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Narratives that originate at border crossings cannot be bound by national borders, languages, and literary and critical traditions. Born of crisis and change, suffering alternately from amnesia and too much remembering, and precariously positioned at the interstices of different spaces, histories, and languages, they seek to name and configure cultural and literary production in their own terms and to enter novel forms of inter/transcultural dialogue.1
BORN IN MALATYA, EASTERN ANATOLIA, in I946, the Turkish-German writer Emine Sevgi Özdamar first travelled to Germany when she was nineteen, to spend two years in Berlin as a guest-worker. She returned to Turkey in 1967, and trained to be an actor at an Istanbul drama school. After the military putsch of 1971 she was arrested and briefly detained for socialist activities. The continuing political instability in Turkey motivated her return to Germany, this time to East Berlin, to work with the Brechtian theatre director Benno Besson, whom she later accompanied to France. Returning then to Germany, she settled into a position at the theatre in Bochum, and it was there that she began to write, while continuing to act, direct, and appear in films. Her freelance writing later took her to Berlin, Düsseldorf, France, Frankfurt (as the thirtieth writer in residence for Bergen-Enkheim), and, most recently, back to Berlin, where she was the 2009 recipient of the Kunstpreis Berlin. She has written short stories, plays, and novels, using her adopted language of German.
As a former guest- worker who has made Germany her home, writing in German, she represents one of the new "diasporas of advanced capital" in the metropolitan centres of Europe, as Vijay Mishra calls them.3 Gayatri Spivak refers to these groups more polemically as "transnationals" in the context of a "'neo-liberal' world economic system, which, in the name of Development [...] removes all barriers between itself and fragile national economies, so that any possibility of building for social redistribution is severely damaged."4 Her description of the migrations and 'border crossings' in response to economic factors over which the migrants have no control conveys a sense of the essential rootlessness and powerlessness of such people; the term 'diaspora', on the other hand, suggests groups who - for whatever reason - have arrived and settled in a...