Collecting Childhood Memories of the Future: Arabic as Mediator Between Turkish and German in Emine Sevgi özdamar's Mutterzunge

A new German, singularly Turkish. Reading Emine Sevgi Özdamar with Derrida'sMonolingualism of the Other

“…44 The journey to the mother tongue, via the detour through the grandfather tongue is, as Brandt notes, 'no exercise in nostalgia'. 45 As wittily as 'Mutterzunge', 'Großvaterzunge' first of all embarks on a journey out towards ata sözleri, the 'words of ancestors' (or grandfather's words), also meaning 'proverbs' in Turkish. 46 It is again the playfulness of and with language that is central.…”

“…Her texts certainly resist any straightforward placement with-in German literature, given their frequent Turkish settings, their references to Turkish history and culture, and their somewhat warped use of the German language. Written in German, they often resonate with underlying Turkish expressions and proverbs that Ö zdamar translates literally into German, as Leslie Adelson (2005), Bettina Brandt (2004), or Yasemin Yildiz (2008) have demonstrated, producing a highly unusual German with traces of Turkish. These traces are only decipherable as such to readers versed in Turkish, but they are audible as disruptions of a 'standard' use of German to any reader proficient in German, whether or not one is able to say that this disruption stems from a Turkish subtext.…”

The Images of Women in the Novel ‘The Bridge of the Golden Horn’ by the Migrant Literature Author Emine Sevgi Özdamar

“…Dieser Literaturpreis ist ein Beweis, dass Özdamar eine weltweite Schriftstellerin ist. Dementsprechend sind mehrere Werke von Özdamar Thema weltweiter, wissenschaftlicher Untersuchungen geworden (Jankowsky 1997;Milz 2000;Johnson 2001;Lüling 2003;Brandt 2004;Göttsche 2006;Littler 2012). Insbesondere wurde der Roman ‚Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn' in der Türkei und im Ausland in mehreren wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten behandelt.…”