Zafer Senocak – författare

"Germany long ago became part of us German Turks," Zafer Senocak observes. "Are we also a part of Germany?" Gathered here for the first time in English translation, these essays chart a new orientation for German life, culture, and politics beyond the Cold War and at the dawn of an unprecedented era. The 1990s began with national unification between East and West and closed with a radical liberalization of German citizenship law; many questions about the largest minority in this multicultural Germany have yet to be asked. This decade also reeled with war in the Persian Gulf and "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans. As Germans imagine themselves as westerners interacting with Muslim populations at home and abroad, these essays acquire a critical urgency. Senocak reconfigures the Turkish diaspora and the German nation by mapping a "tropical Germany."

In this bilingual collection (Turkish and English), Zafer Senocak returns to the language of his childhood even as he writes from Germany, his home since he was eleven. Readers will find explorations of migration, exile, memory, identity, and the fine line between reason and belief — themes that have appeared throughout his career as a leading Turkish-German intellectual, but which gain new shades of meaning as he articulates them in his first language. Some poems reference mystical Islam — exploring both hidden and evident aspects of the world, the real and the dream-like — as well as Turkish poetic traditions. These poems movingly give voice to what his translator Kristin Dickinson calls “moments of cross-cultural contact and entanglement.” The book will be a fascinating companion to his earlier collection, Door Languages, published by Zephyr Press in 2008, translated from German by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright.