By Artun Ak
When I stopped by a bookstore in Berlin this past summer to buy a copy of Fatma Aydemir’s 2022 bestseller, Dschinns, I could not find any on the shelves, so I asked the employee whether they had one in the back. Visibly frustrated with himself, he mumbled that “there should always be one out,” and hurried to the storage. Soon he was back with two copies: one for me, one for the display.
More than two years after its publication, Aydemir’s page-turner is still so popular and beloved among critics and readers alike that it gives shopkeepers grief about potentially lost business. Given this state of affairs, I would like to take Jon Cho-Polizzi’s admirably seamless and culturally cognizant English translation of this indubitably important book — according to him, “one of the definitive novels of our generation” (“Translator’s Introduction,” xvi) — as an occasion to work through some of my quandaries about and around the work.
~
Shortlisted for the Deutschen Buchpreis, adapted for the stage thrice, and supposedly being considered for the screen, Dschinns/Djinns tells the story of a German-Turkish family shuttling between the two countries, from Hüseyin and Emine’s rough upbringing in rural eastern Anatolia to their uneasy move as guest workers to Germany, where they raise four very different children, each of whom gets a chapter of their own with a limited third-person narrator. There is the adolescent soccer player Ümit wrestling with his budding homosexuality, his burden exacerbated by cruel teammates and a well-meaning but therefore even more cruel coach (“But you know what the good thing about this problem is? There is a cure” [Djinns 42]), and then there is Sevda the (mostly rightfully) ever-resentful girlboss, who dumps her bum of a husband, takes over the neighborhood Italian restaurant, and militantly parents her own two children (“She doesn’t want her children to be afraid of her. She only wants them to obey” [101]). Her younger sister, Peri, hate-writes a master’s thesis on the aphorisms of Nietzsche (arguably, she misunderstands his “nihilism,” characterizing it as the belief that “all things are equally meaningless,” [135] but that need not be adjudicated here) and tries to convince her mother, to no avail, of the discursive construction of gender, whereas Hakan, the troubled older brother raised on rap and now addicted to Red Bull and speeding, is engaged in some shady used car business and dating a certain Lena, his polar opposite (“hippie clothes,” “teacher in training” [165]), in an attempt to save himself from himself.
Djinns begins, however, at the end, when Hüseyin retires after years of inhumane drudgery at a factory and decides to return not to the village, but to Istanbul, that metropolis he had passed through a couple times on the way to Europe. He has bought a flat there, large enough for the entire family, and his wish is to settle back “home” for good. I am quoting the entire first page to give a sense of the writing:
Hüseyin… do you know who you are, Hüseyin, when you see the shining contours of your face in the reflection on the balcony door? When you open the door, stride across the balcony, and a warm breeze caresses your face while the setting sun glimmers between the rooftops of the apartments in Zeytinburnu like a giant tangerine? You rub your eyes. Maybe, you think, maybe every obstacle and every conflict in this life was only there so that, one day, you could stand up here and know: I’ve earned this for myself. With the sweat of my brow.
You hear the first evening call to prayer from the balcony of the apartment — this spacious, three-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor. The apartment you worked and saved for — for almost thirty years — while raising your four children and providing your wife with an admittedly humble but never meager life. You lived your days to the rhythm of three shifts, Hüseyin. You took on every Sunday, every holiday, overtime. Took advantage of every available bonus in the metalworks to make sure your family could get by. To buy new football cleats for the little one, pay off the older one’s debts, and still set a little something aside. And now you’ve finally done it. You’re fifty-nine and a homeowner. In a few years, when Ümit finishes school and you can finally leave Germany — that cold, cold-hearted country — there’ll be an apartment waiting for you in Istanbul with your name at the door: Hüseyin! You’ve finally found a place you can call home. (3)
Aydemir/Cho-Polizzi’s prose is neither lavish nor barebones, but functional: sentences, dutifully, often start with the subject, and are rarely to be hindered by hefty subclauses; their lengths are optimized for readerly ease, and as for the word choices, they are never more than what they must be. Sure, there are the Turkish words and references, but are they really that outlandish in the context of the German literary scene that has had its Emine Sevgi Özdamars and Feridun Zaimoğlus since the 1990s?
The American reading public might have a somewhat more challenging, and therefore productive, experience with this aspect of the book, but still, I believe that we have a language here that mostly effaces itself for the sake of the story, thus giving us, as The Guardian’s mini-review has it, “a big old family saga to lose yourself in” (if the language was otherwise, such an immersion would have been disrupted). Indeed, this simplicity is a major reason why the play in the text with the gender-neutral third-person Turkish pronoun o — which leads into a trans subplot which I will not spoil, but it’s either brilliant (because it is so overkill) or outrageous (because it is so overkill) — is so pronounced: as it farcically adheres to the pedantry of German grammar, it also exhibits, for a change, the work’s linguistic being.
On the other hand, this self-effacement of language — which, in case it is not clear, requires extraordinary skill, discipline, and restraint on an author’s part — is also quite dangerous, because it makes every mishap extra jarring. There is, for example, that whimsical “giant tangerine” (gigantische Apfelsine [Dschinns 9]) in the first paragraph quoted above, which pulls me out of this scene of a promise of relief after much toil and suffering, and puts me in some acid-riddled Los Angeles vibe — perhaps in Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice? And it soon turns out that this description of the sun is the first in a series of curious food metaphors. When Ümit sees his mother crying on the couch, he perceives her body as “a collapsed heap of limbs strewn across their sofa, as impossible to reconstitute as the stew meat in a pot of goulash” (Djinns 13). Cho-Polizzi’s translation actually makes this comparison of a physically and psychologically exhausted body to a tasty East European delicacy more, well, palatable, albeit only slightly, by putting some syntactical and conceptual distance between the limbs and the dish, whereas the original German pairs the (lying-around of the) limbs directly with the goulash, having to then explain itself: “Ümits Mutter bestand nur noch aus zerfallenen Gliedern, die auf dem Sofa verteilt herumlagen wie Gulasch, unmöglich, sie jemals wieder sinnvoll zusammenzusetzen” (Dschinns 25). And later, when Peri tries to imagine what the skin of a dead body would feel like, she thinks of “an orange overwintering in the cold of their balcony. Not a frozen orange, but rather, a very cold orange that had absorbed the winter night into its flesh, saving its chill away in the tension of an empty, lifeless peel” (Djinns 118). In having to deploy the words “empty” (leer) and “lifeless” (leblos) (Dschinns 165), and thus coming close to setting up a tautology (dead skin ~ empty and lifeless peel), Peri practically confesses to the inefficacy of her own bizarre metaphor. And given that this series of food comparisons is distributed across three narratorial voices, it seems more likely that the culprit here is not these characters with their idiosyncrasies, but the author herself.
~
“But wait, who is dead?” — I hear you asking, which brings me to my next quarrel. Well, Hüseyin is dead. At the end of the short opening chapter, he has a heart attack that he does not survive, which triggers the story’s main action of the entire family rushing to Istanbul to attend his funeral, the text jumping back and forth in time to relay, in complementary bits and pieces, their individual and interpersonal histories. There is something sensationalist in jumpstarting a book with the surprise death of a sympathetic character, who, after years of enduring societal abuse, is about to get what he has always wanted, which Aydemir, in the course of a four-page long description of Hüseyin’s endless dying, does not fail to emphasize: “This is the end. Finished. Over. This is how you’ll die. Covered in your own vomit. A sticky mess of fruit in the apartment you dreamed of all your life” (Djinns 10).
This trick, if you will, is repeated in the book’s concluding chapter to a wholly different effect, when most of the family joins Hakan, who arrives in Istanbul too late for the funeral, in what is, to me, the funniest twist in the entire book, i.e, they drive overnight down to the Southern coast to relax and vacay, while Emine and Sevda stay in Istanbul, in Hüseyin’s oppressive apartment. As mentioned, Sevda is consumed by resentment, because she was initially left behind in Turkey to take care of her grandma, thus delaying her arrival in Germany, and on top of it, Emine did not enroll her in school when she finally made it over. Soon enough, they begin arguing, during which it is revealed that there was a fifth child, Emine and Hüseyin’s first daughter, whom they were (or more accurately, perhaps: she was) forced to give to Hüseyin’s older brother and his wife, as they could not have a child themselves. It is also verified for good that the family is actually German-Kurdish, Hüseyin having made them suppress their Kurdish identity to survive Turkish state terror. By the end of the argument, Emine has a reckoning, and accepts her mistakes as a mother. She cannot change anything now, she knows it, we know that she knows it, but the finality of her case is still bluntly underlined by an earthquake, which sort of feels like a natural manifestation of Sevda’s rage or a perverse revenge — and, it seems, kills Emine (“You’re saying your final prayer, and suddenly it no longer smells of rubble” [Djinns 269]).
The book could have ended with her stunned on the balcony, thus gracefully closing the cycle, or, for a more off-kilter option, with an outro on a beach in Antalya, but what this impending death enables Aydemir to do is to have Emine dream of that alternative scenario where she has done better as a parent, and there it is, a dinner table with the entire family, including, at the very end, the fifth child she had to abandon:
This is your home, Emine. Your own place in the world. The place where all the people you love are together. The people who love you. The place where everyone always forgives each other. Because forgiveness is the only thing that helps against our loneliness. Because forgiving others is the only way to find forgiveness. The only way to forgive yourself. (270)
Even if Hüseyin’s death could be described as sinister but smart — one wonders who all these people that mattered so much to him are, or, more neutrally or formally, one wants to see how the novel is to follow up on this shocking turn of events — this last bit of overwrought melodrama (I believe we are supposed to think something along the lines of “ach!, poor, poor woman, look at her delusionally imagining the wholesome life she always desired, but could not bring into existence, while being crushed by the building where her husband also succumbed to death, also worn down by the weight of all the years” as we shed a tear or two and nod our heads) culminating in such new-agey, self-helpy pop-knowledge is at best ineffective, and at worst: cringe.
(These two chapters dedicated to Hüseyin and Emine are written in second-person, with the narrator talking directly to the characters. This narrator, or these narrators, are arguably the titular djinns, their name coming from the Arabic word for “demon” — although, as Peri tells Ümit, they are “neither good nor evil… at least not according to the Quran” [Djinns 134]. The point is that they “are capable of remaining unnoticed until the moment of catastrophe when the reality of their existence finally becomes undeniable” [135]. Given that Hüseyin’s djinn promises to look over the apartment after he dies, it is possible that Emine is possessed by this same guardian djinn, who helps her slip into the aforementioned fantasy.)
~
In an appallingly condescending, if not racially charged review of Djinns that could only have been written by a white German — in response to the various street-slang and “vulgarities” populating the novel, Iris Radisch writes: “that’s how one speaks when one is young and angry and feels excluded and prosecuted in this bleak caricature of a country with its ‘eternally gray skies’ and ‘eternally sad faces,’” (“Verficktes Land”; trans. mine), as if one cannot swear in a literary work, and as if Germany is not the country of gray skies and sad faces — she also draws attention to this earthquake: “everything, even nature, is roped into serving this political novel, one that is ready to sacrifice literary complexity for the clarity of a spotless set of convictions” (ibid). By the time one reads this last line in Radisch’s review, it is hard not to feel that she is simply pissed about Aydemir having been oh so mean to Germany, and a “literarily complex” work would have, I don’t know, balanced out every instance of post/migrant pain with a Hans oder Heide extending their hand to Hüseyin or Emine.
In any case, per Radisch, there is minimal place in a literary work for what she derisively calls a “mode of lament” (Klagemodus) (ibid). It goes without saying that I disagree with this: coolly detached centrisms that such a conviction often ends up promoting tend to be cowardly, (purposefully) ignorant, and boring. And yet, there is a kernel of truth in Radisch’s emphasis on the spotlessness of Aydemir’s novel. When I was not stumbling over the occasional faulty literary device or rolling my eyes at the excess of sentiment as sampled above, my experience of reading this book was an uncanny affirmation of what I already know.
The story lines and cultural forces that constitute the book make too much sense, as if I have encountered them millions of times, and this is because the text shies away from most details that could not be assimilated into the myriad societal patterns or logics it wants to represent (for a counter-example, cf. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, which also goes for a similar topical maximality — “everything that matters for the moment has to be addressed, has to be talked about” — but manages, radically more successfully, even if at times a little obnoxiously, in making each topic appear in its fullness). Except for Sevda, who I believe is the only one who gets close to, and maybe even succeeds in, evading such subsummation, most of the characters feel less real and more typical. As Stefanie Wirsching writes, for example, “the part with Hakan seems to be there mostly for the purpose of talking about police violence” (“‘Dschinns’ — so ist das Buch”; trans. mine), which is to say, Hakan is merely a tool to make a critical point regarding policing that is simply not novel (yes, cops are racist; yes, they are cruel).
As the accumulation of such a typology, what we have between the two disasters (Hüseyin’s heart attack, the earthquake) is a narrativized introduction, and little more, to the disastrous experience of being a racialized minority in Germany — and Turkey: I am excited to see how Djinns performs over there, where engaging with “the Kurdish question” in a way that is not sanctioned by the state can easily get you behind bars. In any case, for those who themselves share in such post/migrant experiences, there should not be much that is new or surprising here — but perhaps this is precisely why the book sells so well: this schablonizing mirror of a novel hurts, yes, but it soothes as it hurts, as it hurts so familiarly — and for white Germans, these are lessons that they should have learned and knowledge they should have acquired a long time ago. If, as Denis Scheck’s blurb on the back of the German version claims, Djinns is “an eye-opening reading,” this has less to do with the book’s virtues and merits, and more to do with the truly depressing state of German public consciousness.
Aydemir, Fatma. Djinns. Translated by Jon Cho-Polizzi. The University of Wisconsin Press, 2024.
Artun Ak is a PhD candidate in German Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, with a focus on the early 20th century from a media studies perspective. His dissertation investigates the “returns of nature” in Weimar film culture, as seen in theoretical texts by Häfker, Balázs, and Kracauer, and in films by Murnau, Reinert, and others
Works Cited
Aydemir, Fatma, Djinns, trans. by Jon Cho-Polizzi (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2024).
___. Dschinns (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 2022).
Cho-Polizzi, Jon, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Fatma Aydemir, Djinns, trans. by Jon Cho-Polizzi (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2024).
Cummins, Anthony, “The best new novels for autumn 2024, from Sally Rooney to Jonathan Coe and Haruki Murakami,” The Guardian, August 25, 2024.
Radisch, Iris, “Verficktes Land,” Zeit, no. 9, February 27, 2022. Wirsching, Stefanie, “‘Dschinns’ — so ist das Buch,” Augsburger