Clear-eyed and unsentimental

Çiğdem Akyol's debut novel ‘Geliebte Mutter - Canım Annem’ [in English: “Beloved Mother”] begins and ends with the death of the protagonist's father. The scant 200 pages in-between spans the parents lives Aynur and Alvin and those of their children Meryem and Ada. Their existences play out between the Bosphorus and the Rhine, between factory work and university, between the search for identity and the loss of home, between domestic violence and the urge to belong. Too much, in fact, than can be covered in a single review. 

Some authors would need a thousand pages for a story like this, and would still say less than journalist Akyol does in her first novel, a work of fiction that is deeply rooted in reality. The narrative form chosen by Akyol, who has previously published non-fiction books on Turkey, mirrors the inner conflict of her characters. Rather than proceeding chronologically, she alternates between the perspectives of the parents and of the children (in particular between the daughter and her mother). She jumps between time frames and narrative perspectives. 

Parts of Meryem's story are told in the third person, others in the first person. Like intimate conversations with her mother, these revolve around the thematic core of the novel: the difficult relationship with her parents, with her parents' generation, which fluctuates between fear, horror and rejection on the one hand and love and recognition on the other. 

Towards the end of the book, there is a conversation between Meryem and Ada, siblings who meet after a long time. Both are in their 30s and living prosperous, academic professional lives, secure in a way that was not an option for their parents, who came to Germany as guest workers. 

While Ada has long since fled the family, worn down by fear of his father, by his mother’s rejection, and by constant panic attacks, Meryem has returned to be with her terminally ill father on his final journey, and to make peace with her mother. Her view of Aynur has changed, but Ada doesn't want to know and finds his sister naive.

It is moments such as these - genuine human moments - that give the novel its power. Nothing is clear in the lives of this family. They are complex, unstable, insecure, and we follow them every step of the way. This is where the great art of storytelling lies, in using precise brushstrokes to build a closely-observed portrait, one which seizes and shakes the reader, not least from a feeling that one’s own weaknesses are also being exposed. Where in life are we weaker than in relation to our own parents, in the very place we would like to be strong?

An Alevi family in Herne

Aynur and Alvin grow up in completely opposite environments in Turkey, hers urban and modern, his traditional and rural. They don't find each other but are brought together by Aynur's brother. Aynur agrees to marry Alvin although she knows it’s not a path she particularly desires. She moves to Herne in Germany with her awkward, uneducated husband, living in a tiny apartment alongside Alvin's brother and father. All three men work long hours in coal mines and factories for starvation wages. No one thanks them.

The couple have children and finally move into their own apartment, but life shows little improvement. Alvin loses his job, gambles away their money, gets into debt and takes out his pent-up frustration on the family. Aynur, meanwhile, may appear to have given up but inside she continues to struggle, not just with the situation and her unloved and all-too-often violent husband, but also with her children, whom she stops understanding long before they reach puberty. Occasionally she wonders what the word ‘guest worker’ actually means and why she has a completely different idea of how to treat guests than Germans.

Akyol builds on a long tradition

Ada and Meryem's childhood is shaped by their experience of the family home. Caught between fear of their parents and affection, they find support in each other until they start to pull away, an urge rooted not just in puberty but also in a deep-rooted desire to flee their family. Then, they cling to each other again, their father flying into a rage with their mother who passes her humiliation on to the children.

While Ada isolates himself, Meryem resorts to self-harm and lacks commitment. Only later, when working as a journalist in Turkey, does Meryem learn to forgive her mother, having gained a new perspective on her parents’ homeland. This, together with the impact of her father's death, enables her to see how hard her parents' lives ultimately were, and how much they endured for the sake of their children.

Çiğdem Akyol’s gaze is clear-eyed and unsentimental in depicting this Alevite couple and their children. It reveals the harsh living conditions in some traditional Muslim families, the merciless exploitation and exclusion of guest-workers, and how it may affect their children in the form of poverty, domestic violence and racism long after they’ve reached adulthood. Above all, the author depicts these characters in all their contradictions without judging them. She leaves that to the reader, offering a new perspective just when they think they’ve formed an opinion.

Rarely has the story of the guest-worker generation been so impressively presented in literary form. It is telling that only now, more than 60 years after the guest-worker recruitment agreement, a new generation of children is shedding light on the subject. In recent years, we’ve seen Dinçer Güçyeter's debut novel ‘Unser Deutschlandmärchen’ (Mikrotext Verlag 2022) (also a deep bow of respect to a mother) and Fatma Aydemir's ‘Dschinns’ (Hanser Verlag 2022).

Clearly, these novels are not the first such works on this theme, but in the past they were usually published by small presses. For example, the writer Aras Ören, who memorialised the guest workers in Berlin some 50 years ago. Or Fakir Baykurt's “Duisburg Trilogy”, which was written in Turkish and has only been available in its entirety in German translation from a small publishing house, Duisburger Dialog Edition, for a few years. These are part of a body of literature which belatedly deserve much greater attention.

Çiğdem Akyol
„Geliebte Mutter - Canım Annem“ 
Steidl Verlag 2024 
240 pages, 24 Euro

You can find a reading sample here (in German).