In September, the far right, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party won the most seats in a state election for the first time. Concerns about the AfD’s rise have been growing for some years, but this was the clearest sign yet of the threat the party poses to Germany. As such, the arrival of Djinns in English couldn’t feel more timely.
Djinns — a word of Arabic origin that one character, Peri, says can be used to mean “everything we think is strange, different, unnatural” — was a bestseller upon publication in Germany in 2022. The book, the second novel by Berlin-based Fatma Aydemir, herself the granddaughter of Turkish-Kurdish immigrants, is a deft, multi-layered story of one immigrant family’s life. It feels epic, although its primary storyline happens over just a couple of days in 1999.
We begin with 59-year-old Hüseyin in the Istanbul apartment where he hopes to retire. As he walks its rooms he looks back over what he has endured since first going to Germany as a Gastarbeiter (guest worker) in 1971, and then settling with his family in Rheinstadt, Thuringia — the state the AfD won this year.
But then Hüseyin suffers a heart attack and dies. The Muslim tradition is to bury loved ones as soon as possible, so his wife and four children hurry to Istanbul.
The novel’s six chapters are each told from a different family member’s perspective. We hear from the couple’s youngest son, 15-year-old Ümit, who is caught up in struggles with his sexuality. His oldest sister, single mother Sevda, fell out with their parents years ago. Peri, a student in Frankfurt, has begun to question their parents’ values, not least the unspoken rule that the family doesn’t speak Kurdish any more. And then there is Hakan, angry at the lot his child-of-immigrants status has handed him, despite his love for that most German obsession: driving on the autobahn at breakneck speed.
Most moving is their mother, Emine’s, chapter. None of her children know the extent of her trauma, until Hüseyin’s death leads to her disclosure. “He took away and gave me everything, your father,” she says.
Aydemir is unrelenting in her depiction of racism. Arsonists target migrant homes, and racist slurs are frequent. But despite this weighty subject matter, its language is playful, translated with a lightness by Jon Cho-Polizzi. Upon hearing of her husband’s death, Emine “had become a collapsed heap of limbs . . . as impossible to reconstitute as the stewed meat in a pot of goulash”. It’s a wonderful, awful image.
Aydemir’s novel is about Turkish migrants in Germany. But its majesty as a work of literature is in its universality. All over the world, people choose or are forced to leave their homelands. Working out how we can better welcome these migrants is essential if democracy is to survive, and to do so we must open our ears to the reality of their experiences. English-language readers of Djinns must not see this as a German problem; as is evident in the rhetoric of British far-right politicians, the task is ours, too.
Djinns by Fatma Aydemir, translated by Jon Cho-Polizzi, Peirene Press £12.99, 368 pages
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