TRANSIT

This paper investigates the theme of returning ‘home’ in Fatma Aydemir’s 2017 novel, Ellbogen, arguing that the novel’s protagonist utilizes her physical journey to Turkey to formulate a new, fluid positionality between apparently conflicting expressions of Otherness and belonging. Through the lens of decolonial anthropology, including the works of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Stuart Hall, I examine the ways in which imaginaries of inheritance and ascription both inform and deconstruct components of Turkish German archival memory. My reading proposes a conceptual framework in which encounter and return are not conclusive, but continual. The character Hazal’s engagement with multiple elements of her family’s diasporic memory meld with her lived experience of violence and disenfranchisement in Berlin—as well as her difficulties accessing and acknowledging the communities with which she consistently finds herself associated in Germany. Hazal’s ‘return’ to her country of nationality then becomes a critical renegotiation of her own identity—one which transcends fixed notions of belonging as defined by the subject’s spatiality or temporality. In providing this close reading of Ellbogen, I also point to its thematic continuities with Aydemir’s recent 2022 novel Dschinns, as well as both novels’ role within a growing tradition of contemporary German-language literature which question underlying constructs of division. The intervention a journey like Hazal’s realizes instead permits the formulation of unique positionalities through constant, ongoing negotiation. I argue that a work such as Ellbogen acknowledges the participatory nature of belonging, the fragile bonds which render this belonging possible, and the as-yet unwritten future participation may engender.