TRANSIT

Previous scholarship on the final installment in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Istanbul-Berlin trilogy has issued largely along two trajectories, pursuing questions of migration and transnationalism on the one hand and German memory politics on the other. What has been overlooked in the process is the text’s unique interplay of genres, voices, and spatial metaphors that turns the more traditional thematics of migration into a metaphorics of migration. This article argues that Özdamar’s novel represents migration neither as social question nor as existential dilemma, but rather as a grand metaphor for desire, and argues for a reading of Seltsame Sterne not as a migration story but as a love story. The narrative coalesces around the pursuit of an extravagant imagining of love in which the multiple valences of love become, through their very repetition, a guiding textual metaphor that both contains and exceeds the boundaries of personal emotions and experiences. This radical reframing of migration and exile through the prism of love and desire points toward an articulation of human experience more broadly—a provocation that constitutes nothing less than a reclamation of political subjectivity for those marked by explicit migration experiences. With the powerful assertion of self-presence provided by the intimacy of the diary form, the text stakes its claim to a place in the middle of the cultural, linguistic, and geographic lifeworld within which its author/narrator situates herself. Staging her autobiographical narrating subject as author of her own diaristic notes, living a life between and among the texts that surround her, Özdamar claims her own place as completely imbricated within the world of European letters. Ultimately, this twin presentation of cultural creation both as a narrative theme and as object asserts a uniquely re-situated “German” writing subject.