ISBN: Ostalo
Godina izdanja: 2007
Jezik: Engleski
Autor: Strani

Kao nova, nekorišćena

Emine Sevgi Özdamar
Martin Chalmers (Translator)

Paperback, 258 pages
Published 2007 by Serpent`s Tail


n 1966, at the age of 16, our unnamed heroine leaves her native Istanbul and signs up as a migrant worker in Germany. Lying about her age, she gets work on an assembly line in West Berlin making radios, and lives in a women`s factory hostel.
`The Bridge of the Golden Horn` is a witty, picaresque account of a precocious teenager refusing to become wise; of a hectic four years lived between Berlin and Istanbul; of a young woman who is obsessed by theatre, film, poetry and left-wing politics.

The Bridge of the Golden Horn
by Emine Sevgi Ozdamar, translated by Martin Chalmers
258pp, Serpent`s Tail, £10.99

In a foreword to this novel, John Berger says the author`s voice `changes age from sentence to sentence`. She talks about dreams like a child, Berger writes, while conveying the `cruelty of the existent like a grandparent`. It is partly this combination of an acutely observant ingenuousness and a satirical worldliness that gives The Bridge of the Golden Horn its mesmerising power and charm.

The novel is the second in a semi-autobiographical trilogy by the Turkish- German writer, actor and director Emine Sevgi Ozdamar. The first, whose lengthy German title translates as Life Is a Caravanserai With Two Doors; I Came In One and Left By the Other (1992), retraced the author`s childhood in a politically turbulent Turkey in the 1950s and early 60s. The Bridge of the Golden Horn (1998), written when Ozdamar was in her early 50s, takes up the story from its teenage narrator`s arrival as a `guest worker` in West Berlin in 1966. Like the author, the would-be actor learns German from scratch as a young adult, working on a factory assembly line making radios to earn money for drama school in Istanbul. The scene shifts between Germany and Turkey, before political events in Turkey drive her away in the mid-70s, to work in Brechtian theatre in East Berlin. Yet the bridge of the title also spans the interlinked worlds of its narrator, as events in Europe and the US, from Vietnam to May 1968, trigger reactions within Turkey.
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The wide-eyed 16-year-old, who has lied about her age to join the tide of Turkish gastarbeiter, at first views Berlin as a film in which `I didn`t have a part`. But her world, as a cloistered middle-class Turkish girl, gradually expands beyond the women`s `hossel` in which she lives opposite the Hebbel theatre, through contact with the Turkish Workers` Association and an avuncular communist and his wife. While the girl initially thinks Nietzsche must be the German prime minister, she builds on her knowledge of Shakespeare with borrowed volumes of Gorky and Engels, Brecht and Büchner.

Alongside growing political awareness, the novel details her sentimental education, as she and the other girls master the `fear of brothers and fathers` that weaves a `spider`s web that covered the whole room and our bodies`. While older women warn against losing `your maidenhead, that is your diamond`, a friend tells her: `You must sleep with men. Free yourself of your diamond, if you want to be a good actress. Only art is important, not the diamond.`

Returning to study theatre in Istanbul, the narrator is taken to be a `modern girl` because she chooses, and pays, her own way. Returnees from Germany are deferred to: `Europe was a club with which we smashed each other`s heads - European shoes never wore out. European dogs had all studied at European dog schools. European women were natural blondes.` She learns acting partly from movies - as her mother learns how to answer the phone stylishly by copying Liz Taylor - while encouraged by her drama teacher to imitate the peasant street-sellers who cross the wobbly, low-slung Bridge of the Golden Horn, and become versed in the `oratorio of Istanbul`.

Yet as her political commitment grows, divisions in the country ossify, from Grey Wolves and Ataturk Youth, to the 15 deputies of her own Workers` party, who `often wore bandages on their noses, mouths and cheeks, because the rightwing deputies beat them up in Parliament`. After a military coup brings a clampdown on students and leftwingers, as volumes of Marx are thrown into the Sea of Marmara, and toilets across the city become blocked with leftwing sons` and daughters` incriminating leaflets and letters, the drama student is arrested, partly accused of aiding the Kurds after a journey to the east of the country. Finally released, she resolves to leave Turkey.

Ozdamar directs an insistently mischievous, deadpan irony at a range of targets, not least the self-important - usually male - political idealists of her day. The narrator explains to a hard-working prostitute that her lover `doesn`t work, because he`s a theorist`, while members of a film commune `went out into the streets and with an eight-millimetre camera filmed people they thought were being exploited`. Moments of unexpected lyricism further leaven the novel. A girl sitting uncomprehending with two men speaking German is `like a lonely person looking for foreign stations on his radio at night`, while men flirting with a group of young women `both smoked cigars. When one spoke the other stretched his head up and blew a couple of rings in the air, and we, the three girls at the table, tried to get our wedding fingers inside these rings and hold on to them.`

At first learning German from newspaper headlines, the fledgling actor returns home with two languages, as both a `Turkish nightingale` and a `German parrot`. Or as her earthier aunt puts it: `The chicken who walks around a lot returns home with lots of shit under its feet.` It is this complex, troubled, enriching accretion of languages and worlds that the novel - in Martin Chalmers`s assured translation - so persuasively captures.