Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Story Collection Mutterzunge3 7 1 “Es war einmal ein Dorf, das hatte einen Brunnen und ein grünes Minarett”: Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Story Collection Mutterzunge Renata Fuchs University of California, Los Angeles Abstract: This article examines all four stories from Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s story collection Mutterzunge. Erzählungen (1990). The stories are linked through Özdamar’s unconventional storytelling created out of secular and religious themes and motifs present in Eastern and Western narrative traditions. The author fuses the East and West through linguistic signs and cultural themes. In order to rewrite the established practices and customs and ultimately the common literary canon, the author recasts popular fairy tales from both traditions. By depicting female characters as sexually progressive and autonomous, she forges a new model of a multicultural society. Özdamar makes her female protagonists the focus of her stories, emphasizing the role of Muslim women in the process of globalization leading through hybridization to the development of a global, common cultural discourse that results in a new “translocal” or World Literature, thus signaling a possible union of both traditions in the newly fashioned society. Keywords: migration, multiculturalism, hybridity, fairy tales, Muslim women In her debut short story collection, Mutterzunge. Erzählungen (1990), Emine Sevgi Özdamar, the first Turkish-born author to win the prestigious Bachmann Prize, presents stories about Turkish emigrants in Germany. All four stories, “Mutterzunge,” “Grossvaterzunge,” “Karagöz in Alamania. Schwarzauge in Deutschland,” and “Karriere einer Putzfrau. Erinnerungen an Deutschland, ” are interconnected not only through the unique language invented by the author 372 Renata Fuchs in order to reflect the hybridity of her protagonists, but through the original storytelling as well. 1 Transculturality and the linguistic aspects of the two first stories “Mutterzunge” and “Grossvaterzunge” have been extensively explored in the secondary literature. 2 In contrast with the scholarship to date, this article takes into consideration all four short stories included in Mutterzunge, focusing on the language phenomenon in connection with the act of storytelling and on the tales within the stories. Özdamar introduces fairy tale motifs from both Western and Eastern traditions in that she presents, for instance, two prominent characters: the figure of the wolf from “Little Red Riding Hood” and the persona of Ali Baba from the Arabic tales One Thousand and One Ni ghts ( MZ 60). At the end of the first story, “Mutterzunge,” Özdamar expresses her wish to bring the “Arabic writing and the Latin letters” together via storytelling. In her newly created tales, the author uses recurrent thematic elements, such as the “Granatapfel” and “Geduldstein” ( MZ 15-48), which are present in traditional Western and Eastern fairy tales. She subverts the power around her by mixing languages and various stories rooted in mythologies, religions, and traditional fairy tales, thus merging both the Occidental and Oriental discourses on which civilizing processes rest, rewriting them, and replacing one with the other. Özdamar’s refashioning of traditional fairy tales includes not only a multicultural approach, but also an eroticization of the text; within that context she gives a new voice to women, in particular to Muslim women. The author places her female protagonists at the center of her project, emphasizing the role of women in the process of globalization leading through hybridization to the formation of a global, common cultural discourse resulting in the new “translocal” or World Literature. Multicultural thinking, according to Jankowsky, “implies that acquiring knowledge about the different cultural structures that coexist within a country, as well as globally, will allow for a greater understanding of the mental map out of which people from various backgrounds participate in society” (263). Through her writing, Özdamar contributes to a better understanding of that mental gap even though she risks being categorized as a minority writer who produces a body of literature that “is at best an expendable ‛enrichment’ to ‛native’ German literature” (Adelson 305). Because Özdamar writes in the German language and with an inclination towards a majority, her oeuvre is split between both cultures. The effect of such deterritorialization is, Teraoka observes, almost a rule for the majority: “They [the minority] speak, while we learn to listen. We are no longer sovereign or manipulative toward their reality but unsure and ignorant. And it is only when the self can suspend the imposition of its beliefs that it can hope to listen carefully to what the other is saying” (Teraoka 161). By merging both Western and Eastern traditions and using more than language, Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Mutterzunge 373 Özdamar’s stories create a space of unity for multicultural discourse based on fairy tales. Özdamar’s rewriting of children’s fairy tales for adult audiences should not come as a surprise. Folklorists point out that fairy tales were never really meant for children’s ears alone, as they were originally told, for example, at the fireside by adults to adult audiences (Tatar xxvi). Literary fairy tales were deliberately used in the 17th century to promote the Western civilizing process, and their discourse on manners and norms added to the creation of social norms (Zipes 1). According to Freud, to deal with unconscious and conscious conflicts and experiences like love, aggression, or fear, people reach to fairy tale archetypes such as mothers, fathers, kings, queens, witches, giants, or princes; an example of such a use of fairy tales is the stepmother serving as a projection of a bad mother (Tatar 144). The essence of our lives has been circumscribed by these common cultural discourses, which have inscribed indelible marks on our imagination and affect our behavior. Özdamar employs the power of these cultural myths. She is able to take this language and use it to create boundary-crossing and boundary-shifting works that subsume and subvert the power around her. The author refashions the social norms in order to create a global, common cultural discourse. Especially in her last story, “Karriere einer Putzfrau,” the author makes clear that the Western literary canon is not more important than other literatures. Özdamar is a most thought-provoking author who raises fundamental questions about multiculturalism and about roles of women in their new home, a multi-cultural space. Critics agree that the relationship established between identity and language in these stories is such that neither Turkish nor German identity is privileged (Bird 161). Places and experiences in Turkey and in both parts of Germany, past and present, overlap and mix in a uniquely interwoven language. The free flow of thoughts provocatively organized is a stream of cultural and political consciousness. Written in broken German, the stories effect a sense of closeness as well as alienation. Özdamar plays with the German language, peppering it with foreign metaphors, foreign-appearing words, and violating grammatical rules. In so doing, she brings out a new poetic sound and rhythm and establishes her own aesthetic art forms of expression. 3 The author and her narrator are “shaped by three different languages: Turkish, Arabic, and German. […] [As] language pairs, neither Turkish and German, nor Turkish and Arabic, nor Arabic and German have, from the perspective of historical linguistics, much in common” (Brandt 301). This linguistic disparity strengthens Özdamar’s unique voice: “In meiner Sprache heißt Zunge: Sprache. Zunge hat keine Knochen, wohin man sie dreht, dreht sie sich dorthin” ( MZ 9). One can learn many new tongues even though they are marked by a foreign 374 Renata Fuchs accent (“gedreht”), which implies being multilingual and hybrid. She connects mother tongue with the act of “erzählen.” “Tiefe zu erzählen” requires that one must “Lebensunfälle erleben,” and without a tongue one cannot tell stories ( MZ 12). To facilitate the act of story telling, the narrator starts learning Arabic: “Ich werde Arabisch lernen, das war mal unsere Schrift. […] wenn mein Großvater und ich stumm wären und uns nur mit Schrift was erzählen könnten, könnten wir uns keine Geschichten erzählen” ( MZ 14). The spoken word of her mother’s contemporary Turkish that the narrator replaced with German leads her back to the written word of the grandfather’s Turkish, influenced by Arabic, and ultimately to storytelling. The author maintains the theme of storytelling in all four stories so that in “Karagöz in Alamania” the peasant says to his donkey: “Da sagte der Bauer: ‛Gut, erzähle Geschichte, so lange du kannst, und ich trage dich’” ( MZ 54), and in “Karriere einer Putzfrau” the mythical Ophelia relates theater stories. The first two stories “Mutterzunge” and “Grossvaterzunge” revolve around the dilemma of linguistic dislocation: “Wenn ich nur wüßte, in welchem Moment ich meine Mutterzunge verloren habe,” the protagonist / narrator wonders ( MZ 11). In these stories, Özdamar portrays a Turkish woman who lives in East Berlin, is alienated from her family, and in a way from her own self. The opening sentence suggests the protagonist’s biculturalism: “in meiner Sprache heißt Zunge: Sprache” ( MZ 9). This might be true of many languages; yet, in the German language “Sprache” and “Zunge” are separate signs and indeed a sign of the protagonist being divided. The main character has become so at home in the German language that even the most intimate memories of her mother’s words come back to her now “wie eine von mir gut gelernte Fremdsprache” ( MZ 9). Her position between Turkish and German culture is mirrored in the disunited city of Berlin, where two radically contrasting realities exist side-by-side; her hybridity is immediately apparent to her mother: “Du hast die Hälfte deiner Haare in Alamania gelassen” ( MZ 9). Although Atatürk’s westernizing reforms had a liberating effect on women, whose lives were no longer subjected to Islamic law, the protagonist supports the ideology of reviving the previous version of the Turkish language unstripped of its Arabic alphabet (Yildiz 151). She imagines that without the connection through the Arabic letters, she would not be able to tell stories to her grandfather (her roots) or to understand his stories. In an attempt to reconnect with the Turkish of her grandparents’ generation and the act of storytelling, she finds an oriental scholar, Ibni Abdullah, who teaches her Arabic letters. Thus, her identity becomes inseparable from language and storytelling and is enhanced by not rejecting traditional roles (although she ultimately rejects them), but by exploring them in her own context. Even though she perceives Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Mutterzunge 375 herself as a progressive, emancipated woman, she falls in love with her roots embodied in her Muslim teacher. Özdamar draws attention to subjugation as a concern of importance for a traditional Muslim woman: “Ich bin die Sklavin deinen Antlitzes” ( MZ 32). The Arabic language becomes the language of love and suffering (Neubert 160): “Ich hatte Schmerzen in meinem Körper, […] ich legte mich hin, sah, wie der Schmerz meine Haut aufmachte und sich in meinem Körper überall einnähte, ich wußte, daß in diesem Moment Ibni Abdullah in meinen Körper reingekommen war” ( MZ 20-21). Özdamar’s text seemingly rejects the aspect of Atatürk’s reforms that contributed at least in part to literacy and education for women (Haines and Littler 120). The wish to take up willingly a position of subjugation within Islam (a position arguably even more circumscribed than in Christianity) and to embrace the patriarchal order cannot be reconciled with feminist theory (Haines and Littler 121). For that reason, Haines and Littler conclude that the protagonist is a nomadic intellectual who accepts her own hybridity, in place of the restoration of an intact identity (123). While their claim is certainly not amiss, I think that the protagonist is not just passively accepting her own hybridity, but rather she is consciously acting on a desire to rescue that which was lost in Islamic tradition precisely because of its Westernization, namely, a longstanding tradition of erotic narrative (Shafak 1). Unlike the Turkish Westernized elite alienated from their own cultural background, she reaches to the old erotic sources of narration, for instance The Thousand and One Nights, as a manifestation of her emancipation (Shafak 1). As the relationship between student and teacher turns into a passionate mutual desire, a conflict arises. Ibni Abdullah’s view of oriental femininity clashes with the narrator’s expectation of sexual autonomy. The narrator’s wish for sexual freedom appears to oppose her intention to learn Arabic, the language of the law of Islam, where female carnality is perceived as a destabilizing overindulgence, which must be restrained (Haines and Littler 124). The protagonist attempts to override the order prescribed by men through fully living her sexuality and also in the way she dresses: “I am going with Ibni Abdullah to a men’s party, I am wearing half men’s clothing, half woman’s, I sing there a song from the Koran, I am afraid of Ibni Abdullah’s cheeks, they are like Khomeini’s Mullah” ( MZ 22). This description produces a dynamic and ultimately subversive effect. She, the woman clothed in revolutionary attire, sits in the presence of men and reads from the Koran. Her western body produces Islamic words. The fascination with the Arabic language and letters culminates in a poetic passage in which the German language becomes pictorial, recalling Arabic calligraphy: “Es kamen aus meinem Mund die Buchstaben raus. Manche sahen aus wie ein Vogel, manche wie ein Herz, auf dem ein Pfeil steckt, manche wie eine Karawane, manche wie schlafende Kamele” ( MZ 18). This parade of images 376 Renata Fuchs enables the narrator to recontextualize Arabic within the German world, and it also connects Özdamar’s story to Arabian tales. The images invoke a beautifully illustrated manuscript of One Thousand and One Nights with its literary themes and techniques, such as the embedded narrative of a story within a story. Likewise, the figure of Ali Baba appears in the third story of the collection Mutterzunge, “Karagöz in Alamania. Schwarzauge in Deutschland.” The Arabic words that the narrator is learning are often personified as her companions in the room: Die Schriften lagen auf dem Teppich, ich legte mich neben sie, die Schriften sprachen miteinander ohne Pause mit verschiedenen Stimmen, weckten die eingeschlafenen Tiere in meinem Körper, ich schließe Augen, die Stimme der Liebe wird mich blind machen, sie sprechen weiter, mein Körper geht auf wie ein in der Mitte aufgeschnittener Granatapfel, in Blut und Schmutz kam ein Tier raus. ( MZ 26) The narrator’s body is described as a cut-open pomegranate, a fruit which was known in antiquity as a metaphor for sensuality and fertility (Isaacs 129). Hence the symbolism here might be associated with Orange Princess stories, classified as tale type ATU 408 in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther classification system. This type portrays brides or young princesses as fruit or as seeking fruit. To this category belong such tales as two popular Turkish tales, “The Enchanted Pomegranate Branch and the Beauty” (Kúnos 188-203) and “The Three Orange Peris,” (Kúnos 16-28). The latter was literalized by Giambattista Basile as “The Love for Three Oranges.” The dream of Özdamar’s protagonist in which she sees an animal emerging from her body and then invading it as well as stones needing to be submersed in water in order to come alive includes core motifs from “Little Red Riding Hood.” The author reformulates the motif of Little Red and her grandmother being swallowed by the wolf and then being ripped out of his body. She renders not only lively explicit sexual imagery, but also conveys a representation of a violent birth as a consequence of blind love. Additionally, the description of the stones provides another link to the Grimms’ tale, as Little Red fetches great stones with which she and her grandmother fill the wolf ’s belly and which cause him to collapse and fall dead. In turn the motif of stones leads us to the “Geduldstein, Geduldmesser” tale and to the theme of patience (Goldberg 59). Traditionally, the Arabian tale about Princess Parizade, “The Story of Two Sisters Who were Jealous of Their Younger Sister” spotlight the stone motif. It is a girl’s quest tale about a disenfranchised princess who must undergo a set of trials in order to establish her true identity and that of her brothers who have been turned into stones. The dominant theme of the stone appears several times in Özdamar’s narrative and emphasizes or ironizes female patience. The repetition of this particular motif along with that of the number forty can be Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Mutterzunge 377 found in a popular Turkish tale, “Geduldstein, Geduldmesser,” where the girl is waiting with the prince for forty days in the fortieth room, (Kúnos 214-20); it is reflected in the forty days of the narrator’s sequester in her lover’s “Schriftzimmer” as well as in the assertion that one cup of coffee is worth forty years of friendship ( MZ 20). In fact, Özdamar retells the tale of “Geduldstein, Geduldmesser” almost entirely ( MZ 33-34), adding only a love potion and eliminating a mother figure. She thus sets the stage for her last story about Ophelia who is a contemporary false bride fairy tale character that I will discuss later ( AT 437) (Goldberg 59). In the story “Mutterzunge,” Özdamar fashions a tale about a woman’s patience based on the account of Zeliha and Yusuf, the Arab version of the biblical narrative about Joseph and Potiphar’s wife ( MZ 37-8). The attractive but pious Yusuf resists Zeliha’s efforts to seduce him and spends years in jail. Only later, when Zeliha’s husband dies, is she eventually able to marry Yusuf. The story told by Ibni Abdullah’s mother and recounted by him can be read as a mother’s warning for her son to be chaste. At the same time, it is also the vindication of women’s sexuality whose depiction has been systematically suppressed with the process of Westernization and modernization (Shafak). In the eyes of conservative Muslims, the figure of Zulaikah (here Zeliha) needs to be condemned and vilified for first seducing Joseph and later accusing him of raping her; however, for the Sufi mystic tradition, she represents someone purely and madly in love (Shafak). Özdamar reaches back to this longstanding tradition of erotic narrative in the histories of Middle Eastern countries by embedding the widely misinterpreted story of Zulaiha into a Western tale. Relating to the voice of the Koran and the language of ancient sagas and fairy tales, Özdamar interweaves into her story one of the most popular European fairy tales. She re-tells “Little Red Riding Hood,” a popular tale in the Grimms’ collection, which in itself took second place only to the Bible as the most widely read book in Germany (Zipes 18). Özdamar writes: Yusuf, wie schön ist dein Gesicht. Allah hat es so gemacht, Dank Allah. Wie schön sind deine Haare. Was nützt es, im Grab werden sie verfaulen. Wie schön sind deine Augen. Ich schaue damit zu meinem Allah. Yusuf, schau mit deinen Augen in mein Gesicht. Ich habe Furcht, daß meine Augen in der anderen Welt blind werden. Yusuf, du gehst weg, wenn ich in deine Nähe komme. Ich will in die Nähe von Allah. 378 Renata Fuchs Komm in mein Bett. Die Decken werden mich vor Allahs Augen nicht verstecken. Garten hat Durst. Gib Wasser. Garten hat Besitzer. Feuer ist da, lösche es. Ich hab Angst vorm Feuer. ( MZ 37) Özdamar emphasizes patience as of great importance for a traditional Muslim woman and simultaneously decontextualizes traditional roles by refashioning them. To achieve her goal, the author recreates the key dialogue from “Little Red Riding Hood.” This tale has been read as having evolved from a sexually charged male phantasy highlighting a socio-sexual struggle for domination as part of Western common cultural heritage (Zipes xi). 4 The sexual struggle for social domination in the tale of “Little Red Riding Hood” is particularly visible, according to Bettelheim, in “pubertal sexual desires” (182). Instead of being repelled and scared, Little Red seems intrigued by the situation so that she makes no move to leave; “it is this ‛deathly’ fascination with sex which is experienced as simultaneously the greatest excitement and the greatest anxiety that is bound up with the little girl’s oedipal longings for her father” (Bettelheim176). From the very beginning, the female is dominated by a male ruling over her own desires. Özdamar uses this dialogue, which is already permeated with sexual desire, for a situation of role reversal. The author explores alternative behaviors within a female / male relationship and invents a gender-swap situation where a female sexual phantasy is given importance. The author transposes the gaze of the wolf, as she has the woman, Zeliha, appropriate the wolf ’s language thus sexually empowering the female seducer, a role that the narrator has given herself. She is casting herself into Zeliha’s role, and Ibni Abdullah as the beleaguered and seduced Jusuf, who in many versions is called “the Prophet Yusuf ” and is thus associated with Islam. Admittedly, there have been many modern uses and adaptations of “Little Red Riding Hood,” and some of them introduced role reversal. 5 Within this context, we are reminded that fairy tales could very well be directed to adult audiences and can tell us much about “real conditions in the world of those who told and those who heard the tales” (Tatar 50). Folklorists, cultural anthropologists, historians, sociologists, educators, literary critics, psychologists have all interpreted the tale of “Little Red Riding Hood” and seen it as a parable of sexual awakening and maturity or as a threat to the girl’s virginity (Tatar 39). The anthropomorphic wolf could symbolize a man, lover, seducer or sexual predator. With the role reversal strategy, Özdamar changes the old power dynamic. Just as Walt Disney, in order to enforce his own ideology, retold the Grimms’ Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Mutterzunge 379 retellings so is Özdamar retelling this fairy tale, which represents socio-cultural power relationships, particularly those based on gender, to present a new ideology. The author connects the tale of the attractive-but-pious Yusuf, who resists Zeliha’s efforts to seduce him, to the main plot in her text, in that she has the narrator promise at first to love Ibni Abdullah “in a sacred way” and to continue studying the text ( MZ 43). Moreover, she points to the associations among love, written text, and storytelling, especially when Ibni Abdullah makes the act of sexual intimacy dependent upon the narrator’s text study. The narrator spends precisely forty days in the study with Ibni Abdullah “within her body” before she decides against being patient and against succumbing fully to this “holy love.” 6 The physicality of language and its sensuousness as well as Özdamar’s insistence on corporeally grounded metaphors cause the physical body of the narrator to merge with the body of the text read by her. The proximity of the body and language to storytelling is also manifested in a story wherein the voice of the Koran’s firm lesson about the eternal punishment in fire is interspersed with passages from a Turkish love song, in which a lover declares lifelong pure love: Koran: “Es sei denn, mit seiner Erlaubnis.” Türkisches Lied: “Ich werde sie nie beschmutzen, wenn ich mich auch ins Feuer werfe.” Koran: “Was die Elenden anlangt, so sollen sie ins Feuer kommen.” Türkisches Lied: “Ich werde nie satt werden, wenn ich auch tausend Jahre an diesem Busen läge.” Koran: “Ewig sollen sie darinnen verbleiben, solange Himmel und Erde dauern” Türkisches Lied: “Ich will eine Nacht, die ich mit dir habe, lebenslang im Leben lassen.” Koran: “Es sei denn, daß dein Herr es anders wolle, siehe, dein Herr tut, was er will.” ( MZ 33) The author mixes the passages from the Koran with a Turkish song, illustrating the difference in the perception of love. The sensual voice of the Turkish lover is heard through the scriptural authority of the Koran, foregrounding human passion; thus, the new text decenters the original context (Bird 170). The narrator’s exploration of her identity through Arabic script, which initially embraces submission to a stipulated system, discloses itself as empowering. She shows how these texts can be enjoyed and transformed in new contexts, which are defined by her. Therefore, when Ibni Abdullah insists on pure religious love and locks her in the room, the narrator, after initially feeling intimidated by his words, sees in the Arabic text the narrative of her own love for him and her own escape in the figure of the bird (Bird 171). Here the author rewrites completely the meaning of the symbolic “forty days” and the “bird.” Instead of her waiting patiently for the lover / prince for forty days, she considers herself 380 Renata Fuchs to be a prisoner of his love and wants to fly away. Hence, the bird is not helping her to achieve the goal of finding her way to the prince but rather the opposite. Ibni Abdullah relates to her a story that he knows from his grandmother. It is one of the most published tales belonging to the category of the Patient Stone ( ATU 894) of which there are twenty-two texts (Marzolph 223). The story starts with a typical opening line used in fairy tales from the Middle East: “Es war einmal, es war keinmal.” Its protagonist is a girl who has to wait patiently forty days for the man of her dreams ( MZ 34). The whole text is a leveling performance between the language of love and affection, chiefly executed by mythological symbols and unsentimental metaphors (Neubert 159). The motif of a “Geduldstein” highlights the importance of patience within Islamic culture. The form of the fairy tale, however, as presented by Özdamar, is altered in that the author added the motif of a love potion, which causes the right bride to fall asleep / faint so that the false bride takes her place. This particular change of adding the key scene evoking the tale of “Sleeping Beauty” allows the author to merge two traditions of storytelling. Sensuality and desire predispose the narrator to follow her teacher’s wishes and to learn the new kind of love in order to please him: “Du Seele in meiner Seele, […] ich opfere mich für deine Schritte” ( MZ 32). As she talks herself into submission, her words become more like self-defiance. The narrator becomes more and more the property of her teacher, even to the point where she is silenced behind a veil in the room of the scripts (Neubert 160). The language and religious study entwine with physical love: “‛Gib mir deine Spucke in meinen Mund.’ Er gab. Seine Spucke ist ein silbernes Getränk, ich trank es und betete: ‛Mein Allah, mit der tötenden Liebe mach mich bekannt’” ( MZ 31). At first they both succumb to their lust; however, Ibni Abdullah does not relinquish his religious convictions, according to which only the female counterpart is to be blamed for demonstrating strong sexual desires: “‛Die Sünden sollst du tragen,’ sagt Ibni Abudullah und liebt mich in einer Moschee. Er hat ein Tuch über seiner Schulter” ( MZ 21-22). He covers his body while making love in the mosque and later is ashamed of his exploits. In the end, the narrator leaves because her sexual freedom and dissatisfaction with her partner is too quickly equated with unbelief. Ibni Abdullah remains trapped within the patriarchal religious tradition since he is not yet able to master the contradiction intellectually, as expressed in his words full of laughter: “Die türkischen Frauen wollen viel Sex” ( MZ 43). The narrator leaves the room of scripts in which she has been locked for forty days and throws the scripts she had studied on the highway: “Ich konnte nicht lernen. Ich warf jemandem den Schriftzimmerschlüssel in den Hof, er machte die Tür auf ” ( MZ 46). By eroticizing her text throughout, Özdamar ascribes a much more prominent role Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Mutterzunge 381 to women. Imagining herself as a bird that must be patient while waiting for love, the “ich” tries to calm her heart by pressing against it ( MZ 20); later, she wants to press a stone against her heart to suppress that love ( MZ 40). At the same time, she compares her lover’s penis to a heart: “sein Penis atmete wie ein Herz. Im Schlaf ” ( MZ 36); thus, elevating the importance of love on both the emotional and erotic levels. The story closes with an episode detailing the narrator’s encounter with an unknown girl to whom the narrator describes herself as a “Wörtersammlerin” ( MZ 48). However, the “collector of words” was unable to find a dictionary for the language of her love: “ich habe kein Wörterbuch gefunden für die Sprache meiner Liebe” ( MZ 32). “Ruh heißt Seele,” says the narrator to the girl who then answers: “Seele heißt Ruh” ( MZ 48). With this line, the author finishes her second story in the collection, “Grossvaterzunge,” and couples the English word “rue,” a metaphor for regret as well as a herbal remedy for undesired pregnancy, with the German word “Ruhe,” rest and silence, and connects it to the Arabic word meaning the soul. As a woman, the narrator decides against her Oriental lover and his patriarchal ways tied closely to religious sentiments. On the level of the narration, however, the author fuses the East and West through the linguistic signs, thus signaling a possible union of both traditions in the newly forged society. The third story of the collection Mutterzunge, “Karagöz in Alamania,” opens with a line usually found in fairy tales: “Es war einmal ein Dorf ” ( MZ 49). In contrast with the second story, wherein only some components of this structure of narration are apparent, the entire third story is transformed into a fairy tale. The magic aspects amalgamate with elements of reality and religious symbols merge with fairy tale motifs. Immediately at the beginning, the narrative becomes complicated with the introduction of a dream so that it is difficult to discern which events really take place and which belong to the realm of the dream. Özdamar’s fairy tale thematizes and problematizes migration between the Orient and the Occident, depicting identities before and during the actual process of migration. The protagonist, the farmer Karagöz, decides to go to Germany in search of a job and leaves his pregnant wife behind in Anatolia. The departure is preceded by a dream of the farmer’s wife, in which she witnesses an odd dialogue between her husband’s father and the owner of an apple tree. In the bizarre dream, Özdamar anticipates the protagonist’s immigration to Germany and mystifies the structure of the story even further by producing new linguistic forms. In fact, when the owner of the apple tree from whom Karagöz is stealing apples asks Karagöz’s father whether his son could work for him, the two men discuss the business by way of adages: “Die beiden sprachen über dieses 382 Renata Fuchs Geschäft nicht direkt, sondern in Sprichwörtern” ( MZ 50). Seyhan observes that they both engage in “dialogue” until Karagöz’s father gives up because he “runs out of fitting proverbs and the other man does not” ( Writing outside the Nation 110). Just as in the first two stories, where creative language mirrors the hybridity of the narrator, so it is the case in the third story where the newly coined linguistic code reflects the protagonists’ border identity. Ultimately, the code also demonstrates that the protagonists are just victims of the process of emigration and immigration. From the onset, the experimental use of the German language leads to the destabilization of the reader’s position who may be alienated by the new structures of the language: “Es war einmal ein Dorf, das hatte einen Brunnen und ein grünes Minarett” ( MZ 49). The first sentence in the story accentuates this phenomenon by misplacing the verb in the relative clause, introduced with the relative pronoun. Even though the sentence can be readily understood, its grammatical structure is incorrect and thus produces the alienation effect. In fact, the author employs the device of making strange in all her stories mentioned here. Already in the first story, she signals the intention to distance the reader: “Brecht war der erste Mensch, warum ich hierher gekommen bin” ( MZ 13). According to Fedemair, Özdamar resorts to the Brechtian concept of “Verfremdung” not in a political / didactic sense as used by Brecht himself, but rather to express herself poetically, that is, solely for aesthetic purposes (160). I, however, claim that Özdamar’s alienation effect reflects the emotional state of her figures in the most articulate way possible. For instance, the author’s lawless and at times defective language along with the sudden use of Turkish or Arabic words in the middle of the text express the immigrants’ experience of learning a new language. This third story, as previously mentioned, begins with “es war einmal,” which is a typical line signaling to the reader the fairy tale genre. In fact, the story features many elements that the Russian linguist and anthropologist Vladimir Propp distinguished as characteristic for the structure of a fairy tale: an unfair situation, the need to travel, the entry into a new realm, the encounter with the enemy and speaking animals, and a return home (Propp 147-224). Undeniably, the elements of the fairy tale structure are ubiquitous in the third story; yet, it is really more of a fairy tale parody than a traditional tale. On the surface, the tale does have some of the Propp elements, but it does not really ever suspend belief. The story also integrates other genres. For instance, as Seyhan indicates, Özdamar had originally written “Karagöz in Alamania” as a theater play in 1982, which was staged at the Frankfurter Schauspielhaus in 1986. The play was based on a letter written by a Gastarbeiter who had permanently returned to Turkey, and its title alludes to a traditional Turkish shadow play, commonly Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Mutterzunge 383 called karagöz, which happens to be the name of Özdamar’s main character, who is a “comic fast-talking smart aleck who constantly ridicules his sidekick” ( Writing outside the Nation 111-12). Hence, Özdamar’s story includes some of the most characteristic elements of a play. The interchange of scenes introduced by the expression “Es wurde dunkel, es wurde hell” bears likeness to the curtain fall in a theater at the end of each act. It can also be argued that the line “Es wurde dunkel, es wurde hell” and its repetition brings to mind the biblical story of Genesis, more precisely “the Creation of the World” when God separates the darkness from the light. Consequently, the first scene involves the apple tree and resembles the Genesis story, “the Fall,” when Eve eats the forbidden fruit and gives it to Adam: “Die Frau war hochschwanger. Der Bauer war sehr arm. [...] Er stieg auf den Rücken seiner schwangeren Frau und erreichte einen Apfel. Er gab ihn seiner Frau” ( MZ 49). This comical role reversal changes the power distribution since now the male is responsible for the crime of taking a fruit from the tree, and the scene reveals and problematizes the harsh treatment of women and anticipates the farmer’s leaving his wife. At the same time, the story has affinities with the Brother Grimms’ “Rapunzel” and the peasant’s temptation to steal lettuce from the sorceress’s garden for his pregnant wife. As in any traditional fairy tale, the characters are depicted in a somewhat rigid fashion and are almost reduced to prototypes: the Gastarbeiter Karagöz, his wife, who is portrayed as a typical Turkish woman, fertile and financially dependent on her husband, the ignorant farmer of the town, and lastly an animal who can speak and who symbolizes the intellectual. The erudite donkey quotes Marx and Socrates and thus indelibly presents a link to the Western tradition of thought. The figure of the speaking donkey brings the story to the level of fairy tales and magic, on the one hand. On the other hand, however, the reader is reminded once again about religious stories—this time from the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament, as well as from the Christian tradition. In Numbers 22: 28-31, we find the story of Baalam whose donkey refuses to carry him and is beaten by his master as a punishment; the Lord then opens the mouth of the donkey and the animal is able to speak. According to tradition, Mary, while pregnant, rode a donkey to Bethlehem. Özdamar’s donkey is witty and imaginative and able to produce ad hoc rhymes while pronouncing moral aphorisms. At the outset of their journey, the farmer and the donkey realize that they have a long way to Germany ahead of them. Since the donkey does not want to walk anymore, the farmer suggests that they tell each other stories and take turns in carrying each other so that the time would pass quickly. As in previous stories, here again Özdamar emphasizes the idea of storytelling. While the author is synthesizing fairy tales and stories of various origins, her evident knowledge of and fascination with different literary genres includes 384 Renata Fuchs elements from both Eastern and Western cultures. When the farmer and the donkey arrive in Istanbul on their way to Germany, a cunning urine seller calls the farmer “Ali Baba” ( MZ 59). The name Ali Baba is intended here pejoratively, yet it links the Karagöz story to the Oriental collection of fairy tales One Thousand and One Nights, which was compiled in Arabic and is rooted in ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, and Indian folklore and literature. It is comical that the character who has the magic “potion” for entry into the door is Ali Baba, and this “open sesame” potion is urine. Özdamar’s Karagöz resembles Till Eulenspiegel, an impertinent prankster figure originating in Middle Low German folklore that was used for political critique. The shadow theater, karagöz, was characterized by sexual and political humor lampooning those in power, thus defying censorship and enjoying an unlimited freedom (Öztürk 292-93). In the late nineteenth century, however, the theater became subject to the governmental bans and restrictions (Öztürk 299). By employing the figure of Karagöz, Özdamar attempts to restore performers’ loss of agency and to rescue the power of the Turkish shadow theater. As the story about Karagöz continues, it is divided into separate scenes; the sentence “Es wurde dunkel. Es wurde hell” serves here as the divider. The setting of some of the scenes remains unclear because the change of place is often difficult to determine and the sequence of departures and returns occurs in the text frequently. During the process of border crossing, the reader loses track of the characters’ actual location and is thus alienated again. Lastly, according to Wierschke, the reader is unsure where the protagonists find themselves, as they appear to be left in a state of being nowhere and always moving (203). The “Deutschland Tür” stands for the crossing point to another culture, a new world into which the remnants of the old world are brought along and introduced. Considering these circumstances, the representation of the door on the border to Germany intensifies the idea of a split, as it symbolically enacts not only the division between the two countries but also the limited capacity at the crossing point. The undertaking of crossing the border is momentous here because the characters develop a distinct code of communication, which only those who undergo the same experience are able to understand. They are oddly united in their hybridity. One of these unifying experiences is becoming familiar with the guidelines for guest workers described in Ein Handbuch für Gastarbeiter, which is a manual meant to be helpful for those arriving in the West for the first time. As the farmer starts reading out loud from the book, his reading creates a comical situation: “Das war ein Buch, das die türkische Arbeitsvermittlung für die nach Alamania gehenden Arbeiter geschrieben hatte. Es heißt: Ein Handbuch für Gastarbeiter, die in der Fremde arbeiten gehen […] ‛Lieber Bruder Arbeiter! Die Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Mutterzunge 385 Toiletten in Europa sind anders als bei uns: wie ein Stuhl’” ( MZ 65). By way of this description, the stay in Germany is already preconceived as an out-of-ordinary experience and a clash of two different worlds. As difficult as it might be, the border crossing is, however, depicted as particularly challenging for Turkish women. Özdamar illustrates this predicament with two examples of contrasting characters in a dialogue with a compatriot: Die Türkin ohne Kopftuch sagte: “Könnt ihr nicht einen Tag leben, ohne Eure Schwänze in den Mund zu nehmen? ” Der Mann mit dem Schaf sagte: “Weib, wenn du nicht den Ketzerschwanz mit Muffe in den Mund nehmen wolltest, hättest du dir doch deine Beine abgehackt und wärst zu Hause geblieben.” […] Die Türkin mit dem Kopftuch antwortete: “Dein Schaf soll in deinen Mund scheißen, Kerl, ich hoffe, Inshallah, du sollst Schweinefleisch essen, Kerl.” […] Die Frau mit Kopftuch sagte beim Gehen: “Versteh ich etwas von Schmuck und Kopftuch? Verstehe ich nicht! Aber ich liebe mein Kopftuch. Ich nikis versteh, was wollen türkische Arbeitsvermittlung-Gastarbeiterhandbuch von meinem Kopftuch.” ( MZ 68) Özdamar problematizes here the issue of head covering for Muslim women: one woman does not wear a headscarf while the other does. The cleaning woman headscarf of the 1970s and the 1980s was a symbol that focused on national, class, and educational difference that located immigrant culture in a rural, traditional past (Weber 91). The author alludes to those debates and coincidentally actualizes them. The woman without the head covering is accused of promiscuity. According to her accuser, she should have never left Turkey if she could not protect herself from male desire by wearing a headscarf. The woman wearing a headscarf takes sides with the woman being attacked verbally, yet she wonders why the employment agency harasses her for wearing a headscarf. The position of either a duty prescribed or a prohibition leaves the women no alternatives. Either way they will be condemned. The headscarf is oftentimes perceived as an embodiment of the cultural opposite of emancipation because it manifests Islam’s tendency toward violence as well as cultural exclusion (Weber 99). However, feminist responses to the headscarf debate have been divided. On the one hand, the incompatibility with women’s rights or a modern life has been pointed out. On the other hand, research suggests that women who choose the headscarf also insist on women’s independence in relationships, education, and work (Weber 102). Özdamar expresses this ambiguity already in “Grossvaterzunge”: “Ich ging den arabischen Frauen mit Kopftüchern hinterher, ihre schwangeren Töchter neben ihnen, ich will unter ihre Röcke gehen, ganz klein” ( MZ 21). The westernized emanicipated narrator’s desire to search for her roots reveals itself in the inquiry into the feminine Orientalism embodying the “sweetness” of subjugation, something that European women have lost. 386 Renata Fuchs “Karagöz in Alamania” ends as it has begun, that is, with a bizarre dream—this time in a form of a poem. Having at first abandoned his wife because of the move to Germany, the farmer decides that he loves her after all: “Alles, alles geht vorbei, aber unsere Liebe nicht” ( MZ 89). As the farmer lies in his in-half-divided bed of which the other half is reserved for his wife and children, he begs for forgiveness in strangely religious terms: “Mein Liebling du, stolz und frei! Verliebt bin ich nun mal in dich. Erbarme dich doch meiner” ( MZ 102). His plea is answered by the apple tree: “Nach Prügeln wohl verlangt dein Herz. […] Lieb mich nicht, ich lieb dich nicht.” In turn, the farmer hits the apple tree in which he now sees his alter ego, that is, a nightingale singing ( MZ 103). In the end, the combination of different genres, code switching, and irony, creates a magnified alienation effect and entirely destabilizes the typical vision of migration. The readers, like the characters, now experience the disruptions of migration (Franzè 56). During the whole process of going back and forth between the two countries, the characters must grapple with Heimweh, besides other difficulties, but a final return will never take place because the author destines them to a perpetual migration. Just as at the end of the second story, where Özdamar introduces an element connecting to her last story through Shakespeare’s character Ophelia, so it is also the case here that she provides a link to the story that follows. Through the symbol of the nightingale, she points to yet another of Shakespeare’s plays, Romeo and Julia. With this particular scene, Özdamar anticipates the last story in Mutterzunge, “Karriere einer Putzfrau , ” where the new Ophelia plays the prominent role. “Karriere einer Putzfrau,” begins with the introduction of the protagonist: “Ich bin die Putzfrau, wenn ich hier nicht putze, was soll ich denn sonst tun? In meinem Land war ich Ophelia” ( MZ 104). The transformation of Ophelia (referencing Shakespeare’s character) into the Turkish cleaning lady can be related to the Grimm Brothers’ tale “the Goose Girl” ( ATU 870A) since the transformation plot bears similarities with stories belonging to the categories of ATU 870A, ATU 437, and ATU 594 II and III . These are stories of the false bride, a true princess who is forcibly replaced by a usurper and made a servant before she is recognized as the true bride through a series of tests (Goldberg 59). “The Goose Girl,” however, does not contain the Stone of Patience episode, which is mostly present in fairy tales from Persia, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, or Spain, but rather the heroine’s recitation of her tale of woe is directed to the iron stove inside of which she sits (Goldberg 60). Only when the true princess tells her life story, is she recognized and marries the prince. Özdamar’s Turkish Ophelia tells the reader about the divorce from her mad husband Hamlet whose apparently deranged words, “Geh in ein Kloster! Geh! Leb wohl,” set the stage, literally and metaphorically, for the story that in the Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Mutterzunge 387 second part becomes a play ( MZ 104). 7 Two well-known Western cultural figures end their relationship because of social class differences, as articulated by the husband: “Wir machen gute Liebe, aber das ist nicht alles, zwischen uns ist Klassenunterschied” ( MZ 104). Özdamar erases these social class differences in the second part of the story where all literary works are put on the identical level regardless of whether they belong to the Western literary canon or not. So-called “low” literature, including fairy tales, anecdotes, and oral stories, has the same status as “high” literature. Historical figures, politicians, artists, literati, or a simple cleaning lady are treated the same, and females are equal to males through role reversal. Thus, within Özdamar’s main story, the reader encounters stories populated with unknown, unimportant figures along with those who left an indelible mark on the cultural make-up of Western society (Ophelia, Hamlet, Caesar, Medea, Woyzeck) but receive new roles here. For example, the prince runs through the woods totally lost, the wolf appears to be friendly, and the narrator’s grandmother tells the departing Ophelia / cleaning lady a tale about Frau Scheiße ( MZ 105-07). By juxtaposing Western canonical works with the Frau Scheiße tale that evokes satirical Turkish shadow plays ( karagöz ) mocking hegemony, Özdamar disrupts and deregulates all established norms of discourse. The humorous tale of Frau Scheiße, belonging to the type ATU 1351, “The Silent Wager,” frames Ophelia’s journey to Germany as a cleaning lady. There are several versions of this particular tale all over the world including Goethe’s rendition “Gutmann und Gutweib.” However, the famous Persian variant, “Stubborn Husband, Stubborn Wife,” is almost identical to Özdamar’s story in which an argument about who should do the work in marriage results in the wager of silence and almost ruins the marriage because the couple, while insisting on the terms of the wager, lose goods. The practical spouse, here the wife, tries to recover the lost goods by chasing after the thieves and tricking them. The gist of this tale is that although silence is golden, too much silence is the mark of an utter fool. In fact, the second half of Özdamar’s story has affinities with the stories of “Dummer Hans” in which poor, dumb, and powerless characters trick powerful adversaries. In this case, Frau Scheisse evades those who want to sexually assault her. The unique element in this story is the name of the protagonist, Frau Scheisse, and her tricking the thieves and almost rapists with faked feces in their boots. The original story has the woman putting dough made of flour and water into the boots, not feces. Since defecation, scatological humor, and “beyond all enduring obscene” sexuality, often featuring the penis, are part of the karagöz theater tradition, there is a connection here between this tale and the karagöz sequence (Öztürk 296-97). Cleaning up feces is part of the cleaning lady’s job in Germany, and it is related to the dirty bed linens—a claim made against her 388 Renata Fuchs by her mother-in-law. The motif of “Scheisse” continues throughout the story in various scenes, for example, when she must clean up after Prince the dog and after the people in the apartment building who “haben in der Nacht […] von manche Türen geschissen” ( MZ 111). The cleaning lady (and at the same time Ophelia) sets her own life in parallel with those of well-known personalities, thus putting herself on an identical par with them. Özdamar shapes her narrative into the cleaning lady’s story and theater performance, never relinquishing the narrative flow to the control of other major texts (Rankin 5). The narrator is the playwright and director who decides to displace the stars from their own distinguished dramas. She gives voice to the powerful Western tradition embodied in its celebrated figures, but at the same time she points out its imperfections: Ophelia goes insane and drowns herself; Hamlet is the unstable prince tormented by his father’s ghost who alerts him to his mother’s infidelity with his uncle; Caesar is the egocentric leader murdered by his trusted friend; Medea kills even her own children as a revenge; and Woyzeck savagely slays his beloved Marie. Just like the narrator, the once-powerful figures who now play in her drama have all been betrayed by those whom they trusted most. No happy ending seems possible because “am Ende gewinnen immer die Bösen” ( MZ 105). Yet, with the new play within her story, Özdamar not only attempts to rewrite the tragic ending, but also participates in a conversation about the literary canon by suggesting a major reconsideration of its intellectual foundations. The cleaning lady’s minority text develops its own voice and deterritorializes major texts to which it alludes. 8 Canonical texts operate within the minority framework; thus, foregoing their power and legitimatizing the minority text. During this process the focus is shifted away from the prominent, powerful Occidental male figure to the seemingly fragile, obscure Oriental female figure. Whereas for Hamlet madness is metaphysical and linked with culture, for Ophelia it is a product of the female body and female nature. Ophelia’s flowers suggest the contradictory double conceptualization of female sexuality as both chaste blossoming and lustful corruption. She is the virginal rose and the sensual madwoman who, in distributing her wild flowers and herbs to the members of the court, is symbolically deflowering herself. Ophelia gives rosemary to Hamlet, pansies to Laertes, fennel and columbines to Claudius, and rue to the Queen and herself. By giving rosemary to Hamlet, she symbolically celebrates her wedding as well as her funeral. She reserves for herself rue, a bitter plant with medicinal qualities and used as a symbol of repentance. Özdamar connects Ophelia’s gestures in the last scene of Hamlet to her fourth story about Ophelia, “Karriere einer Putzfrau,” and to the closing line (“Ruh heißt Seele”) of her second story “Grossvaterzunge” (as discussed above) ( MZ 48). Through the Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Mutterzunge 389 linguistic association of the German word “Ruhe” and the Arabic word “soul,” Özdamar brings together the Occident and Orient not in order to preserve a binary opposition drawn between them, but rather to erase epistemological distinction made between them. Regardless of their roots both women, the narrator from “Grossvaterzunge” and Ophelia from “Karagöz in Alamania,” refuse to go along with the patriarchal attitudes and subordination. Özdamar creates an image of self-assertion with no space for a melancholic, misty-eyed nemesis, as her Ophelia is reborn in Germany. The author transfigures the protagonist’s sunken dead body belonging to cultural imagination into a figure signaling the transformation of social norms, specifically those concerning diversity and marginalization of women. As a cleaning lady in Germany, the protagonist allows herself to become the drowned corpse of Ophelia, and at the same time she is “die ehemalige Leiche von einem Mann […], der Hamlet spielen wollte und sollte! ” ( MZ 107). She may have been killed in her own country, but she has resurrected herself on stage in Germany. Here she discovers that her fairy tale “prince” is a dog that she must follow with her white plastic bag: “Da stand ein Hund. Schwarz-weiß gekleidet, […] Ich bin diesem Prinz gefolgt. Meine Arbeit war leicht. Der Prinz schiß im Wald, ich bin immer hinter ihm gelaufen und habe die Scheiße in einer weißen Plastiktüte gesammelt und nach Hause in den Förstersalon gebracht” ( MZ 108). Özdamar relocates the acclaimed figures of the Western canon into the fairy tale woods where the prince, now turned into an animal, and Ophelia, now quasi princess, quasi Little Red Riding Hood, quasi a contemporary woman, are sent on an aimless chase. The fairy tale genre is yet again foregrounded, when the figure of a wolf is introduced: “Ein Wolf im Wald hat mich angesprochen,” and Little Red becomes a forest ranger who hesitates to shoot the eagle because it belongs to an endangered species ( MZ 108). It is also in the woods that she encounters a plastic serpent reminding the reader about the biblical paradise: “Es war eine Plastikschlange, und sie sang: Heut marschiert die Garde auf. Alle Mädchen freun sich drauf ” (MZ 110). This time, the serpent, a symol of the devil and temptation, acts as a guard against a public masturbator and rapist: “Eine Männerstimme: Ich bin dein Nachtgespenst, dein süßes Nachtgespenst. Ich weck dich, wenn du pennst, so oft, bis du mich Liebling nennst, sei bloß nicht so erschreckt, du wirst nur aufgedeckt, und wenn du aufgedeckt, dann wirst du wieder zugedeckt” (MZ 111). As the scene location changes to a high-rise building, Ophelia falls victim to stalking: “Dann knackte er auch oft mit seinem Schwanz” ( MZ 112). While dreaming in her new location, Ophelia sees the rapist as a wolf: “‛Jemand ist im Zimmer, Gott sei Dank bin ich wach’, sagte ich zu mir, in diesem Moment fliegen diese Füße über das Bett und kommen als Wolf wieder runter” ( MZ 111). Many 390 Renata Fuchs radical adaptations have transformed Little Red Riding Hood into a fearless, independent girl (Zipes 42). Özdamar’s version, however, does not rehabilitate the wolf and does not undermine the assumptions of the traditional cultural pattern. Here the wolf, as representative of sexuality in general, is still a threat. When the first part of Özdamar’s story “Karriere einer Putzfrau,” stylized as a fairy tale, ends, the second part, depicted as a theater play, begins. She turns to experimental subversive art in the form of Brechtian revolutionary theater, as the necessary catalyst for change (Weber 187). Özdamar’s last story epitomizes not just the collected memories of an obscure Turkish cleaning woman, but rather it is a part of an extensive fusion of separate identities that encompass literary canonical and historical figures regardless of their famous or infamous status. Along with the fabled prince included in the classic Grimms’ fairy tales, famed Hamlet, eminent Medea and Julius Caesar, and notable Woyzeck, Özdamar also introduces Adolph Hitler, Eva Braun, and Nathan der Weise, who is Germany’s most prominent symbol of enlightened thinking and a Jewish character capable of dialoguing peacefully with Christians and Muslims. By involving Nathan der Weise in her “mad” play, side-by-side with the anti-Semitic Nazi leader, the author shows the inadequacy of reason and the inability to unite the Western with the Eastern thought not only in the cleaning woman’s world, but also in the Western world. The cleaning lady casts herself as the mad Ophelia, a status that brings her closer to others participating in the “Blödsinn”: “ich habe soviel Blödsinn wie all Toten. So bin ich gelaufen, […] bis zum nächsten Theater” ( MZ 111-12). The displaced cleaning lady interacts dramatically with the figures engaged in her play. Because these figures are displaced themselves, either from their literary scenery or historical context, she can be perceived as being equal to them. Indeed the celebrated world-drama stage is “ein einziges Männerpissoir” wherein “Cäsar […] läßt Kleopatra die Pißbecken saubermachen” and “Ophelia macht im Männer-Pissoir den Boden sauber” while “alle Plastikschlangen lachen als Playback” ( MZ 114-15). The scenario is performed as a contemporary situation comedy with seemingly regressive misogynistic accents that, however, alert to the problem of women’s marginalization in history. When the drunken Hamlet “kriegt seine gespielten Orgasmen, Ophelia sagt zu ihm: ‛Hamlet, tue nicht so—gib dir nicht Mühe’” ( MZ 117). In this sexual act, Hamlet changes roles with Ophelia, as he takes on the role of the unsatisfied female pretending to have orgasms. Ophelia does not need her Hamlet to complete her. After all she is now the main character and the director of her play. Özdamar closes her story with a linguistic puzzle consisting of some like-sounding words: “Hier ist die Bohnermaschine, die Bühne wird täglich gebohnert, haben sie gesagt, nein, hier ist die Bohnermaschine haben sie gesagt, Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Mutterzunge 391 die Bühne wird täglich gebühnert, die Bohne wird täglich gebohnert, nein, nein, die Bühne wird täglich gebohnert. Das war es” (MZ 120). The cleaning lady fulfills her obligation as far as keeping the stage clean and polished is concerned. Simultaneously, however, she feels responsible for keeping the stage occupied and performing. Özdamar’s text creates a space in which a minority figure, a status based on race, gender, and class, becomes not only visible, but also prominent in that she determines the fate of the majorities. In this particular story, the author does not mention any popular Turkish figures but alludes only to eminent Western characters that have been long established in the literary canon. The author subjects the celebrated figures to her power and places her cleaning lady on the same par with them. With the power of her narrating voice, the cleaning lady is herself the author communicating with the dramatically perished; thus, creating a space for a new tradition to emerge. According to Maria Tatar, fairy tales do not only influence us, they reveal realities already present in what she calls the “folklore of the human mind” (Tatar 57). Most importantly, however, “the hard facts of fairy-tale life offer exaggerated visions of the grimmer realities and fantasies that touch and shape the lives of every child and adult” (Tatar 192). By revising the fairy tales and biblical stories that have influenced Western thought and intertwining them with stories from the Eastern lore, Özdamar attempts to rewrite literary tradition in order to reflect the new realities of multicultural German society. Through such linguistic experimentations as code switching and mixing of narrative forms, Özdamar engages in new and unique forms of expression that illustrate the border identities she introduces. Literal and metaphorical borders, including those between life and theater, life and death, Occident and Orient, Western literary canon and minority works, are featured in all stories of Mutterzunge. Özdamar brings German culture into contact with Islam in different and unpredictable ways. Her prose is informed by secular, leftist values. Still, she draws on cultural background that has accommodated Islam as religious experience, and she is indebted to a poetic tradition in which sacred and profane are overlapping categories. Her new oriental woman embodies a site where intellect and body meet and where independence from tradition through sexuality is introduced. Özdamar’s stories display lucidly that a hybridized identity is not able to function in the new society without rethinking its historical past and taking part in the process of reshaping the present political landscape of the host country in order to provide livable conditions for numerous others who are also minorities. Gadamer argued against such naïveté because “the ontological ground of understanding in language, the fusion of horizons in interpretation, cannot explain other, vastly different cultures that do not share our histories” ( Writing 392 Renata Fuchs Outside the Nation 6). Because we participate in human experience through a dialogue sustained by shared traditions, Özdamar rethinks and reshapes traditional lore using religious and secular motifs from both traditions, Oriental and Occidental. In doing so, the author assigns women an integral dominant position in contemporary society, which is stimulated by the process of hybridization and globalization and can lead to the formation of global, common cultural discourse culminating in the new “translocal” or World Literature. Notes 1 I will refer to “Karagöz in Alamania. Schwarzauge in Deutschland” as “Karagöz in Alamania” and to “Karriere einer Putzfrau. Erinnerungen an Deutschland ” as “Karriere einer Putzfrau.” I will refer to the story collection Mutterzunge . Erzählungen as Mutterzunge . When quoting from the story collection, I will use the abbreviation MZ within parentheses. 2 Critical works have examined Ozdamar’s writing in relationship to how it functions as a hybrid of German and Turkish culture (Monika Shafi, Margaret Littler Seyhan, Kader Konuk). Critics have commented on Ozdamar’s technique of literal translation, which is especially pronounced in her earlier work. This technique has been interpreted as a method of preserving and presenting authentic Turkish culture (Kuruyazici), as an act of affirming Turkish memory culture capable of opposing official history (Seyhan), as enriching German culture (Wierschke), as a study of the foreignness of Germany (Sölcün), and as an aesthetic experiment (Brandt). 3 In a 1996 interview with David Horrocks and Eva Kolinsky, Özdamar commented on her deliberate wish to write in German in this specific way: “I was also attracted to German as a new language. You see, at that time, I often traveled back to Turkey by train, finding myself together with ... all migrant workers. Their common language was German ... They made mistakes, of course, but the German they spoke was devoid of clichés and came out almost like poetry as they struggled to express the images of their mother tongue in this new language. And this, as I now realized, was the language of some five million Gastarbeiter” (47). 4 According to Zipes, there is a “Red Riding Hood syndrome” in Western culture, which persists at all levels of society and involves a perversion of sexuality that began during the 17th century (46). 5 Zipes explains that there were three major currents in the radical Little Red Riding Hood tales from 1950 to 1980: first, her portrayal as developing a sense of independence without help from males; second, attempts to rehabilitate the wolf; third, experiments debunking traditional narrative forms and seek- Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Mutterzunge 393 ing to free readers and listeners so that they can question the conventional cultural patterns. These currents overlap to form critical statements about the way we view sexuality on the basis of the Riding Hood pattern (39). 6 Brandt points out that forty has a high symbolic value in the text. Not only it is the period that emblematically spans the generation between the mother tongue and the grandfather, but it is also a number that generally represents privation in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (303). This way, the wait in Abdullah’s room acquires a sort of religious value (312). 7 Federmair reminds us that Brecht in his Arbeitsjournal identified Hamlet as a “new type”who distinguishes himself in an alienated way. This alienation effect is produced through a creation of a new type of figure - that of a doubtful intellectual - who does not fit into his historical surroundings where code of honor and acts of revenge need to be obeyed. Thus, Hamlet could be perceived as a foreigner, a migrant, a nomad within an orderly society. Consequently, Federmair thinks that Özdamar takes this idea of Brecht and develops it further with her own Hamlet figure (160). 8 Here Jeffrey Peck’s assertion rings true that in employing the literary device of allusion, minority texts and authors deterritorialize so-called major texts from their comfortable "immovable place" (281). Tales where personal destinies meet historical forces are often the most powerful guardians of public memory (“Lost in Translation” 419). Narrative memory recovers history and reinvents it for individual and collective empowerment outside the nation (“Lost in Translation” 419). Works Cited Adelson, Leslie. “Opposing Oppositions.” German Studies Review 17.2 (1994): 305-30. The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. Ed. Andrew Lang. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1898. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment. The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. Bird, Stephanie. 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