Mother Tongue

»If only I knew where I lost my mother tongue,« the narrator asks herself in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s 1990 prose debut. After many years in Berlin, Turkish, her first language, has become foreign to her. In search of her roots, she falls in love with the scribe Ibni Abdullah, who introduces her to the »grandfather tongue« Arabic, the language of »holy« love and the Quran. And she tells the fairy tale of the poor Turkish peasant who arrives in faraway Germany and finds himself working as a street sweeper – like so many of his people who, in the sixties and seventies, are transformed into the servant caste of West German cities. Ultimately, even Ophelia herself is demoted from the stage of her homeland and becomes a cleaner in a German theatre in this clever, confident book told with puckish irony.

»Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s work opens up a both intellectual and poetic dialogue between different languages, cultures and world views.« Jury of the Georg-Büchner-Preis 2022

»The book is tender and scruffy, raw and sensitive, pious and vulgar. It drenches the reader with downpours changing between defiance and sobbing, between farce and sudden grief. Its language is a pile of shards with sparkling edges.« Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»The dialectics of the (verbal) self-assurance is what creates the pleasure of reading [Özdamar’s] prose.« Frankfurter Rundschau