet leaves enough room for the good and the bad spirits. The “Jinns” that he bears in the title (with a deliberately wrong plural, it comes from a character’s perspective) are disembodied spirit beings who, in the Koran, act as addressees alongside humans. They also appear frequently in the stories from the “One Thousand and One Nights”. Since they have long been overwritten in pop culture, it doesn’t hurt if you hear “jeans”.
The novel is told from six perspectives, the perspectives of the family members. In addition to the parents, there are the three adult children, Sevda, Hakan, Peri, and fifteen-year-old Ümit. While their perspective is described in spoken speech, Aydemir chooses the first person perspective for Hüseyin and Emine. They are addressed by inner voices that can detach themselves from them. How else should the final thoughts of a dying person be told if not from the perspective of a spirit, a jinn, or a “shadow”? That’s the name of the voice that promises the dying Hüseyin that it will “stay here” in his apartment, “and I’ll watch over your family.”
Fatma Aydemir: Jinns. Novel. Hanser Verlag, Munich 2022. 367 pages, 24 euros.
Sevda bears the name of a first-born child whose parents always said died shortly after birth. Only at the very end, in an intimate dialogue, does she learn the truth from her mother. The feeling that her existence is “borrowed” characterizes her life. And also the experience of being left by her parents for a while like a “broken suitcase” with her grandparents when her father brought the rest of the family to Germany.
The specific history, which is also typical for the so-called first “guest worker” generation, is put together like a mosaic. The hopes that Hüseyin had started out with soon turned into loneliness, a loop of memories and longings that made him more and more mute. Fear and loneliness waft through the novel like evil spirits that sometimes settle in this soul, sometimes in that.
For decades the children did not know that their parents are Kurds
It’s amazing how changeable Fatma Aydemir’s storytelling voice is. Each character is believable and coherent and at the same time completely different from the others. The most rebellious is Peri, who left the “shitty town” and her “shitty family” as quickly as possible to move to Frankfurt to study. There she desperately delves into Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, only to happily end up with Judith Butler. The lesson that Aydemir builds into her novel about grammatical gender is enchanting, when she lets Peri explain to her mother that Turkish has no feminine and masculine nouns, so that she can carry out a targeted charade later in the novel with a Turkish revamped German.
For decades the children did not know that their parents are Kurds. After his experience in the Turkish military, Hüseyin banned Emine from speaking Kurdish. In Istanbul, Ümit hears his mother speaking to mourners for the first time in a language that is foreign to him. It is not least the double loss of speech that made Emine bitter. “Hüseyin first took away your mother tongue and then brought you to a country where you no longer had a language. It felt as if he had betrayed you. As if he had been betraying you every day since you first met by hiding his heart from you.”
After her fast-paced, somewhat schematic debut novel “Ellbogen”, which describes a seventeen-year-old’s spontaneous excess of violence, Fatma Aydemir is in great form with her second novel. Born in Karlsruhe in 1986, the writer lives in Berlin as a columnist and editor for the taz. Most recently she gave the with Hengameh Yaghoobifarah Anthology “Your homeland is our nightmare” out.
The variety of voices in her novel is just as extraordinary as the nonchalance with which she transfers the usual discourses on origin, gender and identity into the narrative. She masters playing with leitmotifs as well as relaxed dialogues and skilful dramaturgy. What an idea, to let most of the action take place in an apartment that becomes the symbolic place of repressed dreams: an oppressive setting, a high-pressure chamber of emotions, pulsating with the imaginary between life and death. In its mixture of sobriety and poetry, the novel is occasionally reminiscent Emine Sevgi Ozdamar. In some motifs to Orhan Pamuk, for example when the “Museum of Dreams by Hüseyin Yılmaz” is mentioned. With “Dschinns” Aydemir has conquered a narrative tone that can compete with the present without losing the spirit of the epic.