Foreign in my own country
By Dorte on Tuesday, April 29 2008, 12:34 - Permalink
By MÜJGAN, Istanbul
I was only about 14 when my whole family decided to return home, back to our home country Turkey. Return back? For me it was not a return back. The only return I could have made was going back to Germany. Anyway, I suddenly found myself in a foreign country which I only knew from a couple of holiday trips. A country whose language I hardly spoke and where people’s everyday life seemed completely unusual to me.
As a 14-year old I was not authorised to make my own decisions. So I ended up in a country where people gazed with wonder at me, the “almancı”, in fact right from the first day we moved to a small city near Istanbul.
In Germany, I had been a Turk – here I became an almancı. At least people were not able to see that right away, my being different, whereas in Germany, my ethnic origins had always made a visible difference.
Wondering gazes is indeed what I received a lot. So it was not for no reason that sometimes – when once again someone made efforts to hear my broken, newly learned Turkish – I felt like a monkey in the circus having to perform artful stunts. And they burst out laughing when I made a mistake or did not get the gist of a conversation.
This is also why I was relegated to a class two levels below my own. As if a lack of language skills reflected a lack of knowledge!
All too well I remember my first day at my new Turkish school. Our first lesson: social studies. My fellow students are writing an exam. I am told to sit down at one of the empty desks – though luckily I don’t have to take part in the exam. Silently, a little intimidated because everything is new to me, I remain sitting on my chair. As soon as I turn my head to one the students next to me, however, my teacher snaps at me. I don’t understand everything she says, nor why she gets so angry with me. It occurs to me that she might think I had passed a cheat sheet to the other student. I can hardly speak the language and already in the middle of some conspiracy. With my broken Turkish I try to explain that I don’t even know what the lesson is about and that I am not capable of writing cheat sheets. The teacher, however, does not listen to me but gives me a slap in the face. My cheeks are glaring red when I silently sit myself down again.
Yet another custom I would not get used to very easily: that you have to stand up whle you are talking during the lesson. Would the teacher not see me if I didn’t? Was it more healthy to stand while you are talking? Questions like that were impossible to ask. I was also amazed at how easy it was in my new school to receive a slap in the face.
No less than 25 years have passed since then. A quarter of a century. Still, I somehow feel German in many respects. Many people are surprised that I don’t have an accent in Turkish – after all the teasing I tried very hard and put a lot of effort into learning the language really well. When I tell people that forty per cent of me is German, they immediately ask about my parents. I have given up on explaining to everyone why forty per cent of me is German even though my parents are both of Turkish origin. I simply tell people that my grandfather was German. This can make life a lot easier.
I belong to none of the two countries fully – this much I know. Much rather I am somewhere in between, as a kind of hybrid being between both worlds. Even though sixty per cent of me is Turkish, I somehow feel foreign here in Turkey. Which is also positive in a way because it gives me the opportunity to keep a kind of distance from which I can look at this country, always with a certain feeling of estrangement. An estrangement which also helps me when I write. How else would I have been able to write this text?
Translation from German by Dorte HUNEKE
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