“Outgrowing Gastarbeiterliteratur”: Germanness Redefined in the Poetry of Zafer Şenocak and Zehra Çirak

Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo

This article originally appeared in VI:I1 of NMR

Due to the massive migratory movements of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries, the borders that outline the definition of German national identity are now strikingly fluid. Efforts to define “Germanness” in terms of a single common language, religion, ethnicity, or restrictive literary canon fail to encompass—and at times even acknowledge—the complex identities, artistic productions, and experiences of cultural hybridity of at least 20 million Germans with Migrationshintergrund [migration background] and the 11 million people that comprise the Ausländische Bevolkerung [foreign population] of Germany in 2018.[1] In the de facto multicultural nation that Germany is now, Zafer Şenocak, born in Ankara in 1961, and Zehra Çirak, born in Istanbul in 1961, use (and purposefully misuse) German to subvert the aesthetic expectations of classic German poetry. The unusual German structures and the themes of migration and cultural hybridity are both key features of the poems and means to masterfully rebel against the strict rules and definitions of syntactic and identitary Germanness. In addition to their forceful disregard for traditional punctuation and capitalization, they “employ a variety of the textual strategies such as allusion, code-switching, interlanguage, neologism, and syntactic fusion, [ . . . ] characteristics of postcolonial discourse.”[2] In doing so, they “abrogate the ‘centrality’ of standard German and [ . . . ] inscribe difference.”[3] In reshaping the German language, the poets use aesthetic means to symbolically open the boundaries of Germanness. This study builds on Petra Fachinger’s observation of the abolishment of standard German by illuminating why abrogation is necessary to German poets with Migrationshintergrund in the process of carving their space in the contemporary canon and in voicing their unique experiences of alterity and hybridity.

            In order to illuminate the relevance and urgency of the poets’ language and themes, this study first describes the societal context in which Şenocak’s and Çirak’s poems were produced.  The subsequent close readings of selected poems enable the analysis of language use as a deliberate engagement with, and subversion against, the prescriptive rules of German. In turn, this language play redefines what German poetry can be and shows how German poets have used their medium to represent contemporary struggles of belonging, an important task in a country where a substantial portion of the population must reflect on their own Germanness since the term has only recently started to encompass their experiences and cultural identity. Through contextualization and close readings, I demonstrate that Şenocak and Çirak use language play to enable readers to rethink the limits of how German language can be structured. Specifically, language play in their poetry can be a key site for the problematizing of identity, nationhood, and most importantly, belonging in a multicultural society that has xenophobic sectors that regard ethnic and cultural difference with contempt or distrust

The history of Germany in the second half of the twentieth century accounts for how two poets born in Turkey can be read within the contemporary German literary tradition. A great influx of foreign workers during the 1950s and 1960s changed Germany’s body politic. According to Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos, “temporary guest workers recruited to work in West Germany between 1955 and 1973 became de facto immigrants, thus transforming the Federal Republic of Germany into an immigration country.”[4] Klusmeyer and Papademetriou likewise assert that “between 1950 and 1994, approximately 80 percent of the increase in the West German population resulted from migration.”[5] In 2006, the Federal Statistical Office reported of the reunified contemporary Germany “that nearly one-fifth (19 percent) of the population in Germany had a migration background (Migrationshintergrund),”[6] a number that excluded the “approximately 12 million ethnic German refugees and expellees, who came to Germany as a result of World War II and its aftermath.”[7] In the early 1990s, “the introduction of jus soli [right of the soil] granted former guest workers and their children greater access to German citizenship and, in so doing, transformed the boundaries of German nationhood.”[8] As a consequence of the guest worker policy, “the continuing crisis of German identity since unification and the de facto settlement of Turkish and many other ‘Other’ Germans make it imperative to rethink Germanness.”[9] The picture painted by these statistics is of a de facto immigration land, despite continuous reactionary efforts to define it otherwise.

The length and social impact of the guest worker program restated the emergence of what has been termed Gastarbeiterliteratur [Guest worker literature]. This taxonomy “was coined in 1980, simultaneous to the founding to two publishing houses PoLiKunst (Politische Literatur und Kunst) and Südwind Gastarbeiterdeutsch,” which made the accounts of guest workers’ experiences available to a larger public.[10] These publications documented “experiences of culture-shock and problems of integration, exploitation at work and social discrimination, domestic clashes due to conflicting social values, and financial and emotional hopes and aspirations of guestworkers in Germany.”[11] While originally useful, Gastarbeiterliteratur is no longer a fitting term because subsequent generations of migrants and their children now identify as Germans and feel the label marginalizes their artistic production creating the undesirable effect of niche literature. Gastarbeiterliteratur thus falls into the category of inadequate labels that Jennifer Marston William has likewise noted, “the past few decades have seen several unsatisfactory labels for the diverse body of creative works produced by minorities in Germany.”[12] William argues that although critics have come to “realize that multicultural writing has changed and enriched the German literary canon, [ . . . ] the tendency to marginalize the works as ‘Other’ persists.”[13] Gastarbeiterliteratur paved the way for a now-complex literary corpus that challenges its subcategorization and has broken into mainstream contemporary German art and literature. While many of the themes in the poetry of Şenocak and Çirak fall into Mani’s list of common themes, these authors also expand it, pondering the German political situation at large. The works of Şenocak and Çirak have won multiple awards, are now included in syllabi across Germany and abroad, and populate bookshelves of bookstores and libraries alike.[14]

Gastarbeiterliteratur is a particularly invalidating term for Çirak, who has expressly rejected this classification and the label of “Turkish German,” as Marilya Veteto-Conrad explains in her 1999 article “Innere Unruhe” [inner unease].[15] Çirak finds this taxonomy synonymous with the flattening of culture implied in full integration and assimilation. Instead, Çirak argues for the celebration of a multitude of cultures intermingling and sharing spaces. In her poetry, she depicts the significance of everyday mundane experiences when lived in the body and subjectivity of the proverbial Other. The objects of everyday life become extraordinary in Çirak’s work as they signify the experiences and categorization of Otherness in daily practices and interactions, expanding the experiences of Germanness to include multiple cultures. Şenocak does not expressly identify or reject the label of “Turkish German” but likewise opens the boundaries of Germanness to include bilingualism. Şenocak depicts bodies split between planets and cultures and brings attention to the pain this causes to hybrid cultural identities. The poets focus on two different themes in order to voice their experiences of Otherness in their multicultural society. Çirak underscores the mundane while Şenocak is more concerned with language itself.

Çirak’s celebration of multicultural conviviality in mundane life inscribes her in the project that Paul Gilroy proposes in the context of postcolonial studies as a national vision to welcome the changing composition of post-World-War-II European national bodies. Gilroy affirms this project does not come from the top, “not the outcome of governmental drift and institutional difference but of concrete oppositional work: political, aesthetic, cultural, scholarly.”[16] It rather emerges “from below,” as “a mature response to diversity, plurality, and differentiation. It is oriented by routine, everyday exposure to difference.”[17] Çirak represents this routine in her poem “Stadtgrenze” [City borders], where people in low-income suburbs use different exotic spices and find a common experience of solidarity in the metaphor of salt which, Çirak explains, knows no national culture.

            Şenocak’s thoughtful focus on language is reminiscent of Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s seminal work in postcolonial studies. Şenocak, as Ngũgĩ once did, ponders how to use and rework the hegemonic language of a powerful majority culture in order to express his own experiences of pain and marginalization. Şenocak thus addresses Ngũgĩ’s famous question, in his own context, about how a borrowed tongue (English in Ngũgĩ’s case), “can carry the weight of our African [or, in this case, a marginalized] experience?”[18] Şenocak pays tribute to Ngũgĩ’s famous assertion that “language, any language, has a dual character: it is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture.”[19] The influential Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe explains how it is possible to express these marginalizes experiences in a borrowed hegemonic tongue, but adds that “it will have to be a new English, still in full communication with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings.”[20] In an analogous way, both Şenocak and Çirak dismantle some of the key rules of the German language, specifically punctuation and capitalization to make it a new German. The strangeness that ensues enables the poets to bring attention to their own eccentric experiences of learning German as a second language outside the home. Şenocak in particular uses this strangeness to foreground the pain of bilingualism.

The fact that Gastarbeiterliteratur was once a useful term but now meets resistance is evidence that the identities of Germans with Migrationshintergrund are in constant flux. Stuart Hall argues that “diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference.”[21] Because these identities are now a substantial part of the German experience in general, Germanness is also in a state of flux. As expected, both poets depict Germany in contrasting strokes: at times a convivial intermingling of cultures, at times bigoted and longing for a pure and homogeneous nation that never in reality existed.

            In order to illustrate the poets’ need to push against societal contempt, carve their space in German literature, and frame their experiences as a key aspect of Germanness, this study cites two examples of bigoted rhetoric which have gained momentum despite, and in reaction to, the success of these authors. These examples are from 1977 and 2016, and demonstrate the xenophobic efforts to assert a monocultural, homogeneous German national body politic where Germans with Migrationshintergrund are unjustly excluded from Germanness. The first is the West German stance officially adopted in a “1977 policy report of a joint commission of the federal government and the states on migrant workers.”[22] This report proclaimed that West Germany was “not a country of immigration” but instead a “country in which foreigners reside for varying lengths of time before they decide on their own accord to return to their home country.”[23] The report proclaims a national vision dissimilar from the reality of the guest worker program, which facilitated the permanent settlement of workers primarily from Turkey and changed the traits of the German body politic: “Germany did not practice a true guest worker policy during this period because policymakers never implemented a mechanism for ensuring the consistent rotation of foreign workers.”[24] Thus Triadafilopoulos asserts that by the end of the twentieth century, Germany had “developed into [a] de facto multicultural societ[y],” because by the time of the “recruitment stop” in November 1973, “German was host to some 2.6 million foreigners.”[25] The second and more recent example of bigoted rhetoric comes from the right-wing political party Alternative für Deutschland, AfD [Alternative for Germany], the “third-largest group in the Bundestag,” the German Parliament.[26] In their online Manifesto for Germany, the AfD explains that because “identity is primarily shaped by culture,” it is the “statutory duty of federal and state governments” to “preserve German Culture, Language and Tradition.”[27] They further assert their stance against conviviality explaining that multiculturalism—

is blind to history and puts on a par imported cultural trends with the indigenous culture, thereby degrading the value system of the latter. The AfD views this as a serious threat to social peace and the survival of the nation state as a cultural unit. It is the duty of the government and civil society to confidently protect German cultural identity as the predominant culture.[28]

The AfD rhetoric nefariously distinguishes between German culture and imported trends. While the local culture is characterized as millenary and still, foreign cultures and traditions are simultaneously diminished as temporary and characterized as attacks. In the xenophobic view of the AfD, foreigners are rendered superfluous and dangerous Others, imposing banal trends that degrade Germanness. The xenophobic anxiety over loose demarcations of the national literary canon reveals the importance that nationalist right-wing ideology ascribes to rigid and conservative ideas of canon. Indeed, as Ankhi Mukherjee argues, “the canon has historically been a nexus of power and knowledge that reinforces hierarchies and the vested interests of select institutions, excluding the interests and accomplishments of minorities, popular and demotic culture, or non-European civilizations.”[29] The AfD thus argues for the preservation of an exclusionary canon antagonistic to changes in the political body of the nation (and that considers artistic products produced by Others to be trends rather than culture), not realizing that, rather than replacing the canon, contemporary Other Germans expand it and, by adding myriad voices and experiences, celebrate it.

            The contemporary German context is characterized by a tension between xenophobic sectors of society and a general conviviality. This context urges the literary foregrounding of the redefinition of Germanness in order to include and voice the experiences of marginalized Germans. Although one cannot imagine this context as a geographical border, such as the hybrid space between Mexico and the US Southwest, the definition of “borderland” by Gloria Anzaldúa proves helpful in imagining the cities of Germany as places where “two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy.”[30] The living space that Çirak describes in her poem “Stadtgrenze” underscores this intimacy when the different smells produced by exotic spices of culturally-relevant foods intermingle. And, importantly to Şenocak’s imagery in his poem “Doppelmann” (Doubleman), Anzaldúa famously describes borderland as “una herida abierta” [an open wound].[31] For Şenocak the wound is not a geographical space but a split in the tongue, a physical border between languages. The poets thus dwell in what Mary Louise Pratt terms contact zone, “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.”[32] Borderland and contact zone serve as useful concepts to imagine the spaces where the poems of Şenocak and Çirak take place. The setting is not in a stable or homogeneous nation-state, but a zone of constant negotiation with identity, power, and intimacy.

            Turning our attention to Şenocak, readers encounter the experiences of language and bilingualism that his dwelling in a contact zone beget. In Şenocak’s poems, the impossibility to feel whole when a person is split between languages becomes the key feature to understand the experiences of Otherness and marginalization. The languages split tongue and body alike, rendering the reconciliation of multiculturalism with Germanness a challenging project.

            Şenocak’s “Doppelmann,” available in different versions and titles, depicts the painful experience of code-switching cutting through the poetic voice’s tongue. The one cited here is a longer version published in 1993 without a title (later versions are shortened to dismiss the first and last stanzas and include the title “Doppelmann”).

ich habe meine Füße auf zwei Planeten

wenn sie sich in Bewegung setzen

zerren sie mich mit

ich falle

ich trage zwei Welten in mir

aber keine ist ganz

sie bluten ständig

die Grenze verläuft

mitten durch meine Zunge

ich rüttele daran wie ein Häftling

das Spiel an einer Wunde[33]

I have my feet on two planets

if they set themselves in motion

they drag me along

I fall

I carry [bear] two worlds in me

but neither is whole

they bleed constantly

the border runs

through the middle of my tongue

I joggle it like a prisoner

the game on a wound

Rather than a line on a map or topography, the border cuts through the people who bear two worlds. It cuts the tongue because it is where languages reside and thus crystalizes the idea of a bilingualism that aches. The metaphorical site for expression is hurt by the wound of a culturally hybrid identity: a body divided. Neither Germany nor Turkey exist entirely in the speaker. The voice is partially heir to both worldviews, as they bleed into one another. The result is a split subjectivity and a feeling of almost-belonging to the nation’s social body. Being a “Doubleman” is an uneasy ordeal where a single subjectivity overflows and is unable to contain worlds that could perhaps fit better in two distinct subjects.[34]

Multiculturalism is thus a painful fact for the poetic voice. It cannot help but experience the split in body and its forms of expressions. Rather than a joyful experience of conviviality, multiculturalism appears as a violent imposition carried unvolitionally on the backs and tongues of those who matter-of-factly bear clashing cultures. As it is often the burden of the children of diasporas, the speaker cannot choose to be a “singleman.” Şenocak shows how multiculturalism is often a taxing duty not of the host majority, but of people who have to constantly balance between two planets and assert their belonging in the political home.

The striking image of the wounded body in pain, split by language itself, is framed in the aesthetic strangeness of the lack of capitalization at the beginning of sentences and missing punctuation. The poet calls readers’ attention to these conventions of language by eliminating them, rendering them unnecessary for effective communication. A possible reading of this decision is the poet expressing that the strict and correct Germanness of capitalization and punctuation are unnecessary to communicate: that Germanness does not need the rigidity of rules to remain intelligible. Instead, the sentences lack clear beginnings and endings and thus bleed into each other mirroring the worlds which the poetic voice painfully inhabits.

            Şenocak builds on the theme of pain that linguistic hybridity causes on the body in his poem “Spielsachen” (Playthings). The poetic voice asks a vague Herr why it could not have two mouths and two tongues:

Sind das meine Beine Herr

warum gabst du mir nicht vier

ist das mein Kopf Herr

warum gabst du mir nicht zwei

sind das meine Augen

warum sind es zwei

hätte eine Nase nicht genügt

hätte ein Mund eine Zunge nicht genügt

sind das meine Münde Herr

sind das meine Zungen

Are these my legs Lord

why didn’t you give me four

is this my head Lord

why didn’t you give me two

are these my eyes

why are there two

as if one nose wouldn’t do

as if one mouth one tongue would do

are these my mouths Lord

are these my tongues[35]

In the first line the poetic voice is not able to recognize its own body.  The sensation of dissonance is consistent with that of “Doppelmann,” where both of the worlds carried feel incomplete and not entirely familiar. Here, there is an uncanny element about the body itself. If the voice had double the legs, and heads, perhaps the dissonance would be solved. But since the subject only has one body, there is a sensation of foreignness. “Spielsachen” imagines the body multiplying (rather than sustaining wounds, as in “Doppelmann”) in order to accommodate the hybridity of two worlds inhabiting one consciousness. The inferred idea of Germanness in this poem, imagined as a single national body, cannot accommodate the multiplicity of languages and cultures that exist within it, thus advancing a pessimistic evaluation of national identity. By the end, the voice is even confused as to whether tongues and mouths, the sites of language, are part of itself.

A note on the translation is here relevant since the English version translated by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright narrows the meaning of the line “hätte ein Mund eine Zunge nicht genügt.” She translates the antepenultimate line as “as if one mouth one tongue would do.”[36] An alternative translation, “would one mouth one tongue not have been enough,” slightly changes the meaning of the poem’s conclusion. This translation readily denotes the existence of double mouths and tongues, a metaphor of bilingualism, that the Herr does not seem to have planned, but that the poetic voice nonetheless has and is showing to the Herr. If this Herr is the societal expectation for citizens of the nation to have but one set of a mouth and a tongue, the poetic voice breaks away from the Herr’s expectation and implies the possibility that the German national body can have more than one tongue despite the Herr’s planning and expectation.

Şenocak continues to ponder the issue of multiplicity of cultures coexisting painfully in one person, a synecdoque of the national body, in the five-part poem “Flaschenpost” (Message in a Bottle). The striking insight of this poem in parts I and IV is that multiculturalism is not as painful for the unquestioned members of the host society, so called “ethnic Germans” (which, the AfD warns have a birth rate much lower than that “among immigrants”) —as xenophobic nationalists often claim.[37] This poem shows how multiculturalism is rather distressing for the Other Germans who learn conflicting cultures and traditions at home and in their larger social environments. The multiple—and often conflicting—expectations and codes of conduct of these sites of development cause tears in the tongue, voice, and subjectivity. The poet portrays a split and confused person as well as a split and confused concept of Germanness that has not successfully achieved an intermingling of languages and heritages. The failure to communicate is the key feature of the experience of non-belonging:

I

es ist kein Geheimnis

heute wirft man seine Flaschenpost ins Meer

das große Meer ist klein auf der Welt

unterhält sich in Geheimsprachen

mit anderen Meeren

die Sprachen sind Seekarten ohne Inseln

in uferlosem Blau

verschwindender Farbe

Rätsel sind in ihnen aufgegangen

Lieder Sprüche Wortfetzen

auch Befehle wie

bleibe

gehe

liebe

I

it’s no secret

today you throw your bottle message in the sea

the great sea is small in the world

converses in secret languages

with other seas

the languages are charts without islands

in boundless blue

of vanishing color

riddles are dissolved in them

songs saying scraps of word

also commands like

stay

go

love[38]

The image of the bottle lost at sea is the archetype of a vital personal message: often the last word and hope of a castaway. The sea, vast but klein auf der Welt [small in the world], is the means through which that message travels. Vital messages exist in the sea of our language. They are not secret to those who can understand us; they are secret to other seas, other languages. The motif of split languages persists in this poem, as one single sea, no matter how vast, cannot cover the whole world. Seas are but small sites of possible communication within great unfamiliar oceans. While nouns are normatively capitalized, the lack of punctuation and capitalization at the beginning of sentences continues to destabilize the propriety of language.

Languages are portrayed as sea charts without islands as one may get lost in their immensity. The feeling of being adrift in an ocean of language without firm land on which to stand is possibly reflective of the early experiences of young migrant children in new social settings. It is possible that these are the experiences of the poets themselves, as Şenocak’s family moved to Germany from Ankara, Turkey in 1970 when he was nine years old and Çirak’s family moved from Istanbul to Germany in 1963 when she was three years old.

Taking this biographical context into account, the last stanza of the poem becomes particularly powerful. Although the words “bleibe, gehe, and liebe” [stay, go, and love] can be combined to create beautiful songs, they are here transfigured into imperatives. The word “Befehle” suggests a command that comes from a figure of authority, perhaps military, and therefore conveys a possible cruelty in these three words. The first two commands, bleibe and gehe, (stay and go), are contradictory messages that ethnically and culturally marginalized people experience in their mundane lives and at the levels of national and international rhetoric of political figures who uphold or reject multicultural conviviality. In the task of understanding Germanness, people with Migrationshintergrund are instructed to stay and go by different sectors of society which figuratively pull them in different directions, ultimately splitting their metaphorical bodies.

            In the fourth part of the poem, the possible hopefulness of throwing the bottle to the sea is replaced by the unlikelihood of the message reaching its destination:

IV

man stirbt auf der Straße

auf der einem laut die Nachricht überbracht wird

man stirbt mit der Flasche unterm Arm

ohne sie geöffnet zu haben

mit allen Worten die man hätte wollen

das Wort das dicht ist

behält man für sich allein

you are dying on the street

where the news was delivered to you aloud

you are dying with the bottle under your arm

that you never got to open

with all the words you had wanted to say

the sealed word

you keep to yourself[39]

This stanza is impersonal, using the an active-voice alternative in the original German that, similarly to the passive voice, diminishes the grammatical and semantic importance of the subject. “Man,” often translated as “one,” dies; there are news told, but not by anyone in particular. The one with the message, unable to deliver it, is the one who dies, with its words still sealed, heard by no one. Here, to die and to keep silent seem synonymous, as though one could only exist (at least in terms of the relationship to others) through and within the seas of languages, as they mix with each other. Whether it is an open wound along the tongue, or a wound that annihilates the person, language is a source of anxiety and non-belonging in the dimension of the migrant experience.

Şenocak’s exploration of the effect of bilingualism on the body and psyche enables the redefinition of the Germanness to include several languages, tongues, and mouths that, although painfully tearing through the body, are an undeniable experience of alterity for many Germans. Shifting the focus away from language, Çirak foregrounds the manifold meanings of mundane objects. Çirak underscores the shifting connotations of bicycles, trains, or food items in marginalized experiences, showing just how different everyday life can be for Germans with Migrationshintergrund. Like Şenocak, Çirak disregards traditional punctuation and capitalization thus opening the limits of intelligible German. Unlike Şenocak, Çirak depicts experiences of pain caused not by bilingualism but by socioeconomic marginalization and nationalist violence. This is the case of the poem “Kein Sand in Rad der Zeit” (No Sand in the Wheel of Time).

Ich stehe in der U-Bahn an die Wand gelehnt

schweigend schaukle ich in der U-Fahrt

fünf Jungs und zwei Mädels kommen auf mich zu

schwankend im Laufe der Geschwindigkeit

festen Blickes fixieren sie mich

und grinsen sich immer näher

ich versuche die sieben zu ignorieren

die anderen Fahrgäste sind alle

mit sich selbst beschäftigt

die sieben stehen nun

kaum noch einen Schritt von mir

der eine und die andere holt aus

zum Schlag

noch einmal noch mal

die anderen johlen begeistert

jetzt bin ich Neger — Jude — Ausländer —

Penner — oder anderswer

nein sie sehen nicht was ich wirklich bin

jetzt nur noch ein geschlagenes Ding

ich höre noch ein kleines Kind

das ängstlich Mama ruft

und die anderen Fahrgäste machen sich

bereit zum Aussteigen

ich falle um

ich bin ein Fahrrad

mein Besitzer ist

ein Neger — Jude — Ausländer

der mit Vorausahnungen

schon eine Station früher ausgestiegen war

von nun an bin ich

nicht mehr — nur ein Fahrrad

I stand in the subway leaning on the wall

silently I sway in the metro

five boys and two girls approach me

faltering because of the speed

firm grins are fixated on me

and sneering ever closer

I try to ignore the seven

the other passengers are all

busy with themselves

the seven now stand

hardly a step before me

one and the others wind up

to hit

once again and another time

the others jeer excitedly

now I am a Negro–Jew–Foreigner–

Bum–or some other

no they do not see what I really am

now just a beaten thing

I still hear a little kid

who anxiously calls mama

and the other passengers

make themselves ready to deboard

I collapse I am a bicycle

my owner is a Negro—a Jew—a Foreigner 

who with premonitions

already deboarded a station earlier

from now on I am

no more—only a bicycle[40]

Çirak’s poem plays with the identity of the poetic voice as it degenerates and ultimately becomes an object. It starts with the voice as the subject of every line. The speaker stands, leaning on the wall doing nothing in particular, and sees, just a mundane scene of riding on the subway. But then, the five boys and two girls approach the speaker. Although the poem does not state it, one is inclined to imagine these boys and girls being white, certain of their belonging to the German social body, their Germanness. They hit the poetic voice time and again for no other reason than its Otherness, reminding the poetic voice of its condition of non-belonging. The voice becomes first a “Neger — Jude — Ausländer — Penner — oder anderswer,” and the readers hear these words as slurs that the boys and girls inflict during the attack. The physical cruelty of this violence tears the body apart while the slurs explain it. The seven children define beyond doubt what Germanness cannot encompass. They use their fists and screams to write their definition on the broken body of the Other. The poetic voice understands that violent pain on the body is a shared experience by those who are poor and historically marginalized. It becomes then a geschlagenes Ding [beaten thing], robbed of its personhood.

The other passengers are concerned with continuing with their lives, unencumbered. They seem oblivious to the violence. Or, if they witness it they do not care to prevent or address it. The train becomes a metaphor of the nation. It is always moving, with a wide array of people riding inside, perpetuators, witnesses, and victims. The poem warns of the danger of passengers who accept this vicious scene as normal. By listing the people who have historically been the victims of cruelty, the poem reminds the nation of its historical identity and implicitly states the question of whether brutality inflicted on Others’ bodies is a desirable vision for the project of nationhood. In the last lines of the poem, the “I” is not a human anymore, just an object meant to transport.

Çirak’s foregrounding of mundane experiences as key sites to ponder the definition of Germanness importantly includes the representation of domesticity in her poem on “Stadtgrenze.” In this poem, Çirak draws attention to the significance of everyday household objects in migrant experiences:

Am Stadtrand die Klage:

Meine Stadt ist voll mit Häusern

meine Häuser voller Leute

die ihre Kopfzimmer einrichten

mit Bedürfnissen jeder Art

unsere Leute sind genug

uns genug die Unsrigen

für die Zahl der Teller

wir würzen nur exotisch

doch essen ein und heimisch

Das Salz kennt keine Nationalgerichte

wer will nun wem

die Grenzen

in die Augen streuen?

On the edges of the city the complaint:

my city is full of houses

my houses are full of people 

who arrange their head room 

with needs of every sort

our people are enough

ours are enough for us

for the number of plates

we spice only exotically

however we eat alone and locally

Salt knows no national dish 

who wants now to throw

the borders

in whose eyes?[41]

The poem is set at the edges of the city, probably a low-income suburb where a multiplicity of cultures share the tight spaces of large buildings and projects. In this space, one can smell all sorts of sweet, sour, and savory national dishes emanating from the windows and hallways. The poem starts with a disembodied complaint: those who are jarred by this multiplicity of smells; and further jarred by the people who arrange their Kopfzimmer [head space] in different ways, worldviews, religions, structures of social organization.

            Multiculturalism in this poem happens in the tongue. But, unlike Şenocak’s poems, the tongue is not the place for language, but for culture conveyed through flavor. And although there is a wide variety of spices, people eat locally. The first line of the second stanza signals the possibility of finding common ground regardless of national ancestry. Indeed, Das Salz kennt keine Nationalgerichte [salt knows no national dish]. Unlike the division between the One and the Other in “No Sand in the Wheel of Time,” “City Borders” finds a space to assert the experience of people is more similar than categorizations and borders would suggest, regardless of their culture of origin. The final question, wer will nun wem/ die Grenzen/ in die Augen streuen? [who wants now to throw the borders in whose eyes?] is an assertion that borders between peoples are artificially created, dispersed by those who benefit from feelings of division and difference. The ways people prepare food, eat, and live, have more in common than imposed city borders might imply.

            The portrayal of multiculturalism is cautiously optimistic, but not because the host society joyfully tolerates the multiplicity of cultures in this poem. Instead, it is because multiculturalism is shown as the shared experience of the different groups at the geographical margins of the city and social margins of the nation. Germanness can include these people because their shared experiences eliminate the borders between them.

These selected poems portray the difficult processes of identification for migrant communities, as they struggle with violence, the pain of multilingualism, and partial belonging. The poets and their poems contain several worlds within them, and the scenes and struggles may not be common to all German people. However, these poems depict the lives and concerns of German citizens and residents intersected today by multiculturalism, expanding the delimitations of national identity. Germanness pondered and redefined in the poetry of Şenocak and Çirak can be an experience of pain and violence, but it is also one undeniably shared by many people who have lived in Germany for generations and irrefutably belong in the contemporary definition of Germanness.

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. “English and the African Writer.” Transition, no. 75/76 (1997): 342-349.

Alternative für Deutschland AfD. Manifesto for Germany. Stuttgart: AFD, 2016. https://www.afd.de/wp-content/uploads/sites/111/2017/04/2017-04-12_afd-grundsatzprogramm-englisch_web.pdf.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 2007.

Ashcroft, Bill. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 2002.

Chase, Jefferson. “AfD: What you need to know about Germany's far-right party.” Deutsche Welle, 24 Sep. 2017, https://p.dw.com/p/2W7YF.

Cheesman, Tom. Novels of Turkish German Settlement. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007.

Chin, Rita. The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany. New York, NY: Cambridge UP, 2009.

Çirak, Zehra. “Kein Sand im Rad der Zeit, Stadgrenze” Fremde Flügel auf Eigener Schulter. Hamburg: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1994.

Destatis. “Bevölkerung und Erwerbstätigkeit.” Destatis Statistisches Bundesamt. April 15, 2019. https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoelkerung/Migration-Integration/Publikationen/Downloads-Migration/auslaend-bevoelkerung-2010200187004.pdf?__blob=publicationFile.

Fachinger, Petra. Rewriting Germany from the Margins: “Other” German Literature of the 19080s and 1990s. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2001.

Flotow, Louise von. “Preface” in Gino Chiellino. Fremde Discourse on the Foreign. Toronto, CA: Guernica, 1995.

Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York, NY: Columbia UP, 2005.

Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, no. 36 (1989): 68–81. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44111666.

Katzenstein, Peter J. Policy and Politics in West Germany: The Growth of a Semisovereign State. Philadelphia, PN: Temple UP, 1987.

Klusmeyer, Douglas B., and Demetrios G. Papademetriou. Immigration Policy in the Federal Republic of Germany: Negotiating Membership and Remaking the Nation. New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2009. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qcrnk.

Mani, B. Venkat. “Phantom of the ‘Gastarbeiterliteratur.’” Migration und Interkulturalität in neueren literarischen Texten. Ed. Aglaia Blioumi. München: Ludicium, 2002. pp. 112-129.

Mukherjee, Ankhi. What Is a Classic?: Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon. Redwood City, CA: Stanford UP, 2013.

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession (1991): 33-40.

Şenocak, Zafer. Door Languages. Trans. Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright. Brookline, MA: Zephyr Press, 2008.

Şenocak, Zafer. “Untitled.” Der Deutschunterricht 46, h. 5 (1993): 102.

Trapp, Erin, “Zehra Cirak and the Aporia of Dialogism.” Poetry and Dialogism: Hearing Over. Eds. Mara Scanlon and Chad Engbers. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Triadafilopoulos, Triadafilos. Becoming Multicultural: Immigration and the Politics of Membership in Canada and Germany. Vancouver, CA: UBC Press, 2013.

Triadafilopoulos, Triadafilos, and Karen Schönwälder. “How the Federal Republic Became an Immigration Country: Norms, Politics and the Failure of West Germany's Guest Worker System.” German Politics & Society 24, no. 3 (2006): 1–19. www.jstor.org/stable/23742736.

Veteto-Conrad, Marilya. “‘Innere Unruhe? Zehra Çirak and Minority Literature Today.” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 53, no. 2 (1999): 59– 74.

wa Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey Heinemann, 1986.

William, Jennifer Marston. “Cognitive Poetics and Common Ground in a Multicultural Context: The Poetry of Zehra Çirak.” The German Quarterly 85, no. 2 (2012): 173–192. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41494747.

[1] Destatis, “Bevölkerung und Erwerbstätigkeit,” Destatis Statistisches Bundesamt, April 15, 2019, 23, https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoelkerung/Migration-Integration/Publikationen/Downloads-Migration/auslaend-bevoelkerung-2010200187004.pdf?__blob=publicationFile

[2] Petra Fachinger, Rewriting Germany from the Margins: “Other” German Literature of the 19080s and 1990s (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2001), 46.

Fachinger uses these terms, borrowed directly from Ashcroft’s The Empire Writes Back, to inscribe her own discourse in postcolonial studies, a framework I employ later in this study. Bill Ashcroft, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 2002).

[3] Fachinger, 46.

[4] Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos, Becoming Multicultural: Immigration and the Politics of Membership in Canada and Germany (Vancouver, CA: UBC Press, 2013), 1.

[5] Douglas B. Klusmeyer and Demetrios G. Papademetriou, Immigration Policy in the Federal Republic of Germany: Negotiating Membership and Remaking the Nation. (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2009), xii. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qcrnk.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Triadafilopoulos, 3.

[9] Tom Cheesman, Novels of Turkish German Settlement (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007), 32.

[10] B. Venkat Mani, “Phantom of the ‘Gastarbeiterliteratur,’” Migration und Interkulturalität in neueren literarischen Texten (München: Ludicium, 2002), 113.

Polikunst was an association founded by foreign artists and writers in order to protect their interests and promote their work. To clarify, B. Venkat Mani is referring to the Polinationaler Literatur und Kunstverein (Polikunst) in the context of his analysis of Aras Ören’s literary work. It is relevant to note that Luise von Flotow describes PoLiKunst not as a publishing house, as does Mani, but as “an association founded primarily as a movement of foreign artists yet also designed to represent their interests [ . . . ] which in an attempt to avoid the usual patronizing treatment (Bevormundung) accorded foreigners, restricted its membership to foreign writers/artists.” Louise von Flotow, “Preface” in Gino Chiellino, Fremde Discourse on the Foreign (Toronto, CA: Guernica, 1995), 8.

Further, Rita Chin explains that PoLiKunst “aimed to use literature to build a grassroots movement of laborers brought together by the shared sociohistorical experiences embedded in the very language (gastarbeiterdeutsch) that guest workers used.” Rita Chin, The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany (New York, NY: Cambridge UP, 2009), 115.

[11] Mani, 113.

[12] Jennifer Marston William, “Cognitive Poetics and Common Ground in a Multicultural Context: The Poetry of Zehra Çirak,” The German Quarterly 85, no. 2 (2012): 173, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41494747.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Şenocak was awarded the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize in 1988 and was a featured author in the 2007 PEN World Voices Festival. His work was anthologized in the Contemporary German Writers series of the University of Chicago Press. He has been writer-in-residence at the University of Wales Swansea, M.I.T., Darthmouth College, Oberlin College, the University of California at Berkley, and Lafayette College. His work is used to teach German worldwide by the prestigious Goethe-Institut in their “Migration and Integration” module. Çırak was also awarded the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize both in 1989 and 2001 and she is the 1994 recipient of the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize.

[15] Marilya Veteto-Conrad, “‘Innere Unruhe? Zehra Çirak and Minority Literature Today,” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 53, no. 2 (1999): 59.

[16] Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York, NY: Columbia UP, 2005), 99.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey Heinemann, 1986), 7.

[19] Ibid, 13.

[20] Chinua Achebe, “English and the African Writer,” Transition, no. 75/76, (1997): 349.

[21] Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, no. 36 (1989): 80. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44111666.

[22] Klusmeyer, xii.

[23] Peter J. Katzenstein, Policy and Politics in West Germany: The Growth of a Semisovereign State (Philadelphia, PN: Temple UP, 1987), 239-240.

[24] Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos and Karen Schönwälder. “How the Federal Republic Became an Immigration Country: Norms, Politics and the Failure of West Germany's Guest Worker System.” German Politics & Society 24, no. 3 (2006): 1. www.jstor.org/stable/23742736.

[25] Ibid, 2.

[26] Jefferson Chase, “AfD: What you need to know about Germany's far-right party,” Deutsche Welle, 24 Sep. 2017, https://p.dw.com/p/2W7YF.

[27] Alternative für Deutschland AfD. Manifesto for Germany (Stuttgart: AFD, 2016): 45-46. https://www.afd.de/wp-content/uploads/sites/111/2017/04/2017-04-12_afd-grundsatzprogramm-englisch_web.pdf

[28] Ibid, 46.

[29] Ankhi Mukherjee. What Is a Classic?: Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (Redwood City, CA: Stanford UP, 2013), 8.

[30] Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands La Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 2007), 19.

[31] Ibid, 25.

[32] Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 34.

[33] Zafer Şenocak. “Untitled.” Der Deutschunterrich 46, h. 5 (1993): 102.

[34] I capitalized the first person pronoun “I” in the English translation even though it is not capitalized at the beginning of sentences in the original German. Because it lacks conventional capitalization and punctuation, the original German has a sense of strangeness. This strangeness is still conveyed in the English translation with the lack of punctuation. Further, I included two possible meanings for the word “tragen” in my translation to illustrate the complexity of the language of the poem and how it resists a single interpretation. Where “carry” may not necessarily have a negative connotation, “bear” does, which makes the sustainment of two worlds more clearly a painful experience. The poetic “I” seems to have no identity or ground of its own, but rather is pulled and torn by the worlds that inhabit and wound it.

[35] Zafer Şenocak, Door Languages, Trans. Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright (Brookline, MA: Zephyr Press, 2008), 140-141.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Alternative für Deutschland AfD. Manifesto for Germany (Stuttgart: AFD, 2016): 41. https://www.afd.de/wp-content/uploads/sites/111/2017/04/2017-04-12_afd-grundsatzprogramm-englisch_web.pdf

[38] Şenocak, 2008, 52-53.

[39] Şenocak, 2008, 54-55.

[40] Çirak, Zehra, “Kein Sand im Rad der Zeit, Stadgrenze,” Fremde Flügel auf Eigener Schulter (Hamburg: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1994), 44-45.

Translation in Erin Trapp, “Zehra Cirak and the Aporia of Dialogism,” Poetry and Dialogism: Hearing Over, Eds. Mara Scanlon and Chad Engbers (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 93-94.

[41] Çirak, 51. Translation quoted in Trapp, 189.