Juggling Burdens of Representation: Black, Red, Gold and Turquoise

Abstract

This essay suggests an alternative to the usual practice of categorising migrant writers by generation, in order to counter the teleological tendency in some recent commentaries on German-Turkish writing which celebrate the youngest writers as the most 'advanced'. Instead I put forward the idea that different writers (and writers at different stages in their careers) adopt different strategies in order to cope with the 'burden of representation' which is imposed on them as migrant/minority artists by the public. I survey German-Turkish novelists, outlining a tentative typology of such strategies. 'Axial writing' (directly thematising migrant experience) is the commonest, and has many sub-varieties, but the alternatives are just as interesting.In memoriam Kemal Kurt This essay 1 explores German-Turkish novelists' responses to the burdens of representation imposed by the social fact of being a German-Turkish novelist. Writers and critics alike often resort to metaphors of the circus and gymnastics -tightrope-walking, doing the splits, balancing acts -to convey the position of artists of hyphenated national/ethnic identity. 2 In the German-Turkish context, these metaphors of performance can be alternatives to the predominant 'bridge' imagery, querying its architectural rigidity. 3 'Juggling' might seem unwarrantedly playful, in a time of intensifying conflict over multiculturalism, migration, and relations between the West and the rest. But perhaps the most valuable achievement of the most interesting hyphenated writers -and others -who tackle these issues is to enable us to 1 Research for this paper was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council through a multi-disciplinary project titled 'Axial Writing' (award number L214252030) within the 'Transnational Communities' research programme based at the University of Oxford (http://www.transcomm. ox.ac.uk). 2 For example: Denn du tanzt auf einem Seil: Positionen deutschsprachiger MigrantInnenliteratur , ed. Sabine Fischer and Moray McGowan, Tübingen 1997; 'Doch seit 150 Jahren streckt sich [die Türkei] auch geistig zwischen Moderne und Tradition, Morgen-und Abendland. Ein Spagat, der den türki-schen

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