Nostalgia and religious faith as parts of diaspora biographies (English)
Veronika Bernard
Nostalgia and religious faith as parts of diaspora biographies: Hülya Kandemir’s „Himmelstochter“ and Barbara Frischmuth’s „Der Sommer, in dem Anna verschwunden war”
Memory and Nostalgia
Ege International Cultural Studies Symposium, May 9-11, 2007
Abstract
Hülya Kandemir’s autobiographic book „Himmelstochter“ (heaven’s daughter) of 2005 is indeed a rarity on the German book market as it tells the story of a young woman of Turkish migrant background living in Germany and having decided to turn to living a life as a strictly and publicly believing Muslim. Barbara Frischmuth’s novel “Der Sommer, in dem Anna verschwunden war” (the summer in which Anna had disappeared) also presents a female character (the absent protagonist’s daughter) of an at least partly given migrant background who decides to turn to religious faith. However, she takes a different way than the protagonist in Kandemir’s text.
The paper proposed will analyze Kandemir’s and Frischmuth’s texts concerning a potential relation between diaspora, nostalgia and a tendency to turn to religious faith. In particular, the paper will discuss the question in how far a life in cultural diaspora may have led the characters to a nostalgic image of their family history, and how those two aspects may have helped in leading them onto a way of religious faith. It will further compare the two differing ways to religious faith as they are presented in the texts and will discuss whether the narrative perspective on the problem taken in Frischmuth’s text is relevant in terms of a comment on the relation of nostalgia, diaspora and religious faith discussed.
Dear ladies and gentlemen,
over the next 20 minutes I am going to discuss the following points with regard to each a text written by Barbara Frischmuth and Hülya Kandemir:
- Is a potential relation shown between diaspora, nostalgia and a tendency to turn to religious faith in the texts?
Ø In how far may a life in cultural diaspora have led the characters to a nostalgic image of their family life/ history?
Ø May cultural diaspora plus a nostalgic family view have helped in leading them onto a way of religious faith?
Ø Is there a possible relevance of age?
- In how far do the two ways to religious faith as they are presented in the texts differ from each other?
- Is the narrative perspective on the problem taken in Frischmuth’s text relevant in terms of a comment on the relation of nostalgia, diaspora and religious faith?
Is a potential relation shown between diaspora, nostalgia and a tendency to turn to religious faith in the texts?
Let me start off on this point with two quotations. The first one is taken from Barbara Frischmuth’s book “Der Sommer in dem Anna verschwunden war” (The summer when Anna had disappeared), the second one from Hülya Kandemir’s text “Himmelstochter. Mein Weg vom Popstar zu Allah” (Heaven’s daughter. My way from being a popstar to subordinating to Allah).
The first one: You say “us” and mean somewhere back in Anatolia. But we live here, that’s something different. I will have to decide in case I wish to belong (page 44).
The second one: Suddenly I saw two different ways in front of me. On the one hand side I saw myself on my way to success and fame, on the way to my breakthrough as a singer. On the opposite side I saw myself walking down a street wearing a scarf; I was on Allah’s way. When I looked at the side of fame and success I did not realize anything special. … Then my thoughts wandered to the opposite side. On this side I saw myself feeling happy, glad and free. At this moment I knew that this was the right side for me. I felt the devotion which is expressed in wearing the scarf (page 16).
The sentences of the first quotation are spoken by Nilüfer, Anna’s and Ali’s teen-age daughter. They are part of a quite fierce dispute between her and her Turkish Alevite father who deeply disagrees with his daugther’s new way of dressing. In fact, she has turned to wearing a scarf and clothes covering all parts of her body apart from her face in public after her mother Anna has left her family without warning.
The second quotation presents the central character of Hülya Kandemir’s text reflecting on that particular evening when she decided to wear a scarf and clothes completely covering her body in public in order to show her submission to faith.
Both quotations show characters who feel urged to decide. But decide concerning what, and above all, what for, the reader may ask?
Well, let’s have a look at their situations in life. Both are shown to be characters who feel to be in situations they consider to be volatile, instable and insecure resulting from some sort of change or loss in their lives. So the decision the two of them feel urged to make, most probably, is meant to provide a state of stability and safety in their lives similar to the one they feel to have lost.
However, which former situation provided this particular feeling of safety to them? The texts show that both of them seem to link stability and safety with belonging. So in other words, they miss living as members of a group. For both the family has been such a group.
With Kandemir’s adult protagonist who has moved to her own flat years ago, has been married and divorced – so also this version of family life has gone to pieces – and who is about to make a carreer as a singer (or, maybe, even not to make it) family seems to mean the reminiscence of her life as one of ten children, both brothers and sisters, and a caring mother and a father she deeply admires. Her family life has been so special for her that she even has a term describing its peculiarity: It is the “Kandemir system”. She talks about her parents’ family history at quite an extent and provides the reader with a lot of anecdotal pieces on her childhood and youth as a member of her family. Those pieces are of two kinds: One kind illustrates the normality, warmth and cosyness of this life and the other kind focusses on those occurrences which were able to somehow disturb this normality, as there were her father’s illness, her sister rebelling against their parents by accusing them of not really behaving like sincere Muslims, and her brother trying to change his sister’s behaviour on the beach due to his religiously inspired ideas.
For the teen-age character of Nilüfer in Frischmuth’s text family means the situation of still living as a child within a family. However, this family has changed dramatically within a very short period of time. It is not the same family anymore after the mother has disappeared within hours. The familiar group has been broken up, and the feeling of belonging has become obsolete. However, Nilüfer would still like to live her life as Inimini, as she prefers to be called instead of Nilüfer.
Those situations are embedded in a more general situation of a cultural or even a personal diaspora. Kandemir’s character lives a life as a 2nd generation migrant of Turkish origin in Germany. In Frischmuth’s text Nilüfer lives a life of being the daughter to a culturally mixed couple, consisting of an Austrian mother who has returned from Germany to the place of her birth in Austria and a Turkish Alevite father who has fled his country for not excatly defined reasons (maybe religious, maybe political ones) and who has followed his wife to Austria where he works as a waiter for the current Turkish leaseholders of the neighbouring restaurant after having gone bankrupt with exactly this restaurant which formerly belonged to his mother-in-law’s foster parents. Anna, Nilüfer’s mother, has been the only logical link to the place where the family has lived for several years. When the mother leaves the family also this link is gone.
Due to this constellation Nilüfer has lived in a double-diaspora situation being made up by cultural and personal factors. It is exactly this situation she hints at when she tells her father in that dispute I have been quoting from before: So tell me, how we are, who I am or better, who I am supposed to be (page 44), after her father has told her: I am your father, and you know that I do not belong to them.We are different (page 44). And when he replies that he actually thought she knew who they were because he had told her for several times, she answers: You have told me, baba, but I have never been there. … Those are just stories to me. I am half-half, so I have to decide (page 44).
The search for a new, maybe, larger and more universal group or community to belong to, therefore, looks to be the logical step in the situations the characters feel to be in.
At this stage it is important to point out that we are talking about how they feel. What the texts present is the characters’ very particular view of the situation from the inside, and there is nothing objective about these feelings. Nevertheless, their feelings are the relevant motivation in their decisions as they are shown in the texts.
However, feeling the way they do they could have decided for what so ever. Just as Kandemir describes her vision of that particular night she could also have decided to further invest energy into her career as a singer, and as Nilüfer’s father puts it in the dispute with his daughter by telling her, that he had been prepared for a lot of things in bringing up a teen-age daughter: for picking her up from a discotheque deep in the night, for being confronted with his daughter piercing her nose and dragon-tatooing her back.
Still, Nilüfer as well as the main character in Kandemir’s text, both choose faith.
So the question arising from this is: What do they link with the ideas of belonging, stability and safety in their diaspora situations with their familiar group environments breaking so that their unfulfilled needs lead them to faith? This question will arise in particular if you compare those two female characters to the other members of their families who can be seen as sort of counter-parts to them.
You will see that, for instance, their parents have been in similar situations, still, they have taken different ways than their children.
Kandemir’s protagonist has got parents who had to leave their country in search of a better life and lost the stability of a majority cultural environment to a minority cultural background. Still, they do not turn to a publicly displayed belief as two of their daughters (the second one does at least temporarily) and one of their sons do. Nilüfer’s father had to leave his homecountry years ago without seeing a realistic chance to return, and now he has not only lost his wife, he is alone with two teen-age children. Still, he does not turn to be a public believer, and even Onur, his son and Nilüfer’s brother, does not do so although he is in a quite similar situation as his sister.
A second look at the quotation from Frischmuth’s text may lead us to a, propably relevant, difference between those two classes of characters. The parents are rooted in an original cultural background which provides its limits and liberties and by this gives excatly this feeling of stability and belonging the two characters are longing for. They own what we may call an individual cultural memory.
Nilüfer as well as Kandmir’s central character lack these roots. The only ideas concerning their family roots they can rely on are holiday reminiscences in Kandemir’s case and “stories” in Nilüfer’s. Those diffused cultural ideas cannot be called pieces of a cultural memory they can only be considered a nostalgic cultural patchwork in its emotional qualities and in its lack of coherent substance.
The characters are aware of their lack of cultural roots and they are quite emotional about their individual (cultural) situations. Hence, in their diaspora situations they feel the urge to go “back to their roots” without actually knowing what precisely their roots are.
In fact, what they define to be their cultural roots are no real roots but rather the ideas of nostalgically shaped cultural roots, just as Nilüfer puts it when she explains her move to faith after her father has accused her of not really knowing anything about the faith she was about to join: I have decided to do what I consider the right thing for me. I like the way Nermin and Hülya dress, and I would also like to join them in their Koran lessons (page 45). The description Kandemir’s protagonist gives concerning her scarf-decision and what she likes about wearing a scarf reads quite similar to this.
However, just Kandemir’s protagonist and her brother stay on this way. Nilüfer in Frischmuth’s text and the protagonist’s sister in Kandemir’s one stop being enthusiastic about belief and finally stop wearing scarves. Nilüfer already does so after some months, Kandemir’s sister after some years in her mid-twenties.
So there might also be a point in including the aspect of age in the discussion whether there was a tendency to turn to faith in a situation of cultural diaspora.
All these aspects fuse with the ideas the characters link with family life: It is not family life with all its ups and downs they are missing; it’s the feeling of family life they are missing. And this, again, is rather a case of nostalgia than of memory.
So, summing up this point, it can be said that as soon as age, circumstances and individual needs meet, indeed, a tendency towards faith may arise, at least in the texts discussed.
In how far do the two ways to religious faith as they are presented in the texts differ from each other?
This, however, actually raises a further question concerning the two characters’ ways to faith:
Namely, is it really belief they are looking for – or does the religious community rather serve as a means to fulfil their wish to belong to a larger community which we have defined as one of their central needs before, and by chance this community is a religious one?
Indeed, the only point both characters think to be able to take for granted concerning their cultural backgrounds and their personal situations is that they are Muslims. But even with this point they, due to the lack of cultural memory, on the one hand, do not make the difference and, on the other hand, long for the real “thing” in their effort to define their identities as shown in the quotation: they try to be the better Muslims if compared to their parents. For their parents even in a diaspora situation an urge like this has not been relevant for the reasons given before.
Still, in this context there are two other interesting cases of contrast: that of Onur, Nilüfer’s blond brother, who is called Omo by everyone – a pun both on his blond hair and on the name of a quite popular washing powder in Austria, and that of Nilfüfer’s two friends, the neighbouring sisters Nermin and Hülya.
Nilüfer says of her brother, Onur, that their father has pulled him on his side, meaning by this, he has made him interested in the Alevite movement, and in a way she is right. The text discloses piece by piece that Ali and Onur both went to Vienna now and again to meet with people at some Alevite culture centre. And, indeed, Onur does not feel the urge to become the “better” Muslim as many of the “angry young men” at his age may have done. In Nilüfer’s family Nilüfer is the “angry young man”, so to speak, whereas in Kandemir’s text the main character is just one out of three: she, her sister and her brother. With Nermin and Hülya it is Nermin. They are same age as Nilüfer and their father supports their religious ambitions because he thinks then they “will not make trouble”. Although both wear scarves and attend Muslim religious education provided by a Hodja, only Nermin takes the words of the Koran literally just as Kandemir’s protagonist finally does. She will not take any criticism on this, and will not search for reason behind the words and the rules laid down in the Koran. Nermin’s sister Hülya, on the other hand, allies with Nilüfer, when she starts questioning the Hodja’s words and the rules of mainstream Islam as being formalistic and lacking reason after having participated in the Hodja’s lessons for a few weeks.
Finally Nilüfer reduces her religious efforts and once more changes her way of clothing. She turns to wearing a cap instead of a scarf, trousers and blouses or T-shirts which just cover the upper parts of her arms down to the elbow, whereas Kandemir’s protagonist is really enthusiastic about the feeling of safety the religious rules give her as a woman. She understands mainstream Islam as a religious and cultural system which by no means restricts her personal freedom by giving clear rules. It is rather seen as a system in which the main character feels personally safe due to those clear rules and limits given and agreed on by believers.
So, summing up this point, we can say that all this may at least serve as evidence that it is not belief as such which attracts the two characters, but rather what goes with it.
Is the narrative perspective on the problem taken in Frischmuth’s text relevant in terms of a comment on the relation of nostalgia, diaspora and religious faith discussed.
In Frischmuth’s text this sneaky suspicion in particular is fostered by the narrative perspective on the occurrences provided by Anna’s mother who has come to live with Anna’s husband and children after her daughter has disappeared and by Anna’s childhood nanny. Both are shown to appreciate the second turn in Nilüfer’s behaviour after they have been worrying about the girl, and after Anna’s mother has been deeply disapproving of the girl’s religious ambitions. From their statements it becomes clear that from their point of view Nilüfer is about to turning back to normality and showing all signs that reason has won over non-reason. For them the girl’s behaviour is an expression of protest against her situation and of age-related rebellion. To point this out Nilüfer’s grandmother even tries to ridicule the girl’s religious ambitions by putting a sign “Caution! Alcohol!” on Nilüfer’s favourite chocolates.
On the contrary, Anna’s mother is quite serious about finding out and understanding about Ali’s cultural and religious roots, and Anna’s childhoood nanny does the same.
So, it can be said that in a way the narrative perspective in Frischmuth’s text can be called a comment on a possible relation of nostalgia, diaspora and religious faith: It is a thing which ought to be evaluated with caution in terms of the underlying motivations.