MIGRATION AND LITERATURE Engin Erkiner
Türkçe English Deutsch Italiano Français Ελληνικά Kurdî Español MIGRATION AND LITERATURE Engin Erkiner It is thought that each migration produced its own literature and music, but this determination is not sufficient in several aspects. If we consider that the main area that Turkish people migrated from since the 1960s to European countries, we will see that it is not absolutely necessary to emigrate to take part in migration literature. For example, Adalet Ağaoğlu's novel Fikrimin İnce Gülü tells about the day a worker from Germany spent on his way to Turkey with his car. Ağaoğlu is not a writer who immigrated to Germany for a certain period of time and lived there. It is not necessary to be an immigrant to write a daily journey of a migrant worker with the help of information and fiction. Bekir Yıldız, who is known for his Germany stories, lived in Germany for a certain period of time and observed the life of the workers there. Bekir Yıldız's can be called "temporary immigration". It can be said that there were no writers and poets among the first generation workers. Maybe they wrote stories or poems once in a while, but they were not more or less permanent in literature. As the only exception, Fethi Warrior can be mentioned. Fethi Savaşçı, who worked for Siemens in Munich for years, is both a migrant worker and a writer. I don't know the number of his books, they are many. More writers emerged among the children of the workers – the second generation – and those who came to European countries later. Here, a distinction should be made between second-generation writers who became writers in Turkey but came to Germany because of the danger of being killed or imprisoned. Fakir Baykurt had to come to Germany before 1980 and made the people living here the subject of his novels. Blast Furnaces can be considered the first German novel. While Baykurt describes the change in Turkish workers in this novel, he shows that this is limited to adaptation to daily life, and that the old understanding continues culturally and especially in male-female relations. Fakir Baykurt later wrote other novels about workers in Germany. The stories of the second generation can largely be called "sociological stories". They write about their experiences and problems in daily life. The themes of his stories are largely related to xenophobia. In addition to his inadequacies in the use of Turkish, there is no fiction in his works. They directly describe their experiences, and this is not literature. It can be said that very few storytellers emerged from this segment. Writers and poets who came to European countries and especially to Germany after September 12, 1980 did not generally write works about immigration. It is not necessary for those who have to migrate to write about immigration. Ataol Behramoğlu and Nihat Behram can be counted among them. As the years passed, people who wrote in German began to appear among those who came to Germany later or from the second generation. Whatever language the author uses belongs to the literature of that language. It can be said that Germans understood the contributions of these people to German literature better than Turkish people. Literature requires good use of language. While this is obvious, it is wrong to evaluate literary works on the basis of the correct use of language. This wrong tendency is seen especially in Turkish teachers. Feridun Zaimoğlu writes in German and has carried the different German of the types he describes - second and third generation youth - into his works under the name Kanaksprach. To judge such a work on the basis of "correct German" is to understand nothing of literature. Literature also means literary and cultural magazines. You can't expect everyone to write a book. The first products are published in these journals. I will explore this topic in the next article.
