Fatma Aydemir is one of Germany’s most exciting writers and thinkers. Born in 1986 in the western city of Karlsruhe, Aydemir – whose grandparents were Kurdish-Turkish Gastarbeiter (“guest workers”) – moved to Berlin in 2012 and has since established herself as a vital voice in national conversations about feminism, migration and social justice via her work as a writer and editor for publications like taz, as well as her monthly column for The Guardian.
She has also emerged as a celebrated fiction author: her award-winning 2017 debut Ellbogen (“elbow”) has since been adapted for stage and screen, while her 2022 novel Djinns landed on the shortlist for the German Book Prize.
is a novel of epic sweep, telling the border-crossing story of one Kurdish-Turkish-German family through six different perspectives – and it comes out in English translation this month.
Djinns is such an excellently plotted novel – I really don’t want to give any unwanted spoilers. How would you describe what the book’s about?
It’s a family story. It’s a novel about an immigrant family that came from Turkey to Germany between the 1970s and 1980s – it’s kind of a typical guest worker family. The father, Hüseyin, was the first to come as a labour migrant, and then he was allowed to bring his family to Germany as well.
The story is about the first week of Hüseyin’s retirement: he had just moved back to Turkey and bought an apartment in Istanbul. And the moment he moves into this apartment – which he has saved for his entire life – he dies from a heart attack. Then the family has to meet in Istanbul for his funeral.
That’s the beginning of the story. The rest of it focuses on each of the characters in the family – their struggles, their being confronted with the death of a loved one, their realisation of their own mortality.
One brilliant thing about your structure is that we get to see all these characters from their own perspective, but also how they are perceived by the others.
Family is always a kind of performance, and everyone in it has a role to play.
When I realised that this was going to be a family novel, I thought a lot about, you know, what actually is a family? Why is it still, like, the most dominant form of living together? Even as we’re living in a world that is so analytical with respect to patriarchy. But how is this patriarchal structure, the family, just so powerful that our laws and societies are still structured around it?
The novel takes place in this very private situation of loss – a funeral. I was thinking about how family is always a kind of performance, and everyone in it has a role to play. So giving every character their own chapter, and their own perspective, felt like a good way to give them space to somehow be whatever they are outside this family – but to also still be in the family, and trying to fulfil their role, while reflecting on that as well.
Was it hard to keep all the characters’ voices and perspectives separate as you wrote?
Yes. The first draft took me a long while because I needed a lot of time to step into each character and properly think about them. Some were easier to write than others. But it did take time to find a language for each one, because they think and talk about themselves in their own ways.
The hardest chapter was probably Emine, the mother, at the end. And also the eldest brother, Hakan. That one I had to rewrite from scratch because – you know, it’s so weird, you make up a character and you have a very clear idea of who they are. But then while I was writing I noticed that, hey, wait a minute, actually I am prejudiced against this type of person – this kind of late-20s man – and how he sounds and what he’s doing. I was discovering my own clichés while writing. So I trashed that chapter and started fresh.
Speaking of Hakan, I was struck by the portrayal of masculinity in this novel, which goes beyond stereotypes to find all sorts of ambivalence and vulnerability.
This was the first time I wrote from a male perspective. And so I already knew, okay, it’s going to be different – it’s going to be a challenge. Because if it’s a family story, then it would be very important to have complex male characters, and to allow the brothers and the father the same vulnerability in the moments when they are on their own.
In reality, it was not that peaceful. It’s a story of exploitation.
When Hakan is alone and thinking about himself, for example, he is so different from how people perceive him. Also, as a feminist writing about a conservative Muslim family, there’s the danger of taking a shortcut and saying, “Oh yeah, these men are so evil, and that’s why women suffer.” But that is a very simplified – and very wrong – way of thinking about patriarchy and how women get oppressed, whether it’s conservative Christian, Muslim, whatever. Because this contract is always also being held up by other women, by women who oppress each other.
We are also part of the system. And that’s what I was trying to get at, especially with the very complicated relationship between the mother and the eldest daughter of this family. It was important to have male characters that are allowed to be assholes, and to be vulnerable, and to be in love – all the things that my female characters are allowed.
Is there any German political background that English-language readers should know going in?
I hope, of course, that the book stands on its own, because that’s what good literature is capable of. But I would also say that one very important aspect of context is the history of so-called guest workers, the labour migration that started in the 1960s and 1970s with workers coming from Italy, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Morocco, and most of all Turkey.
The mainstream German way of telling the story is one of success. Germany needed this labour to rebuild its economy – and so they came, and they were happy that they could work and earn so much money. But in reality, it was not that peaceful. It’s a story of exploitation. And it’s a story of how the German state actually tried to keep guest workers isolated, especially those from Muslim countries like Morocco and Turkey, in order to be able to control them and send them back once they were no longer needed.
There is a tendency to see all the migrants that came from Turkey as a homogeneous group, but this was not the case. The labour migration treaty was also an opportunity for minorities in Turkey, like Kurdish people or Christians, to leave the country and start a new life elsewhere. So these minorities, who were being made invisible in Turkey through forced assimilation, were then rendered invisible again when they came to Germany. And this still plays a role in the nationalist and right-wing ideas that you find in large parts of Turkish-German communities.
In the novel, we see various ways that social questions – Kurdish-Turkish issues, queer identity, xenophobia, patriarchy – intersect and interact in the lives of these characters. Was that an intellectual project of bringing these discourses together? Or is that just how people are?
That’s a good question. I mean, the answer is yes – to both. One thing I found interesting in the German reception was that some critics said, “Oh yeah, this is a very conservative family, and you’re telling me that not just one but two siblings are queer? Isn’t that unrealistic?” And I wonder if they have statistics for that (laughs) or why they want to challenge it.
I’m mostly trying to write characters that feel alive to me, and to me it would feel unrealistic to write a story about six people in a family where everybody is straight. And with the Kurdish element, the gender element, well, that’s all to do with the subjects I have chosen for my book. If I’m writing about Turkish guest workers, then it’s clear that they’re not as homogenous as others might assume. And if I’m writing a family story, then of course it’s about patriarchy. What else could a family story be about? So it was very natural that these topics all came into the story.
They also happen to be topics that I have worked on intellectually, outside of fiction. But it’s important to me, too, that I am not writing an essay here – I’m not trying to give anyone lessons. I’m just trying to tell a story that feels real.
You’ve done a lot of nonfiction work as a journalist, editor, and columnist. How does that interact with your literary fiction?
When I started working as a journalist, I found it fun and exciting – I became a different person just by experiencing this process of writing something that gets published and then people have opinions about it. It’s such a different way of being in the world. But I also felt as if I wanted to write in a different way as well, so I started experimenting with fiction, and this literary writing began taking up more and more of my time.
For a while, it was fun to do both at once. But I have been getting tired of writing opinion pieces, especially. We live in this culture where everybody always has to have an opinion about something. And to be contributing to that as a professional – I don’t know, it feels weird. I love writing my Guardian column, and I love working with the editors, but some of the time I just wonder who cares what I think about this or that.
Still, the newspaper likes it, and they say it’s being read a lot. So I’ll just keep doing it, I guess (laughs). Everybody needs a job.
- Djinns trans. Jon Cho-Polizzi, available now from University of Wisconsin Press (US), forthcoming from Peirene Press (UK) on Oct 22
