Turkish immigration, art and narratives of home in France 9781526100610

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Turkish immigration, art and narratives of home in France

Turkish immigration, art and narratives of home in France Annedith Schneider

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Annedith Schneider 2016 The right of Annedith Schneider to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 1 7849 9149 4 hardback First published 2016 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Out of House Publishing

For Melih, Teoman and Sinan, the centres of my migrant home

Contents

List of figures

page viii

Preface

ix

Acknowledgements

x

Introduction: settling in

1

1 Politics and belonging in the music of Turkish-French rapper C-it

28

2 Home and back again: texts and contexts in the Kebab Show theatre troupe

45

3 Home is where the laughter is: humour and narrative control on stage with Ayşe Şahin

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4 A Turk in Paris: Karagöz’s cultural and linguistic migration

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5 The right to (offer) hospitality in Sema Kılıçkaya’s Le Chant des tourterelles

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Conclusion: settling in References

109 118

Index 128

List of figures

1.1 C-it (Seyit Yakut), from his video ‘Hikayem’. Copyright © Seyit Yakut. 1.2 C-it (Seyit Yakut). Copyright © Seyit Yakut. 1.3 C-it (Seyit Yakut) wearing a ‘73’ t-shirt. Copyright © Seyit Yakut. 2.1 Kebab Show, from Fransa, ben de geldim. Copyright © Valérie Cuscito. 2.2 Kebab Show, from Fransa, ben de geldim. Copyright © Valérie Cuscito. 3.1 Ayşe Şahin as Selma Oyunoğlu in C’est pratique pour tout le monde. Copyright © Aurélie Gatet. 3.2 Ayşe Şahin as ‘Vanessa’ in C’est pratique pour tout le monde. Copyright © Aurélie Gatet. 4.1 Rüşen Yıldız backstage. Copyright © Ruşen Yıldız. 4.2 Gürbet in her apartment. Copyright © Ruşen Yıldız. 4.3 The journey home to Yaourtistan. Copyright © Ruşen Yıldız. 4.4 Karagöz in the factory. Copyright © Ruşen Yıldız. 5.1 Sema Kılıçkaya receives the 2014 Seligmann Prize against Racism for her novel Le Royaume sans racines. Copyright © Sema Kılıçkaya.

page 35 39 41 53 56 66 72 83 84 85 87 99

Preface

In the early-to-mid-2000s as I  went back and forth between Istanbul and Paris for a completely different research project on Maghrebi and beur narratives in France, I  became increasingly aware of a Turkish presence in France. Yet when I turned to the media or libraries to find out more about immigrants from Turkey in France, I was disappointed to find very little in my own fields of cultural and literary studies. Yes, there were important sociological and economic studies about French citizens with family origins in Turkey and even about their consumption of cultural work, but almost nothing about them as producers of culture. Knowing the vibrancy of culture in Turkey and among artists of Turkish origin in Germany, this lack of information in France sparked my curiosity. Attempting to satisfy this curiosity was at the origin of this project. As the debate in Europe about immigration, especially from predominantly Muslim countries, became increasingly negative, I  came to see that the kind of work being produced by immigrants from Turkey and their descendants could perhaps also provide a response to anti-immigration rhetoric that labels immigrants of certain origins as impossible to incorporate into mainstream French society on account of a supposed clash of cultures. On the contrary, the artists in the study could produce the work they do nowhere but in France, a clear sign of their belonging to French society – regardless of the language they use or the audience they address. Taking these artists’ work seriously makes it possible to see their relation to the societies where they live through their own eyes. Whereas political language can often only repeat the current ‘common sense’ notions about immigrants and can only frame issues in terms of either/or, the language of art allows one to say things that have not been said before and to explore the grey areas of both/and. I hope that this study will contribute to a more complex and nuanced understanding of immigrants from Turkey and their children in France, to see them and their artistic work as having Turkish, French and global connections.

Acknowledgements

The Türkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Araştırma Kurumu (Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) provided invaluable support for the early stages of this project in the form of a two-year research grant. I  am also grateful to the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Sabancı University, which provided a much-needed sabbatical during part of the grant period. Thanks must also go to the students who provided support with research, logistics, interview transcriptions and photographs at different points in the project:  Birin Topçudere, Olcay Özer, Adile Aslan, Sylvia Nicole Joss, Ceren Bezzazoğlu, İdil Kadıoğlu and Özge Olcay. And a separate thank you to the enthusiastic students in my seminars on migration and culture, where I  first explored many of the ideas in this book. I also appreciate the many opportunities to participate in workshops and learn from members of the diaspora research projects organised by Alfonso de Toro at the University of Leipzig. My thanks to friends and colleagues near and far who provided encouragement, feedback and a sympathetic ear, especially my most constant readers, Pascale Perraudin and Nancy Karabeyoğlu. Thanks also to Ester Gallo, Pieter Verstraete and Aimée Boutin who read parts of the work at different stages. Finally, thank you to the anonymous readers and to the staff at Manchester University Press, who saw this project through from proposal to publication. The ideas expressed in this book, of course, do not necessarily reflect those of TÜBİTAK, Sabancı University or any of those who supported me during the research and writing. An abbreviated version of Chapter  1 appeared as part of an edited collection, Perspectives on the ‘Migrant Cosmopolitans’:  Narratives of Contemporary Postcoloniality. It is included here with the gracious permission of the editors at Peter Lang Press. An excerpt from Chapter 2 has been published in Crossings: A Journal of Migration and Culture 4(2) (2013); it is expanded and edited and appears here with the kind permission of the editors. My gratitude to leaders in the organisations that support immigrants from Turkey and their descendants, especially Muharrem Koç at ASTU, Murat Erpuyan at A Ta Turquie, and Gaye Petek at Elele who kindly shared their time and knowledge, as well as access to their libraries. I am particularly fortunate to have visited Elele, met its staff and attended a few of its events before it was forced to close its

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doors in 2010, after twenty-five years of service to immigrants from Turkey and their descendants. Of course, the project could not have been completed at all without the generous cooperation of the artists whose work is the subject of this study. They and their families have been unstinting in their hospitality and in sharing their experiences, insights and creative work. They have my most sincere thanks and respect. Finally, thanks to my own immediate and extended families on two continents for their support and patience. You made this all possible in more ways than I can express.

Introduction: settling in

This book explores the intersection between the stories told by the adult children of immigrants and the many ways those stories are told or performed. Along the way, we will also examine how their stories counter, play with and sometimes play into public narratives about immigrants and national identity. In public debates about immigration, metaphors and images abound:  home, host, guest, native, alien, borders, transgression, bridges, enclaves, assimilation and integration. Many of these metaphors and images evoke space and the appropriate use of space, which is only logical, as this discussion concerns the movement of people from one space to another. While one understands the reasoning behind such language, it is also important to explore its limits. How does it shape our ability to see and understand the experience of immigration? How does it prevent us from seeing certain aspects? How might immigrant narratives contribute to the creation of a new language and new ways of understanding immigration? A key term in this book, settling, points to two important aspects of immigration. First, unlike the word settlement, which describes a fixed state (sometimes through coercion), settling suggests an ongoing process with some element of choice. Unlike the trajectory narrated in many older stories of immigration, the artists considered in this work have not ‘arrived’ at any final destination, either geographically or artistically. They are neither complete outsiders, nor are they definitively ‘settled’. Linguistically, culturally and physically, they move among cultures and countries. Second, settling, as in settling for, implies the idea of making do, of accepting what is not perfect or final. Just as migration is a process, it also requires compromise and flexibility, a willingness to accept that things may not be exactly as one would like – on the part not only of the immigrant but also of those already there. Settling, as a process, allows for the possibility of change and adaptation, which are key aspects of the creative work considered here. As should be clear already, I see the idea of settling as a positive, ongoing process. It must be noted, however, that the semantic field of settling also includes the less positive and more historically problematic term of ‘settler’. In common parlance, the term ‘settler’ calls to mind those who represented a colonial enterprise in which they occupied positions of power in the colony and displaced indigenous people, as in the United States, Australia or Algeria. However poor or marginalised

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they may have been in their country of origin, in the context of settler society, they wielded more power than do present-day economic and political immigrants who move to a more prosperous country such as France. Despite the relative vulnerability of these immigrants and their descendants, media reports and populist politicians in the receiving country invert the language of colonisation to bemoan the invasion of their land by these new settlers. The work of the artists discussed in this book, however, makes it clear that the artists do not draw such a distinction between themselves and their fellow citizens, refusing the notion that the residency of one’s ancestors makes for more genuine belonging to the nation. Indeed, the work of these artists provides a useful reminder that national culture is always changing, requiring even those with long family histories in a given space to adjust and change. Immigrant settling may be more apparent, and is therefore a useful focus, but because no cultural space is unchanging, everyone is involved in settling in some way. To explore the phenomenon of settling, this book focuses on artists in France whose parents or grandparents emigrated from Turkey. The need to see the lives of immigrants and their descendants from a new perspective, and specifically through their own eyes, is more important than ever, as Europe has become increasingly less welcoming of immigrants and ever more receptive to discourses that portray immigrants, especially Muslim immigrants, as irredeemably other. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel said that German values are Christian values and immigrants in Germany must adhere to those values (Van Renterghem 2010). In Switzerland, a referendum was passed in 2009 that forbade the building of new minarets, and in France, Nicholas Sarkozy in his term as French president from 2007 to 2012 welcomed a debate on national identity that often focused on how immigrants and their descendants were not part of that identity (Saba 2009). Even those immigrants who established themselves in Europe decades earlier are finding that recent debates seek to challenge not only their right to live there, but that of their children, many of whom were born there and hold citizenship. In France, for example, Sarkozy in 2010 proposed stripping naturalised citizens of their citizenship if they were convicted of certain crimes (such as assault on a police officer) (Roger 2011). Since native-born French citizens would face only jail sentences for the same crime, this constituted a direct challenge to the French constitutional principle that all citizens are equal before the law, and effectively would have created a two-tiered system of citizenship. As philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy noted at the time, the French Constitution does not allow one to distinguish among citizens who are ‘plus ou moins français’ (more or less French) (Lévy 2010).1 In the end, in the face of divisions even within his own party over this controversial part of a larger project to overhaul existing immigration rules, Sarkozy withdrew the proposal in 2011 (Roger 2011). The place immigrants from Turkey and their descendants occupy in France also has ramifications in the context of European Union (EU) expansion. During the 2007 French presidential campaigns, commentators observed a parallel between

Introduction: settling in

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negative attitudes to immigration and opposition to Turkey’s admission to the European Union (Emery 2010). If immigrants from Turkey, the argument goes, are so poorly integrated, could Turkey as a whole ever successfully become a full member of the EU without drastically changing European culture? The discussion of integration focuses in particular on the so-called second and third generations,2 whom the media and politicians often stereotype as anti-social and antagonistic to French values. Historian Patrick Weil, a specialist on immigration history, writes that 20 per cent of European voters are afraid that cultural difference will weaken nations (Weil 2010). Whatever their level of educational and professional success, and regardless of whether they, their parents or even their grandparents were born in France, young people who come from immigrant backgrounds lament the fact that they are made to feel like foreigners (or at best, ‘guests’) in France, and then also treated as foreign when they visit the countries their parents or grandparents were born in. Politicians, journalists, economists, sociologists and political scientists all have their own metaphors and ways of talking about immigrants. Some of them are immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants, but their exploration of immigration proceeds in the third person, talking about immigrants, rather than allowing space for immigrants to speak on their own behalf. This book cannot completely escape doing the same, but it also aims to see what immigrants, or, more particularly, the children of immigrants, have to say for themselves  – not in explicit accounts, such as might be gathered through interviews (although interviews also play a role in this analysis), but in a fashion that is at once more mediated and more direct, mediated through art, but direct in that it is their own expression. This book examines the work of four young artists and one collective in music, theatre and literature, all of whom immigrated to France as small children or who were born in France to Turkish parents. Many aspire to professional careers in the arts and have achieved some recognition, but they are not generally well known outside their own communities. Through analysis of their artistic work and their comments in interviews, this book examines the techniques, metaphors and images they use in their art to talk about themselves, their families, their communities and their place in French society. Contrary to many media accounts of second-generation immigrants ‘caught between’ cultures, these young people are in the process of settling in and, through their artistic work, creating new definitions of home and belonging that claim simultaneous local, national and transnational homes. Of course, it cannot be assumed that because an artist comes from an immigrant background his or her primary artistic concern would necessarily be to represent immigrant experience. There are certainly artists from an immigrant background whose artistic work does not take up issues of immigration or the experience of two cultures. That said, the artists chosen for this study are those at least some of whose work concerns the experience of immigration and growing

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up with more than one culture because it is precisely those narratives that allow us to reflect, however indirectly, on what it means to ‘belong’ to any culture: in other words, to question something that is often taken for granted by those for whom identity and culture are single and relatively unchallenged. However creative and innovative, one might reasonably ask if artists can represent their community of origin, and one must proceed with caution in attempting to link the work of the individual with the varied lives of community members. But it is also important to clarify what we mean by representation. In the sense of representation as reflecting a larger community consensus, immigrants are just too diverse a group to make this argument convincing. In the other sense of representation as speaking for someone else, however, these artists (whether they intend to or not) do represent a larger community, inasmuch as they are recognised as Turkish, speaking both to what the community is and what it should be (in their own eyes). Their discourse is, of course, in competition with other often more conservative discourses coming from religious authorities and the official voices of the country of origin, both of whom claim to represent ‘their’ migrants.3 In this sense, creative work matters as another voice in the debate, whether it reflects a smaller or larger part of the community. Narratives of home matter even when they do not mirror the current state of the community, since with time, they may come to shape new visions of the community. Identity This study begins with the theoretical premise that identity is chosen, constructed and fluid, not given, and that communities and individuals use artistic expression in the construction of their identities. Identities may be focused on ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, or a combination of these or any number of other factors. This study, however, is particularly interested in the construction of ‘Turkishness’ in the diaspora, and asks what it means to be ‘Turkish’ when one is born outside Turkey and lives in, receives one’s education in and often votes as a citizen of another country. What kinds of identifications are created with the self-identified Turkish diaspora around the world? And do the descendants of immigrants from Turkey construct identities in connection with members of other diasporic communities? This idea of constructing an identity has been famously explored by Judith Butler, who argues that sexual identities are the result of a repeated ‘performance’, or enactment, of gendered behaviour that cites other performances of gender (Butler 1990, 1993). In other words, each of us imitates already existing examples of gendered behaviour. This does not mean that the performance is necessarily either conscious (although it may be) or a fiction. It is precisely the repeated performance that makes one’s identity real. Empirical studies have also suggested that from the moment of birth, a child’s gender identity begins to be shaped by the

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actions and words of adults (Fausto-Sterling et al. 2011), but Butler has more in mind than just this. In Butler’s argument, one cannot become a subject without this reiterative process of ‘girling’ or ‘boying’, so that coming into being as a person entails coming into being as a gendered person. Repetition, however, always implies difference. Simply by virtue of being a repetition, it is never the same as the original act. Thus each repetition is an attempt to reproduce the original that never quite matches the original. If one’s gender performance always includes some gap between the practice and the ideal, Butler argues, then it has the potential to be something else, and thus the potential to challenge the dominant discourses of gender through those gaps. Butler’s argument concerning the performance of gender has been a powerful tool for academics and non-academics as they seek to understand how sex and gender function. While Butler’s arguments have been challenged in the realm of gender studies, they have nonetheless proven particularly convincing for scholars interested in identities with more obvious social (rather than biological) connections, such as ethnicity and nationality. When I write about the performance of Turkish identity, I am assuming that there is nothing ‘natural’ or biological about Turkishness, although I recognise that some Turkish political and academic rhetoric has historically and aggressively made just that argument.4 My interest in this study concerns how an identity that links ethnic identity to a geographical and political space continues to function when it is separated from that space. One aspect that distinguishes immigrants from Turkey from many other immigrant groups is, in fact, their continued active ties to the country of origin, which will be taken up in greater detail in the following section on immigration. While I  have in mind the theoretical notion of performed identities, as described above, I also have in mind the much more common idea of performance, which involves a public artistic performance with an audience. The performance and audience may be live, as in the staged performance of a play, or they may be more distanced from each other, as when fans listen to a musician’s recording, but in either case, performance implies some sort of public staging in front of an audience. As I began the research for this book, looking for cultural production by young descendants of immigrants from Turkey, I assumed that their work would fall into the same categories as work by other immigrant communities in France, or by immigrants from Turkey in Germany. Among North Africans in France, for example, while music and theatre are important, there is also a varied and well-regarded body of literature, along with significant critical work devoted to that literature (e.g. Bonn 2004; Green 1996; Murdoch and Donadey 2005; Rosello 2005). Similarly in Germany, well-known writers of Turkish origin have made a name for themselves and inspired a great deal of critical work (e.g. Adelson 2005; Göktürk 1999; Şenocak 2000). Among young artists of Turkish origin in France, however, I was soon struck by the predominance of the performing arts, in particular theatre and music, and the near absence of literary work.

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Turkish immigration, art and narratives of home

Thus in addition to trying to develop an overview of artistic activity among immigrants from Turkey and their children in France and to understand the techniques, messages and intent of their work, I also had to ask another question: why so few purely textual works among these artists? Of course, popular music and theatre have important textual elements, even textual origins, but they are fully realised only in their performance, as opposed to fiction and poetry, which are realised as texts. One possible explanation makes recourse to sociological and historical data about immigrants from Turkey to France, which I will address in more depth in the next section. But it is worth saying up front that however useful such data are for understanding the context of this artistic production, a much more complex picture arises in conversation with the artists and through close analysis of the artists’ work itself, which is indeed the focus of this volume. ‘Turks’ in France Community organisers and specialists in immigration estimate that there are more than 600,000 people living in France who identify themselves as Turkish, including immigrants as well as their children and grandchildren. This would make them the second largest immigrant group in France, after immigrants from North Africa, and also the second largest concentration of immigrants from Turkey, after Turks in Germany. When France ended formal labour immigration in 1974, policies of family reunification meant that the primarily male and temporary immigration of the late 1960s and early 1970s gave way to a more permanent settlement that included women and children. All of this raises the question, however, of how to define ‘Turks’. It may seem relatively easy to classify those immigrants born in Turkey as Turks, especially as many of them chose to retain Turkish citizenship and not to become French citizens. But what of their children and grandchildren born in France? Many of these descendants of immigrants from Turkey  – regardless of academic or professional success and regardless of their French citizenship – continue to express a strong identification with the country of their parents’ and grandparents’ birth, and it is this self-identification that provides the framework for this study. In other words, this book is not concerned with identifying criteria for determining who ‘counts’ as Turkish or how to define Turkishness (although this has been an important question in Turkey), but instead focuses on artists who already identify themselves as Turkish. In France, immigrants from Turkey include many Alevis and Kurds, especially, but also Armenians, Jews, Assyrian Christians and Orthodox Greeks. And even those who identify themselves as Turkish may also claim ethnic identities such as Laz, Georgian or Circassian. Religious minorities and Kurds do not usually share the same immigration history as other immigrants from Turkey, in terms of either their reasons for immigration or the period of immigration; nor are they likely to have the same affective ties to Turkey. To take the most extreme example,

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Armenians, who fled to France following the 1915 massacres in the Ottoman Empire, have a much longer history of integration into French society and obviously a much more traumatic relationship with the country of origin of their ancestors. Similarly, many Kurds who left the country as a result of the civil war in south-eastern Turkey, but also ethnic Turks who left Turkey during and after the 1980 military coup because of political persecution, cannot be expected to have the same experience of immigration as those who left Turkey in the 1970s for primarily economic reasons. While any immigrant’s narrative of immigration may express nostalgia for a family past in a particular geographic space, those forced to leave because their lives were threatened can be expected to have an entirely different story about their relationship to the country of origin. The ethnic, religious and national identifications of these groups and how those identifications play out in artistic work are certainly of great interest, but that is a project for another future study. This book instead focuses only on those individuals who claim Turkishness as part of their identity and who are thus usually perceived in France as ‘Turkish’. The individuals discussed in this study came to my attention precisely because they consider themselves Turkish or are considered Turkish by other self-identified Turks, or because they have a substantial connection to organisations that bring together immigrants from Turkey and their descendants. Since a significant question of this research concerns how a community tells stories about its own experience of immigration, it makes sense to focus on this self-described community, at least in an initial study. Another reason for focusing on self-identified Turks in France concerns the way immigrants from Turkey are viewed in France and in Europe as a whole. These are the people Europeans often look at, wrongly or rightly, as indications of what it might mean for Turkey to be a full member of the European Union. The limits of framing a study in ethnic or national terms, however, must be acknowledged. While their parents may have come from Turkey, to call the children Turkish without any qualification is to accept an ethnicised language that privileges ‘blood’ over citizenship. The problem with the term Türk is precisely that it conflates ethnicity, citizenship and, in popular parlance, even religion. (This is true for many national identities in Europe, as well, where the ‘standard’ citizen is Christian and claims an ethnic ancestry that matches the official language of the country.) In Europe, as in Turkey, when one says ‘Turk’, it generally refers to someone who is not only a Turkish citizen but is also Sunni Muslim and ethnically Turkish. This is clear from the common use in Turkey of such expressions as Jewish Turk, Greek Turk or Armenian Turk, which emphasise divergence from the norm. The ‘standard’ Turkish citizen who needs no hyphenation or qualifying adjective is the Sunni Muslim, ethnically Turkish Turk. An alternative term in Turkish, Türkiyeli, translated as ‘from Turkey’, emphasises belonging to a place rather than an ethnicity, but it is used rarely, usually when the speaker wants to make a political or ethical point of separating ethnicity and citizenship.5 Because

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not all immigrants from Turkey consider themselves ethnically Turkish, I will generally use expressions such as ‘immigrants from Turkey’ unless I am referring to a speaker’s self-identification. In the context of anthropology, Nina Glick Schiller has strongly criticised what she calls ‘methodological nationalism’, which assumes that nations and ethnic communities are ‘natural’ and that immigrants by definition therefore transgress borders by doing what is ‘unnatural’. Given this criticism, she argues against using the ethnic group as a conceptual framework, a particularly familiar framework in discussions of immigration (e.g. North Africans in France or Turks in Germany, and, in this book, Turks in France). As she argues, ‘The ethnic group research design leaves several key issues under-researched and under-theorized. Among these are possible non-ethnic forms of settlement and transnational connection and the significance of the locality of the city in migrant settlement’ (Glick Schiller 2008: 2). She argues instead for a framework that looks at other forms of affiliation, such as religion or identification with a particular city. In many ways it is a convincing argument, but one that seems to work best in specific contexts, such as small cities, where immigrant concentrations are too low to make organising along ethnic lines practical. It also works for considering certain cultural forms, such as rap or youth culture, which often transcend ethnic and national boundaries. This brief reference to Glick Schiller’s argument is a useful reminder that even with individuals who define themselves in ethnic terms and ask others to view them in those terms, the researcher is not obliged to reproduce only those same frameworks. This is apparent, for example, in discussions with the rapper C-it (see Chapter 1) and the theatre group Kebab Show (see Chapter 2), who both claim Turkishness as a major part of their identities, but who, in practice, demonstrate that Frenchness is also very much part of those identities. The ‘second generation’ The other choice of this study is the focus on the ‘second generation’. Writers or musicians who grow up in Turkey, complete most of their education there and then as adults move to France for professional or personal reasons may experience real difficulties adapting to the new culture and ironically experience similar difficulties of adaptation when they return to Turkey. But their fundamental sense of who they are and what their culture is does not radically change. The situation is different for young people who were born in France or who came to France at a very young age and who have been educated in France, but whose parents came from Turkey. Their childhood did not take place in Turkey, but in France. Yet their sense of French culture is largely one external to the family. For these young people, for good or ill, cultural belonging must be chosen and asserted more consciously than by those who grow up in the same culture as their parents did, where home and public cultures reinforce each other. Not only must they decide how

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they will negotiate these two cultures and what choices they will make, they must face the reality that identity also depends on someone else acknowledging that one is what one claims to be. As several young people with family origins in Turkey who grew up in France have said, in France they are viewed as Turkish and in Turkey they are viewed as French. For ease of discussion, I  will sometimes use the common expression ‘second generation’, although there are problems with this terminology. First of all, ‘second-generation immigrant’ is an oxymoron, since it is technically impossible to be an immigrant to the country in which one was born. Second, the term suggests a refusal to accept the descendants of immigrants as full members of the society in which they were born. It is telling that the term ‘second generation’ is commonly used in Europe, but far less so in countries such as Canada or the United States, whose narratives of nation building depend on immigration. As historian Gérard Noiriel notes, the term ‘a pour inconvénient d’insister sur l’origine étrangère d’une catégorie d’individus qui sont français, dans leur grande majorité’ (has the drawback of insisting on the foreign origin of a category of individuals, the majority of whom are French citizens) (Noiriel 2002: 40). Just as importantly, as Ruth Mandel (2008) notes, it suggests a non-existent uniformity among the children of immigrants and ignores the many sociocultural differences among young people of immigrant origin. The commonly used terms of ‘second generation’ and ‘Turkish’ inevitably converge in this study of cultural production by the offspring of immigrants from Turkey. Levent Soysal makes a compelling argument when he writes that ‘generational categories hide, rather than reveal, the conditions, participation, and diverse cultural productions of migrant youths in their countries of residence by rendering their experience as an unceasing and unremitting journey “in between” tradition and modernity’ (Soysal 2002: 123). One would not want to perpetuate the old Orientalist cliché that declares all things Turkish as part of tradition and all things French as part of modernity, and then place the artists considered here as ‘caught’ in between. On the contrary, the artists discussed in this study would also refuse this view and claim their access to two cultures as a source of richness and inspiration. Leslie Adelson also critiques the idea of being caught ‘in-between’ in the context of immigration from Turkey to Germany, noting that more than anything, it is a metaphor that works to emphasise supposedly eternal differences between disparate groups of people. The imaginary bridge ‘between two worlds’ is designed to keep discrete worlds apart as much as it pretends to bring them together. Migrants are at best imagined as suspended on this bridge in perpetuity; critics do not seem to have enough imagination to picture them actually crossing the bridge and landing anywhere new. This has to do in turn with the national contours that are ascribed to these ostensible ‘worlds’ linked by a bridge of dubious stability. In

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Turkish immigration, art and narratives of home this model, the Federal Republic of Germany may change and the Republic of Turkey may change (though this is usually dismissed as unlikely), but what is not allowed to change is the notion that Turks and Germans are separated by an absolute cultural divide. (Adelson 2002: 246)

She argues instead that in contrast to the model of a bridge separating (and occasionally joining) two separate and distinct cultures, we should see Turks and Germans as occupying a shared cultural space, in which writers respond to a shared history (including immigration), as well as a shared future. Nikola Tietze, writing about young ‘second generation’ Turks in Germany, cautions that even when they identify themselves as Turkish, one needs to look carefully at the context: [L’]affirmation turque renvoie à une identification sociale, et non à une communauté nationale ou culturelle. Bien que les jeunes utilisent l’attribut ‘turc’, ils s’identifient dans leurs discours à un groupe de dominés qui souffre de discriminations politiques et sociales diverse dans la vie quotidien … En ‘ethnicisant’ ou ‘culturalisant’ des comportements qui relèvent plutôt d’un code de politesse général que d’un caractère national particulier, les individus tentent de donner à eux-mêmes l’estime qui leur est refusée dans la vie sociale. [The assertion of Turkishness reflects a social identity, not a national or cultural identity. Although young people use the term ‘Turk’ in their speech, they identify themselves as a group of oppressed people who suffer various political and social discriminations in daily life. … In ‘ethnicising’ or ‘culturising’ behaviours that have more to do with local codes than with a particular national character, individuals try to give themselves the respect that is refused to them in social life.] (Tietze 2000: 241)

Of course, claiming a Turkish identity, with whatever connotations, does not necessarily exclude the possibility of other identifications. Thus even though this book takes those who self-identify as Turks as its subject, the individual case studies will make it clear that the artists discussed in this study are constantly questioning and testing their own belonging to multiple communities. Immigration in France Immigration moved to the centre of national debate in France in the 1980s when young people of immigrant origin, primarily North African, took to the streets to protest discrimination and police violence, most famously in the 1983 March for Equality and against Discrimination, in which protestors spent nearly two months

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walking across France. The march culminated with 60,000 protestors gathering at a final demonstration in Paris. This was the period in which then-President François Mitterand spoke of ‘la droit à la différence’, or the right to difference. This brief flirtation with a multicultural approach to immigration represented a sea change in French official discourse, which since the Revolution in 1789 had refused to see citizens as anything but French, without ethnic or religious difference. This change in public discourse, however, was short-lived, as it soon came to be appropriated by the extreme right party, the Front National, who instead adopted it as a way to reject immigrants by claiming a right to French cultural difference and thus the right to reject anything they perceived as non-French. Of course, on both the left and the right, the assumption behind these discussions was that there were ahistorical, pure and discrete cultures, completely free of any influence from other cultures. In any case, the French Left soon turned back to the republican language of the Revolution, in which immigrants and their children, quite apart from any ethnic identity, gained citizenship rights ‘on the basis of their integration into the French nation’ (Freedman 2004: 27). A second important moment in the public narrative on immigration was constituted by the riots of 2005. Police in a Paris suburb chased three teenagers of immigrant origin, whom they mistakenly believed to have been involved in a robbery. The young men ran into an electrical transformer station, where they were electrocuted. Two died; one survived with severe burns. As word spread, residents of the Paris suburbs, the banlieues, gathered to protest what had happened. The protests quickly turned violent and spread to other cities in France. According to official police statistics, over the three weeks of the protests, 233 public buildings, including schools, and 74 private buildings were vandalised; more than 10,000 vehicles were burned; and 224 police, gendarmes and fire fighters were wounded (Frégnac-Clave 2008: 430). Media coverage and politicians’ responses reinforced each other in emphasising the violence of the events, attempting to explain them in terms of race and ethnicity alone. More nuanced accounts reflected on social and economic inequalities: The riots thus expressed the profound dissatisfaction that prevails among inhabitants, especially young ones, in the suburbs in relation to their current sociocultural situation. The population of the suburbs is ordered to integrate into a society that does not treat them as equals, a society that does not afford them the same opportunities as others. (Moran 2008: 4)

One aspect of the riots that none of the major media commented on but that is particularly relevant for this book concerns the identity of one of the three young men who were electrocuted. Just as press reports about the riots often referred to the protestors as alienated young Africans and Maghrebis, so initial media coverage about the three young men at the origin of the riots also referred to them

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as Africans and Maghrebis. While one was of African and another of Maghrebi origin, the third young man, the survivor Muhittin Altun, was of Turkish Kurdish origin. As this example suggests, immigrants from Turkey at times seem to be an invisible minority in France, noticed, if at all, as Muslims, lumped together with North Africans. This may account in part for the fact that immigrants from Turkey and their descendants complain less about discrimination than other immigrant groups in France. While it may be true that the physical appearance of many immigrants from Turkey allows them to blend into French society, they also tend to form a closed community. As a social worker in one non-governmental organisation (NGO) put it: Comme les Turcs ne sont pas dans une relation intense avec la société et les familles françaises, ils n’ont pas forcément rencontré de situations discriminatoires. Pour pouvoir dire ‘je suis discriminé’, il faut être continuellement en lien avec la société, dans le dialogue, dans la relation. C’est cela qui est à la base de l’inclusion ou de l’exclusion. [Since Turks aren’t in close relationship with French society and families, they haven’t necessarily faced discriminatory situations. In order to say ‘I’ve been discriminated against’, one has to be in continual contact with society, in dialogue, in relation. That’s what’s at the base of inclusion and exclusion.] (Poinsot 2009: 93)

Thus, while immigration may be front-page news in France, immigrants from Turkey in particular are not. A third important moment in France’s ongoing political narrative of immigration was Nicholas Sarkozy’s election as president in 2007. Sarkozy had made himself infamous during the riots of 2005, when he was Minister of the Interior and spoke of the need to clean the ‘racaille’ (scum) of the banlieues with pressure hoses. One of the first campaign promises the new President fulfilled was the establishment of a Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-Development. Critics noted that national identity had not had such a high official profile since the Nazi occupation and the Vichy Government during the Second World War. As the historian Gérard Noiriel writes: Le discours sur l’identité nationale a pour principale fonction d’alimenter la suspicion à l’égard des nouveaux immigrants, afin de les dissuader de venir en France. Une analyse plus poussée de la rhétorique ampoulée de ces technocrates de l’immigration ‘choisie,’ montrerait que les ‘valeurs de la république’ jouent, dans leur discours, le même rôle discriminatoire que la ‘race’ chez les experts de l’immigration ‘désirable’ dans les années 1920–30. [The discourse on national identity has the principal function of strengthening the suspicion toward new immigrants in order to dissuade them from coming to France. A further analysis of the clumsy rhetoric of these technocrats for

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a ‘selective immigration’ would show that ‘republican values’ in their discourse play the same discriminatory role as ‘race’ did for the experts on ‘desirable immigration’ in the 1920s and 1930s. (quoted in Emery 2010: 123)

The new ministry was widely viewed as increasing the stigmatisation of immigration and was eventually abolished in November 2010. Instead of immigration issues being returned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the Ministry of Social Welfare, however, they are now under the Ministry of Internal Affairs. For many critics, the change in name means no substantive change. Patrick Weil, referring to the fact that the national police are also under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Interior, said ‘La politique de l’immigration a besoin d’autres visions que celles de la police et des préfets’ (Immigration policy needs other visions than those of the police and the prefects) (quoted in Piquard 2010). Official French governmental policy has for decades refused to classify its citizens by race, ethnicity or religion, basing this refusal on the constitutional principle that all citizens are equal before the law and should not be seen as part of any sub-national group. According to this logic, everyone is a French citizen, nothing more, nothing less. In practice, this ‘colour blind’ approach has made it difficult, for example, to prove discrimination in the work place or in elite institutions of higher education. In daily life and through personal experience, it is common knowledge that an applicant with dark skin or an obviously Muslim name, for instance, will have more difficulty finding a job than someone with light skin or a typically French name. The few studies documenting such discrimination have appeared only recently. Adida et  al. (2010), for example, conducted a study that revealed significant anti-Muslim discrimination among employers. In the experiment, they sent out two résumés, identical in terms of qualifications, but one under a typically Christian Senegalese name and the other under a typically Muslim Senegalese name. The ‘Christian’ applicant received two-and-a-half times more call-backs than the ‘Muslim’ applicant. Despite a few indicative studies like this one, it has been difficult to prove discrimination in actual hiring, since the statistical evidence about employment figures by race or ethnicity do not exist on a company-by-company basis. Comparing the situation to that of the United States, the head of the Conseil représentatif des associations noires (Representative Council of Black Organisations), Patrick Lozès, notes: Les Etats-Unis ont prodigieusement avancé en quarante ans, d’une situation où les Blancs et les Noirs ne voyageaient pas dans les mêmes bus à une situation où aujourd’hui des milliers d’élus, d’ambassadeurs, de membres de hauts rangs de l’armée, sont issus de la diversité. Plus de cent soixante ans après la proclamation de l’égalité parfaite entre les citoyens, est-ce que nous avons de la diversité parmi nos cent soixante-treize ambassadeurs, parmi les PDG du CAC 40 ou à la tête de l’armée française?

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Turkish immigration, art and narratives of home [The United States has progressed enormously in forty years, from a situation where Whites and Blacks didn’t ride on the same buses to a situation today where thousands of elected officials, ambassadors, high-ranking army officers are all minorities. More than 160  years after the declaration of complete equality among citizens, do we have any diversity among our seventy-three ambassadors, among the CEOs of the top companies (CAC 40) or at the head of the French army?] (quoted in Gérard 2010)

According to this argument, in the USA, statistics about minority employment have allowed individuals to hold employers accountable for diversity in hiring, aided of course by affirmative action laws encouraging the hiring of minorities. In France, since statistics are not kept and there are no incentives to encourage minority hiring, companies have little to fear from the law and therefore little motivation to seek out qualified minorities. While the restrictions described above make it difficult to track individual institutions, they do nonetheless allow for large-scale academic studies. The Committee for the Measurement of Diversity and Discriminations, in fact, noted in 2010 that the law was not as restrictive as often thought. They evaluated the possibilities for statistical studies within the existing law and concluded that if the Constitutional Council ‘a déclaré inconstitutionnel “la définition a priori d’un référentiel ethno-racial” sur le modèle américain ou britannique, le Conseil ne s’oppose pas au traitement de données “subjectives” comme celles fondées sur le “ressenti d’appartenance”’ (has declared as unconstitutional any “a priori definition of an ethno-racial frame of reference” on the American or British model, the Council does not prohibit “subjective” data such as those based on a “feeling of belonging”) (Van Eeckhout 2010). One appreciates the apparent understanding of race and ethnicity as subjective rather than as pre-existing natural categories, but the fact remains that in daily life, most people behave as though they were pre-existing natural categories, and a ‘feeling of belonging’ to a particular group fails to provide the kind of data needed to combat discrimination in hiring. In terms of more concrete data, the report noted that statistical studies may also be conducted according to the national origin of the interviewees or their parents, which does allow the collection of some data about the second generation, albeit in a round-about way. Using these permitted types of questions concerning parents’ origins and feelings of belonging, in October 2010, the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies and the National Institute for Demographic Studies released a report entitled Trajectoires et origines:  Enquête sur la diversité des populations en France (Beauchemin et al. 2010). When its publication was announced, the media seemed to feel obliged to justify the ethnic content of the report to the public, as evidenced by this statement in an article in Le Monde: ‘En principe, les statistiques ethniques sont interdites en France, mais l’étude a bénéficié d’un accord exceptionnel de la Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés’ (In principle, ethnic

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statistics are prohibited in France, but the study obtained a special authorisation from the National Commission on Information Technology and Freedom [which monitors the collection of private data about individuals]) (Vincent 2010). Based largely on interviewees’ statements regarding their own nationality or that of their parents, the study nonetheless provides a useful framework for this study. According to the study, immigrants from Turkey in France are a young population with approximately half of them under the age of thirty-five, a larger proportion of young people than in any other immigrant group considered in the study (Lhommeau and Simon 2010: 14), a statistic that most likely reflects the fact that immigration from Turkey continues through the descendants of Turkish immigrants marrying Turks from Turkey, who then emigrate to France. Related to this and to the relatively recent character of immigration from Turkey is the striking fact that 96 per cent of the adults of the second generation surveyed are under the age of thirty-five (Lhommeau and Simon 2010: 15) Whether considering the first or so-called second generation, immigrants from Turkey and their children in France are a remarkably young population. In terms of language, more than 40 per cent of the children of immigrants from Turkey spoke no French at home before starting school (Condon and Régnard 2010: 32). Given this linguistic disadvantage, it is unsurprising that school results are also quite low compared to other groups. Approximately 27 per cent of the children of immigrants from Turkey leave secondary school before graduating (Brinbaum et al. 2010: 48). Whereas 53 per cent of the non-immigrant population is in higher education, only 25 per cent of those who identify as Turks are. This is also much lower than other immigrant groups, whose participation in higher education ranges from 41 to 71 per cent (Brinbaum et  al. 2010:  51). About feelings of national belonging, as the report notes, ‘Ce sont les descendants d’immigrés d’origine turque qui se montrent les plus attachés à la nationalité transmise par leurs parents’ (It is the descendants of immigrants of Turkish origin who show themselves to be the most attached to the nationality transmitted to them by their parents) (Simon 2010: 121). Accordingly, whereas 97 per cent of all second-generation immigrants take French citizenship, for the children of immigrants from Turkey that number is 95 per cent – a high number, but still lower than average (Simon 2010: 117). Among first-generation immigrants from Turkey in France, only 31 per cent choose to take French nationality. This is one of the lowest rates among immigrant groups and well below the overall average of 41 per cent (Simon 2010: 118). All of this suggests statistical support for the infamous ‘repli’ (withdrawal) of Turkish immigrants in France mentioned in the academic literature (e.g. Rollan and Sourou 2006). The ‘Turkish community’ I began this study with what I  initially thought of as ‘detective work’, and what anthropologists refer to as ‘snowballing’. In other words, there was no established

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corpus of artistic work, so I went looking for the artists and cultural work coming out the experience of immigration from Turkey. I began by establishing a list of organisations in France that identified themselves as Turkish or Franco-Turkish. Looking primarily at their websites, I determined which organisations seemed to create or support cultural production among their immediate members and the larger community of people with family origins in Turkey. I met with leaders and representatives from these organisations (‘gatekeepers’ in anthropological parlance), who generously took the time to explain yet again the situation of ‘Turks in France’. Eventually, they provided contact information and led me to other people who led me to others. When I asked about cultural activity, however, the response was usually some version of the following: ‘Well, apart from lessons on folk dancing and traditional musical instruments, there’s really not much going on, nothing like the Turks in Germany, no, nothing like that … ah, but wait, there is a young woman in such-and-such a place, and I just saw her poster.’ Or it was a young man somewhere else doing rap, or someone else making his own movies, and so on. With each interview, I gained an increasing sense that, in fact, there was quite a lot going on, but that for the most part it was unknown outside the local context in which it was produced. Despite the strong sense of national and ethnic belonging among many immigrants who identify as Turkish, there seems to be little coordination or communication among those immigrants in different parts of France. Indeed, the ‘Turkish community’ in France is scattered so widely that it is perhaps more accurate to speak of ‘Turkish communities’ in the plural. There are significant concentrations of immigrants from Turkey around Paris, Strasbourg and Lyon, but families of recent Turkish origin can be found all over the country, in small villages as well as in large metropolitan areas. Thus what goes on in Bordeaux may be completely unnoticed in Lille, and vice versa. There are media outlets such as Made in Turkey, a bilingual radio programme produced in Lyon, and Oluşum/Genèse, a bilingual literary journal based in Nancy, which attempt to address a larger audience outside their immediate region. (The radio programme Made in Turkey now broadcasts over the internet, and has thus extended its reach across and outside France with nearly 28,000 members on its Facebook site in 2014.) For seven months in 2008–09 the Turkish national television station TRT also produced a series called Fransa Günlüğü (Datebook France), which each week interviewed members of immigrant communities from Turkey located around France; but as one of the journalists involved in the show noted, ironically, the programme was more watched in Turkey than in France. I also discovered a great deal of online activity, much of it taking place in forums or on Facebook, where young people, in particular, would come together to discuss specific issues such as football, a favourite musician or Turkey–EU relations, or more general issues such as what it means to grow up in France and have parents from Turkey, or whether one should consider a non-Turkish spouse, or even how to define someone as Turkish. Media such as the literary journal and

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radio station discussed above, as well as the internet forums, are fascinating, and a study of these media would certainly provide interesting insights into the lives of young people who identify as Turkish in France. For the purposes of this book, however, these media outlets were a means, rather than an end, pointing me to particular artists. Once I met the artists and began to see their work, it quickly became clear that what was interesting was not only those narratives being written and performed, but also the artists’ narratives of their own lives and the way artistic performance intersected with their performance of identity. Seeing that the works themselves and their analysis were only one part of the picture, without at first having the disciplinary vocabulary of ethnography, I began to use its tools and techniques: in particular, interviews and participant observation. This personal ‘ethnographic turn’ allowed me to focus on what the artists were saying about their work and themselves as artists, as well as the work itself. Given my own background in literary studies, I had begun this study with the intention of focusing entirely on the textual components of the works: play scripts, lyrics, prose. This textual emphasis is important because it is as texts that many of the works examined here began their existence. The performance may adapt the text and even cause it to be rewritten; the performance may be the moment at which these texts interact with their audiences, but the text remains central. Yet as I met with the artists and the people who introduced me to them, it became clear that what the artists themselves have to say about their own artistic itineraries and objectives is also important in understanding the unique position of immigrants from Turkey and their descendants in France. Thus throughout this book, I will attempt to balance the focus on the work itself with the artists’ views on their work. The works of the artists included in this study draw on their parents’ cultural origins in Turkey and interrogate how that culture is also their own culture or not. They are inspired by their families’ stories and their own experiences growing up with two cultures, but also criticise and react against them. In some cases, they may seem to be well removed from the culture of their parents; yet in their narratives, that family culture is still present. This experience of culture as something that cannot be assumed, as well as the narratives that young artists construct to tell about that experience, is central to this study. In the same way that their experiences call on us to be conscious of cultural identification, they also call on us to be conscious of the stories we construct about identity. It allows us to re-examine the dominant metaphors and narratives about immigration and cultural encounter to see how they work and whether there might be better ones available. More importantly, as Ahmed (2000) suggests, it also allows for the formation of new ‘we’s that do not necessarily divide along cultural or ethnic lines. This study is necessarily anecdotal. Artistic production is by its very nature individual, and a few artists can hardly be expected to represent an entire community or communities. Nonetheless, in the face of numerous public narratives about ‘what immigrants are like’, they remind us that this supposed community

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of immigrants and their descendants is made up of individuals. If politicians and journalists, in particular, can be made to remember this, it may help them nuance their discussions and even policies in order to see Europeans with family roots in Turkey not as the ‘other’, who must be assimilated, contained or rejected, but as individuals with a variety of skills and attitudes who can only enrich Europe. And however anecdotal their stories may be, they also highlight issues that run throughout the work of artists of many origins, such as home, otherness, nostalgia, language, nationalism and identity. It does not seem too much of a stretch to imagine that these are also issues that concern members of the community who are not artists. Narratives of immigration One inspiration for this book was my own dissatisfaction with the existing discourses surrounding immigration. The narratives immigrants and their descendants tell through their own creative work may go a long way to countering more pessimistic accounts told by researchers and politicians. But the more familiar narratives of assimilation, insertion and integration continue to carry much of the conceptual and narrative weight in discussions of immigration. It is useful, therefore, to review, however briefly, the assumptions behind these terms. It is not my intention, nor is it possible, to summarise, let alone criticise, all the many arguments made since the 1960s in the media, politics and academic literature concerning the theory or practice of these terms. Sketching out some of their implicit narratives, particularly within the French context, can help in imagining what other narratives might be possible. One of the oldest terms, assimilation, has been in poor repute for some time. As Alba and Nee acknowledge in their revalorisation of assimilation as a term and concept in the US context, ‘assimilation has come to be viewed by social scientists as a worn-out theory which imposes ethnocentric and patronising demands on minority peoples struggling to retain their cultural and ethnic integrity’ (Alba and Nee 1997: 827). Similarly, Kastoryano writes that demands for assimilation are perceived as ‘antidemocratic’ in that assimilation is ‘defined as the total disappearance of the culture of “origin” and depreciates cultural pluralism’ (Kastoryano 2002: 30). While there are of course limits to the comparisons that can be made between immigration in the USA and France, both countries, each in its own way, have historically promoted assimilationist policies, hailing the benefits of the melting pot or, in the French context, ‘le creuset français’ (Noiriel 2006). The etymology of the word assimilation carries with it an emphasis on sameness and implies the repression of difference. The classic version of this has been the oft-told story of the ‘successful’ immigrant to America, whose children are completely Americanised and who do not speak the language of their parents. What often goes uncommented upon, however, is that this assumes a singleness and unity that

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exist in neither the culture of origin nor the culture of immigration. If the ‘host’ society are already diverse among themselves, on which part of that group are newcomers to model themselves? Traditional notions of assimilation also assume that it is only the immigrant who adapts to the receiving country, whereas historically, immigrants have also changed the receiving country over time. Yet even critics of assimilation note its positive potential as an ideal. Although Michèle Tribalat (2003) expresses concerns about the present-day application of assimilationist policies, she also notes that France’s approach is ‘one of the most generous’ in Europe (129), one in which, in principle, simply by being born on French soil or residing there for long enough, one may become a French citizen (the legal principle of jus soli). An applicant for French citizenship is required to fulfil two requirements for ‘assimilation à la communauté française’ (assimilation to the French community): knowledge of French and ‘adhésion aux valeurs de la République’ (adherence to the values of the Republic), both of which are evaluated through an interview (Direction de l’information légale et administrative 2015b). Of course, what count as the ‘values of the Republic’ have been hotly contested, but it is worth noting that despite the use of the term assimilation, the requirements to know the language and to adhere to French values do not in themselves imply the complete erasure of the culture of origin. At its best, assimilation makes possible the French ideal that all those who adopt the language and values of the Republic will enjoy equal citizenship. This ideal, however, includes two limitations. First, as Tribalat notes, such formal equality has long been weakened by systematic discrimination in education and employment. Second, in practice, fears of communautarisme (as discussed in Chapter 1), result in little tolerance for any marks of identity in addition to – let alone in place of – markers of Frenchness. This lack of space for markers of other identities results from understanding assimilation as the imperative to give up completely the culture of origin and embrace the culture of the receiving country. Yet this is no more justified by lived experience than the outdated theories of language acquisition that claimed that speaking a minority language at home would weaken a child’s acquisition of the majority language at school. Just as experience has shown the ability of children to master multiple languages simultaneously, as Alec Hargreaves notes, ‘it is perfectly possible for people to be simultaneously competent in more than one culture’ (Hargreaves 2007: 37). Indeed, the bilingual and bicultural competencies of the artists in this study suggest that assimilation can be positively imagined as the acquisition of one set of cultural attitudes and practices that does not exclude others – but it is rarely imagined in that way. In the end, assimilation is a term that carries with it too long a history of exclusion and oppression to be useful in creating positive narratives of immigrant experience. The main thrust of the French approach to immigration has long been and arguably continues to be assimilation. But in the 1980s, in particular, France flirted with ideas of multiculturalism, although couched in other terms. As Mattelart and Hargreaves (2014) note, the infamous slogan proclaiming the ‘right to difference’

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had originally been intended to encourage immigrants to return to their countries of origin by valorising their culture and encouraging continued feelings of attachment through media, especially television, and by offering government financial incentives for return. The expression, however, eventually took on other meanings and came to stand for a French version of multiculturalism, termed ‘insertion’. Whereas assimilation, as Hargreaves notes, had negative associations with colonial policies and their denigration of other cultures, insertion suggested the possibility of participation in French society while maintaining one’s own cultural identity – in other words, the possibility of being inserted or dropped, whole and unchanged, into French culture. ‘Although the word “multiculturalism” was almost never used, this was implicitly the direction in which the policies of the left seemed to point’ (Hargreaves 2007: 183). A quick survey of media reports since the 1990s might lead one to conclude that multiculturalism is almost as out of fashion as assimilation. Typical of government rhetoric in much of Europe since then, German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared multiculturalism to have ‘utterly failed’ (Weaver 2010). As Vertovec and Wessendorf argue in their introduction to The Multicultural Backlash (2010), however, failures of multiculturalism were not inherent to the idea (which continues to live on under other labels such as the promotion of ‘diversity’), but rather were due to circumstances unrelated to the specifics of multiculturalism. Similarly to Tribalat’s argument, mentioned above, that a weakness of assimilation rests in failures to combat discrimination, Vertovec and Wessendorf argue that failures of multiculturalism can be traced to old-fashioned problems of failed housing, education and employment policy (2010: 16–17). Apart from the political and academic debates around multiculturalism as a policy, multiculturalism at its heart depends on the problematic assumption of separate and distinct cultures that somehow must be brought to coexist. Accordingly, I appreciate Ayhan Kaya’s observation that multiculturalism highlights differences rather than looking for points in common: Culturalist rhetoric generates a dominant understanding in the West compelling receiving societies to perceive migrants and their children within the framework of cultural difference … Ideally, one should rather try to generate the idea that migrants, or transmigrants are individuals, people with similar concerns in their everyday life to the other ordinary citizens of receiving countries. (Kaya 2010: 178, original emphasis)

A language of multiculturalism has difficulty escaping the logic of multiple distinct cultures, however harmoniously they may coexist. Writing in 2002, Adelson describes Germany’s multicultural policies as a misguided attempt to create intercultural dialogue, as though there were ‘mutually exclusive collective identities’ (Adelson 2002:  235), rather than individuals already completely enmeshed in each other’s lives, creating new forms of art out of that interaction. Indeed, the

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emphasis on multiculturalism and insertion arose at a time when the most visible immigrants were Muslim in contrast to earlier waves of European Christian immigrants. However much insertion, rather than assimilation, may seem to value other cultures, as Kastoryano notes, it also raises the question of whether the change in vocabulary reflects a belief about the inability of some groups to be incorporated into French society, a situation in which the right to difference is ‘a concept reserved for the “unassimilable” North African immigration, whereas assimilation is for European immigrants’ (Kastoryano 2002: 31). In any case, by the early 1990s France had quietly abandoned ideas of a ‘right to difference’ and policies of ‘insertion’ and returned to more openly assimilationist policies, this time referred to as part of a programme of ‘integration’. As immigration came to be seen as a growing problem in France in the 1980s, the dominant narrative in the media and government discourse changed from one of insertion to one of integration. The popularity of the term – and its conceptual weakness – arguably rests in its ambiguity. ‘The word was used to loosely denote a kind of third way distinct both from assimilation, implying the abandoning of differences, and from insertion, which championed the right to be different’ (Mattelart and Hargreaves 2014: 279). Whereas insertion carries with it the ‘spectre of communautarisme’ (Lévy 2005), integration tells a story thought to be more fitting for Republican values, a story that downplays individual difference. Generally speaking, to integrate something is to bring it from outside and make it part of something already existing, in order to create an integrated whole. The term integration has the advantage of suggesting that the newcomers bring with them a complementary but missing piece of the whole social fabric. But how that process of integrating the part into the whole will happen or which adjustments will be expected from which actors is left unspecified. Even dictionaries seem to disagree as to what is involved. The Dictionnaire Larousse, for example, defines integration as the ‘fusion d’un territoire ou d’une minorité dans l’ensemble national’ (joining of a territory or a minority into the national whole) (anon. 2015b). The Trésor de la langue française informatisée, on the other hand, provides a definition that describes integration using the language of assimilation:  ‘Phase où les éléments d’origine étrangère sont complètement assimilés au sein de la nation tant au point de vue juridique que linguistique et culturel, et forment un seul corps social’ (phase where elements of foreign origin are completely assimilated into the heart of the nation as much in juridical as in linguistic or cultural terms, and become a single social body) (anon. 2015a). The prominence of the term is particularly visible in government entities such as the Haut Conseil à l’Intégration (HCI), active from 1989 to 2012. The Haut Conseil defined integration as ‘une participation effective de l’ensemble des personnes appelées à vivre en France à la construction d’une société rassemblée dans le respect de principes partagés (liberté de conscience et de pensée, égalité entre homme et femme par exemple) telles qu’elles s’expriment dans des droits égaux et des devoirs communs’ (a meaningful participation of all those who live in France

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in the construction of a society brought together through respect for shared principles (freedom of conscience and thought, equality between men and women, for example) such as they are expressed in equal rights and common duties) (Haut Conseil à l’Intégration 2013). Similarly, applicants for a long-term residency permit must complete a ‘contrat d’accueil et d’intégration’ (contract of welcome and integration), which requires the applicant to demonstrate both linguistic and cultural competence (Direction de l’information légale et administrative 2015a). The Office of Immigration and Integration provides courses to aid applicants in meeting these requirements. The imprecision in the meaning of the term also suggests another problem. At what point can immigrants be said to be integrated  – and in what aspects of their lives? As Kastoryano (2002: 31) notes, integration can refer to professional, economic or social integration. Can any one of these be said to be more important than another? If the artists discussed in this book have built their professional and social lives in France, but create using Turkish language and culture, are they integrated or only partly or poorly integrated? Hargreaves also notes a confusion between functionalist and normative uses of the term. The language of the Haut Conseil and the ‘contract for welcome and integration’ suggest a functionalist narrative ‘based on the notion of participation in French society’, but reports by the HCI ‘favoured a normative approach by claiming to measure the “progress” of integration by reference to indicators such as crime rates, educational qualifications and mixed marriages’ (Hargreaves 2007:  36). The language of integration suggests a linear path from non-integration to integration, in which an immigrant’s success or failure depends on how far he or she has progressed down this path. In sociological or governmental terms, following Hargreaves, decreasing crime rates and increasing levels of education and mixed marriages would be signs of progress along this route. Speaking the minority language or consuming minority media or, as in the examples of the artists in this study, using Turkish language or cultural forms would be signs of deviating from or going the wrong direction on the path. In this model, an immigrant or an immigrant’s descendants are defined in terms of a binary opposition of integrated or not. Stopping anywhere along the path towards integration is viewed as a failure. In France, the term immigrant is often applied without a great deal of precision, so that concerns about ‘immigration’ are often concerns about the children and grandchildren of immigrants. Those who choose their words more carefully may instead refer to those with a migration background (‘issus de l’immigration’), but the stigma of immigration remains, even when it refers to those who are French citizens, born in France. Hargreaves argues that the continued focus on ‘immigration’ makes it difficult for policy makers to see that the problems of the descendants of immigrants are not problems of immigration, but instead problems of discrimination and racism. ‘The use of the word “immigration” to encompass what in many respects were post-migratory processes was symptomatic of

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the difficulties experienced by the French in coming to terms – both literally and ontologically – with the settlement of immigrant minorities’ (Hargreaves 2007: 2). In Germany another term, ‘post-migrant’, acknowledges the migrant background, but also separates the ‘post-migrant’ from the formal status of immigrant. The term has been in circulation since the early 2000s. First coined by Turkish-German author Feridun Zaimoğlu in reference to literary texts, it has more recently been taken up with enthusiasm by theatre producers and artists. Pieter Verstraete has credited Shermin Langhoff, of the Ballhaus Naunynstrasse Theatre, with applying the term to contemporary theatre (Verstraete 2012a). In this context, post-migrant theatre has to do with the experience of migration and involves artists with a migration background, but who are not necessarily migrants themselves. This is more than just a question of word play. Importantly, the term carries with it the interesting possibility of detaching migrant artistic work from biological or biographical migrancy. Rather than insisting on the children and grandchildren of immigrants as immigrants themselves (of whatever generation), the term acknowledges a connection to a history of immigration without locking people into an unchanging status as immigrant. I would argue that it even suggests the possibility that those who are linked by interest or friendship to experiences of immigration may produce post-migrant work. As Verstraete, referring to Langhoff, writes, it becomes a question of a change of perspective (Verstraete 2012b: 3). This term is a positive attempt to change the language and narratives surrounding the experience of immigrants and their descendants, but like the other terms already discussed, it emphasises a status, rather than a process. Indeed, a common problem with terms such as assimilation, insertion or integration, which are used to tell the story of immigrants and their adaptation to a new land, is that they implicitly describe an immigrant’s position in either–or terms. An immigrant achieves assimilation, insertion or integration, or does not. Anything short of that final status is a failure, or at best incomplete. In search of language that acknowledges immigration as a process, this book will use the term settling. The major advantage of looking at immigration in terms of settling is that it implies a narrative of culture as a verb, rather than a noun. In other words, rather than culture being something fixed into which immigrants and their descendants must assimilate, insert themselves or integrate themselves (or, on the other hand, abandon), settling reminds us instead that culture  – any culture  – is a constant work in progress. As Leslie Adelson writes, ‘a nation’s culture is also an activity, a creative engagement with a rapidly changing present’ (2002: 245). If culture is understood as something being created in the present rather than an artefact from the past, this opens space for newcomers to participate in the ongoing construction of culture. This may seem utopian, since people are often heavily invested in an idea of culture passed down through the generations, but the reality is that cultures do constantly change. It is simply (or not so simply) a question of who will be recognised as legitimate contributors to that change.

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Turkish immigration, art and narratives of home Overview

The first chapter of this book examines the debates in France concerning communautarisme and challenges the supposedly indissoluble link between language and identity, by analysing the work of rapper C-it (Seyit Yakut). Communautarisme corresponds roughly to ‘identity politics’, but the emotional weight of this term is difficult to translate into English. For those in France who oppose any sort of political organising along ethnic or religious lines, communautarisme implies sectarian division of society and violates the formal equality inscribed in the French constitution. The ‘colour blind’ attitude of French law, of course, sounds admirable, but in the French application, it also results in official blindness to discrimination. C-it might seem an unlikely example to counter concerns about identity politics, as he performs primarily in Turkish for audiences made up of young people whose parents or grandparents emigrated from Turkey. This chapter argues, however, that despite his performances in Turkish, he and his audiences see themselves as very much settled and a part of France. C-it’s music provides a clear example of how citizens can conceive of themselves as part of an ethnic or religious community, even organising and creating in a non-national language, and also see themselves as part of a larger national community. Despite its performance in Turkish, C-it’s music emphasises the shared economic and political challenges faced by his multiethnic, multilingual neighbourhood, as well as a place for himself and other young people with family origins in Turkey as part of that neighbourhood within a larger national whole. More than for other types of creative work, much has been written on the transnational aspects of rap music, with its origins in the urban USA and eventual dissemination to every part of the globe (e.g. Durand 2002; Mitchell 2001). While that description suggests one-way movement out from an originary centre, the picture is actually more akin to a ping-pong ball bouncing around a room. An artist like C-it may take inspiration from American rap, but he may also collaborate with African and Maghrebi French rappers, exchange beats with Turkish rappers in Germany or talk to producers in Turkey. Music may transcend borders, but it is the musicians who make choices in terms of influences and the audience to whom they will direct their work. The following three chapters all concern artists who have chosen theatre as their creative medium. The second chapter, taking up the example of the amateur theatre group Kebab Show, argues that the public space of theatre, particularly in an immigrant language, can contribute to making immigrants and their offspring feel at home in the host country. Returning to the French concern with communautarisme raised in the previous chapter, this chapter argues that a theatre that includes familiar themes in a home language may succeed in making the unfamiliar public space of theatre (and, by extension, public space in general) less alienating. In other words, what anti-communautaristes see as theatre intended to segregate Turkish speakers from French cultural spaces may instead contribute to

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making immigrant communities feel that there is a place for them in France. In addition to the group’s pieces performed entirely in Turkish, they also have one bilingual play. Filled with word play and humorous situations that require knowledge of both Turkish and French languages and cultures, this piece suggests the important role that native language and bilingual theatre can play in the process of helping all generations of an immigrant community settle in and feel at home Chapter  3, which focuses on the work of actor and playwright Ayşe Şahin, argues that part of settling in and making a new home is being able to tell one’s own story and to have others listen. This chapter also argues that in such situations humour is a particularly effective way of winning over an audience and demonstrating that immigrants are indeed ‘at home’. Şahin addresses her humour to mainstream adult theatregoers, who may not be particularly interested in issues concerning immigration, but Şahin’s play in French makes those issues part of the larger world of the play. As Şahin’s character breaks the fourth wall of the stage and interacts with the audience, this chapter argues that she occupies the position of host, inviting the audience into and explaining both the world of her immigrant background and the world of the sex club where she works. Assuming this position of knowledgeable insider, Şahin’s character inverts the usual hierarchy between misplaced immigrant and settled native. Similarly, although the performance is largely in French, it also includes ‘incongruous’ moments of Turkish and English, destabilising the dominant role of French. Thus Şahin and her character settle in by unsettling their audience. The following chapter argues that one sign of settling is an artist’s ability and willingness to critique not only the host culture, but also aspects of his or her own culture(s) of origin. Puppeteer Ruşen Yıldız uses the traditional genre of Turkish shadow theatre (referred to as ‘Karagöz’, in reference to the main character), but writes his own scripts and performs in French, albeit a French inflected by the slang of immigrant housing projects. As he often performs in schools and community centres, many members of his audience may come from an immigrant background, but not necessarily a Turkish immigrant background. While Yıldız avoids simply recreating exotic folklore for a French audience, he also draws on the historical and cultural roots of Karagöz to criticise both the structures of immigration and the patriarchal tendencies of some immigrant communities. Yıldız begins his productions by taking on easy targets, such as immigration laws and French politicians. Yet once he has lulled his audience into the colourful world of his puppets with humorous critiques sympathetic to his audience, he also asks them to confront their beliefs about gender roles, honour and loyalty to the ‘home country’. Returning in greater depth to the issue of hospitality introduced in earlier chapters, Chapter 5 makes an argument for the circular relationship of home and hospitality, drawing on theoretical work on hospitality by writers such as Jacques Derrida and Mireille Rosello, as well as that of writer Sema Kılıçkaya. Derrida famously points to two contradictory and yet interdependent notions of hospitality. On the one hand, unconditional hospitality calls on the host to take in the other

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without condition, requiring neither return nor justification. On the other hand, conditional hospitality is limited by laws that determine who can be welcomed and for how long. Just as hospitality since the Odyssey has expected the guest’s story in exchange for hospitality offered, Derrida suggests that unconditional hospitality would require the host to refrain from asking the guest’s story or even name. While any question may limit the possibility of unconditional hospitality, even more radically, any communication at all limits this possibility since it designates native and non-native speakers, as well as non-speakers, of a language, and thus implies who has the right to occupy a particular space. Kılıçkaya’s novel is filled with scenes of hospitality, through which characters assert their ownership and belonging to a space claimed as home by different linguistic and religious groups. Examining the ways that characters in Kılıçkaya’s novel offer or accept hospitality, this chapter argues against the assumed opposition between guest and host and demonstrates instead that manipulating these roles can establish someone as ‘at home’. The novel acknowledges the divisive pull of linguistic, ethnic and religious communities, but also demonstrates how hospitality can create new forms of community, based on neighbourhood and shared history. Similarly, the novel creates a kind of home space, from which Kılıçkaya can welcome her readers in French and, by welcoming them into the world she creates, assert a place for the descendants of these first immigrants to France Like many other countries, France has experimented with different approaches to immigration, reflected in the language and policies used to discuss it (e.g. assimilation, insertion or integration). The language we use matters because it determines the kinds of stories that can be told. The discussion of the artists in this study will provide a way of considering the limits and possibilities of these terms and cautions against a simple narrative of transition from Turkishness to Frenchness, from immigrant to native. ‘Settling’, as an ongoing process that includes the possibility of further adaptation and change, may be a metaphor that allows all those involved in immigration (immigrants themselves, the professionals who work with them, and those already settled) to see immigration in a new way. As the language we use to talk about immigration changes, it is hoped that politicians and activists may also find new approaches to allow immigrants and their descendants to find a place within the receiving society, to ‘settle in’ in a way that accommodates, literally, everyone involved. The artists discussed in this study are the first generation to have the cultural and linguistic knowledge in Turkish and French to produce the work they do. They are very different from their parents’ generation who have maintained the dream of a return home. These artists may not always feel fully part of French culture, but Turkey is just one of many possible homes, certainly not the idealised ‘back home’ of their parents. In that sense, they represent the first generation to have affective, as well as material, ties to France. Thus the narratives of belonging that they tell through their work provide a story that is important and distinct from that of their parents. This book brings together these artists because they reflect

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a shift in immigrant communities from Turkey. That is not to say that they are part of a movement of artists who follow and are influenced by each other’s work. Indeed, given that they are spread across France, with bases near Lyon, Bordeaux, Toulouse and Nancy, it is unsurprising that they are largely unaware of each other’s existence. Yet the very fact of their simultaneous and independent presence in many different parts of France indicates a new and important waypoint in the process of settling. Looking at these artists together also goes a long way to countering French fears of identity politics (communautarisme). The artists do have a strong sense of identity connected to family origins in Turkey but they also see themselves as part of French society. It may not always be an easy or uncritical relationship, but the relationship is not harmed by their sense of Turkishness – an important message for politicians and for scholars of immigration.

Notes 1 All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 2 The expression ‘second generation’ will be used in this book, although there are problems with this term, as discussed later in this introduction. 3 The Diyanet (Directorate of Religious Affairs) has been sending imams to Europe since the 1980s, and in 2010, the Turkish Government established the Yurtdışı Türkler ve Akraba Topluluklar Başkanlığı (Office for Turks Abroad and Their Relatives). 4 Turkish anthropologists in the 1920s and 1930s, for example, drew on then-current theories of race to establish a ‘scientific’ basis for the racial superiority of Turks, in contrast to other ‘races’ living on Turkish soil, such as Jews, Greeks and Armenians (Maksudyan 2005). 5 As Yeğen (2004) notes, discussions leading to the 1924 Turkish Constitution included proposals to use the word Türkiyeli, but they were not widely supported, precisely because many of those involved in writing the Constitution preferred to minimise the distinction between ethnic and civic Turkishness. Although somewhat mitigated in the texts of the 1961 and 1982 Constitutions, Yeğen argues that this distinction is nonetheless present in those texts, as well.

1

Politics and belonging in the music of Turkish-French rapper C-it In late July 2011, Michel Raison, a member of the French National Assembly, wrote to the Minister of Culture to suggest censoring ‘certains groupes de musique rap issus de l’immigration’ (certain rap groups of immigrant origin) (Raison 2011)1 because they were a threat to French democracy.2 As an editorialist in the newspaper Le Monde reminded readers, however, it was not young rappers in the banlieue who invented protest music. But previous generations of musicians who ridiculed the French Government, flag or military were rarely deemed a threat to public order or French national security. There were occasional exceptions to this, as when, for example, Boris Vian’s anti-war song, ‘The Deserter’, was banned from being sold or broadcast during the Algerian War from 1954 to 1962. Despite occasional exceptions, however, the general rule was one of tolerance. Such musicians were usually seen as representatives of the common people, modern-day Robin Hoods speaking truth to power. Whereas oppositional music once spoke about an idealised ‘common folk’, who may have been economically marginalised, contemporary oppositional music speaks to young people of the urban outskirts, often demonised by the media and politicians. Rather than see rap music as part of a long tradition of an artist’s right (and responsibility) to criticise society, Michel Raison’s letter depicts rap music as little more than criminal provocation, holding rappers responsible for inciting their listeners to violence against police and other public authorities. As Raison’s own words suggest, what seems to separate rap musicians from previous generations of oppositional musicians is their immigrant background:  ‘Lorsque des paroles de chansons excessives venaient d’un groupe issu de l’immigration, ça n’avait pas le même impact que lorsqu’il s’agissait de Français très marqués à droite qui proféraient des propos racistes’ (When the extreme lyrics come from a group with immigrant origins, it doesn’t have the same impact as when it is French people who are very influenced by the right and who make racist remarks) (quoted in Diallo 2011). This anecdote unfortunately underscores the opposition often drawn in French public discourse between immigration and citizenship, an opposition that assumes that those with immigrant parents or grandparents cannot also be fully French themselves. Thus for a rap musician such as Seyit Yakut (a.k.a. C-it), born in France and the son of Turkish immigrants, the question of identity and belonging inevitably takes on an importance that it would

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not for a rapper without immigrant parents. The inherent political potential of rap provides C-it with a means to challenge the mistaken distinction not only between ‘immigrant’ and ‘citizen’, but also between Turkish and French. And in a resolutely monolingual country where even indigenous minority languages such as Breton or Provençal received constitutional recognition only in 2008,3 language, not surprisingly, is seen as a key component of national belonging. Thus when musicians or writers refuse to use French in their work, as is the case with C-it, but nonetheless claim France as home, it raises compelling questions about national belonging and what it means to be French. C-it’s music suggests the possibility of constructing another identity in which he is both Turkish and French and neither solely Turkish nor French. This other identity is that of the economically and geographically marginalised banlieues, the suburban public housing projects surrounding France’s big cities. Just as the banlieues are isolated from the centre of French cities, so are the majority of their inhabitants excluded from full participation in public life. This feeling of exclusion in France is commonly expressed by immigrants of all origins and by their offspring. Anecdotally, there is little doubt about the lived marginalisation of immigrant communities in France. In the book France, je te t’aime, je te quitte (France, I Love You, I’m Leaving You), journalist Christian Roudault writes about French people who have gone abroad in search of a better life. He devotes one chapter specifically to the situation of young people of immigrant origin and notes that it is only in leaving France that they are accepted as French. C’est en vivant en Suède que Hamid, le fils d’ouvrier marocain, a fait la plus incroyable des découvertes: à vingt-cinq ans, pour la première fois de sa vie, il n’était plus un Français ‘issu de’ ou ‘originaire de’. Oubliée, l’image du beur de banlieue, il était désormais un Français à part entière avec toute la ribambelle de clichés associés au pays de la gastronomie et de la romance. En France, on lui renvoyait sans cesse le reflet d’une identité complexe et brouillée, le miroir suédois lui a projeté une image touchante de simplicité: il était français, point barre. [It was while living in Sweden that Hamid, the son of a Moroccan worker, made the most incredible discovery: at twenty-five years of age, for the first time in his life, he was no longer a Frenchman of such and such origin. With the image of the banlieue beur forgotten, he was fully French complete with all the clichés associated with the country of gastronomy and romance. In France his identity was constantly reflected as complex and complicated; the Swedish mirror reflected an image of touching simplicity: he was French, end of story.] (Roudault 2009: 68)

Academic authors confirm such anecdotes and also note the material costs of such attitudes to the children of immigrants. In a recent article, ‘But Madam, We Are French Also’, based on interviews with upwardly mobile middle-class young people from immigrant families, Jean Beaman (2012) underscores the social exclusion

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that persists in spite of professional and economic success. Her interviewees, with family origins in North Africa, still find it difficult, for example, to rent an apartment, no matter what their financial status may be. While the media often recount anecdotes of exclusion and discrimination, statistically, it is more difficult to substantiate, as French law prohibits statistics that divide French citizens according to ethnic or racial origin. As one commentator put it, ‘The French approach is that if you don’t attach too much importance [to ethnic and racial divisions in society] and don’t talk about them, they will shrink and disappear’ (Patrick Simon, quoted in Ford 2005). One way sociologists have approached this problem in studies is to classify interviewees according to citizenship status, rather than ethnic belonging. Thus, as noted in the introduction to this volume, while it has been considered acceptable to ask whether an interviewee is a French citizen or whether an interviewee’s parents are citizens, one may not ask an interviewee if she or he is ‘ethnically’ North African, and interviewees cannot be classified according to visible racial markers. Communautarisme This concern with ethnic statistics and the desire not to create official distinctions among French citizens, who, in theory at least, are all equal before the law, can be linked to fear of what the French call communautarisme. As the etymology for the word suggests, it refers to communities:  specifically ethnic, racial and religious communities. Brouard and Tiberj (2011) suggest ‘identity politics’ as the proper translation, which does get at the heart of the matter for the French: a concern with political organisation along ethnic or religious lines. The term does not translate easily because it concerns a particularly French idea of the nation, which holds that emphasising one’s sub-national identity (especially based on race, ethnicity or religion) weakens one’s national identity and inevitably leads to division and sectarianism within the nation, the unity of which is based on a unity of language, culture and citizenship. Since all citizens are presumed to be equal before the law, conceptually, for the French, it is logically inconsistent to talk about minorities. Many critics of communautarisme equate it with multiculturalism practised in other countries. They point to dramatic examples such as the ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia, but also to more mundane examples such as the lack of social solidarity in the USA, as emblematic of the problems of multiculturalism. Both within countries favouring multicultural policies and within countries taking other approaches, multiculturalism has, of course, been subject to many criticisms. One of the most persuasive arguments has less to do with politics directly than with what we understand culture to be. Multiculturalism implicitly depends on discrete cultures that can represent themselves through music, clothing and food. Such ‘festival multiculturalism’ assumes that cultures are neat packages, with clear boundaries, easily distinguished from one another. Anyone who has lived

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near a border region or in a diverse metropolitan area, however, understands that cultures in contact with each other are never so distinct. Multiculturalism, as it is practised by governments, tends to ignore that cultures are in constant evolution. It also establishes a distinction between the mainstream or dominant culture and all the other cultures, an ‘otherising’ practice that ‘tolerates’ difference. France’s version of multiculturalism in the 1980s, the famous ‘droit à la différence’, enjoyed only a brief popularity on the left before it was appropriated by the far right as a way to promote essentialist notions of French identity. Communautarisme for many French thus connotes more than anything a fracturing of society along ethnic and religious lines. Even in French, however, the term can be vague, as it has come to stand in as short-hand critique for topics as wide-ranging as the wearing of Islamic dress in public to the funding of primary education conducted in Breton. One well-known critic of communautarisme, Pierre-André Taguieff, describes it as ‘un projet sociopolitique visant à soumettre les membres d’un groupe défini aux normes supposées propres à ce groupe, à telle communauté, bref à contrôler les opinions, les croyances, les comportements de ceux qui appartiennent en principe à cette communauté’ (a socio-political project aiming to submit the members of a defined group to the norms that are supposed to be part of this group, of such and such community, in short to control the opinions, beliefs, behaviour of those who in principle belong to this community) (quoted in Halpern 2004). This has had particular resonance for feminists who fear that women members of ethnic and religious minority groups will be oppressed by communal norms that are more conservative than national norms (Okin 1999). For critics such as Taguieff, communautarisme inevitably weakens the nation, by enforcing other norms than those of the nation. In the view of Taguieff and other anti-communautaristes, any communal norms not belonging to the majority are assumed to be in conflict with national norms. Such an assumption ironically reproduces some of the same errors as multiculturalism in assuming that the culture and norms of a given community are monolithic wholes, ahistorically fixed and unaffected by the world around them. In opposition to this understanding of the word communautarisme, Laurent Lévy has written of ‘communautarisme majoritaire’ (majority communitarianism), which he argues requires French citizens with family origins outside France to give up any visible signs of belonging to cultures other than majority French culture. As he scathingly puts it in Le Spectre du communautarisme, Il leur suffirait de travailler à leur ‘enracinement’, et de convertir la nationalité française dont la plupart jouissent déjà en ascendance gauloise. Il leur suffirait de passer du statut d’indigènes au statut d’autochtones. De se blanchir dans une France blanche, de manger du porc dans une France charcutière, de libérer leurs chevelures dans une France où la liberté capillaire semble devenue identitaire. Le discours réel de l’intégration est l’injonction à l’assimilation, l’injonction à devenir conforme à la norme dominante; au pire, à demeurer invisibles.

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Turkish immigration, art and narratives of home C’est l’affirmation hégémonique du communautarisme gaulois. En somme, l’intégration républicaine, c’est une version soft de l’épuration ethnique; c’est le passage au laminoir. [It would be enough for them to work on becoming ‘rooted’, and to convert the French nationality that most of them already enjoy into Gallic ancestry. It would be enough for them to move from the status of colonised natives to that of locals. To whiten themselves in a white France, to eat pork in a France of pork butchers, to uncover their hair in a France where the freedom of hair seems to have become a sign of identity. The real discourse of integration is the injunction to assimilate, the injunction to conform to the dominant norm: at worst, to remain invisible. It is the hegemonic affirmation of Gallic communautarisme. In the end, republican integration is a soft version of ethnic cleansing.] (Lévy 2005: 120–1, my emphasis)

Lévy thus argues that the anti-communautaristes are not calling for the suppression of all ethnic and cultural particularities, but only those particularities that are not part of white Catholic France. The anti-communautaristes may not be calling for an essentialised French identity based on blood alone, but, according to Lévy, they are still demanding that everyone at least look and act as though they shared the same history. As Lévy argues, if someone cannot or will not conform to the dominant norms, they must remain invisible. Indeed, when the issue of communautarisme has arisen in the media, it has often been in response not simply to philosophical differences of opinion but to visible signs of religious and cultural difference, whether the ‘headscarf affair’ of 1989 (in which three adolescent girls were expelled from middle school for wearing headscarves), or the more recent controversy surrounding the legislative decision to ban the wearing of the burqa in public. The ‘headscarf affair’ eventually led to a law in 2004 that prohibited visible signs of religious belonging in public schools. As critics of the law pointed out at the time, it was inherently discriminatory, since a Christian could hide a cross under his or her shirt but a Muslim could not hide her headscarf. Similarly, the 2010 ban on wearing the burqa in public, which concerns visible signs of difference, sparked protests, civil disobedience and great controversy in the press. By comparison, the debates around the conditions for the ritual slaughter of animals according to Islamic or Jewish religious law, or the proliferation of halal restaurants and butchers, while debated and criticised in the media, have not elicited nearly the same public outcry. Of course, given that the headscarf and the burqa concern women’s visibility, neither is it even simply a matter of community visibility. As numerous commentators have discussed, women’s bodies in both colonial and post-colonial contexts have frequently taken on an enormous symbolic weight (e.g. Woodhull 1993). Meyda Yeğenoğlu, in her discussion of the headscarf controversy, argues that it is not the specificity of the headscarf, but ‘Islam’s public presence that is regarded as excessive’ (Yeğenoğlu 2012: 129). The public presence of Christianity,

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however, such as the scheduling of public holidays to coincide with Christian holidays, does not cause the same concern. If, as Yeğenoğlu argues, secularism comes to be synonymous with French national identity and Islam with the foreign, the controversy is not only about protecting secularism, but also about protecting the usual invisibility of Christianity, which, if visible, would risk disrupting the link between secularism and national identity. The question of communautarisme is not one that divides clearly along expected political lines either. Members of the socialist left are among the most virulent anti-communautaristes, even while they combat the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the far-right Front National (FN). The FN, for its part, uses the discourse of communautarisme to insist that French culture is particular, pure and in need of protection, so that the arguments of communautarisme becomes arguments for the expulsion of unassimilated ‘foreigners’, even if they hold citizenship. Immigrant and anti-racist groups, despite their common interest in the welfare of minorities and immigrant communities in France, are nonetheless also divided on this issue. SOS Racisme, established in 1984 and with close ties to the Socialist Party, has historically taken a firmly republican stand, arguing that the recognition of difference only encourages discrimination (Blatt 1997). The anti-racist political movement, Partie des Indigènes de la République, on the other hand, shares Laurent Lévy’s concern that anti-communautarisme is actually a call for cultural assimilation, where any sort of non-French cultural particularism is forbidden. Instead, they argue that shared nationality does not have to mean shared culture. ‘Nous sommes ici chez nous que l’on ait ou non la nationalité française, dans un pays où chacune et chacun doit jouir des mêmes droits, sans obligation de se fondre dans une quelconque identité majoritaire’ (Here we’re in our own home – that is to say, whether one has French citizenship or not, in a country where everyone has to have the same rights, without the obligation to dissolve into any majority identity) (Partie des Indigènes de la République 2005). They thus agree with Lévy’s charge that in order to be considered fully French, they must make themselves invisible, whereas they want to be considered French not in spite of their difference, but as part of their difference. It is unsurprising then that for many artists of immigrant origin, their performances are precisely a way of making visible the compatibility of difference and Frenchness. If ethnic isolation is the concern of anti-communautaristes, immigrants from Turkey are among those immigrants in France most often described as being turned in on themselves, unwilling to integrate into mainstream French society. For all their visibility in Germany (for good or for ill), in France, immigrants from Turkey are practically invisible – seen in the media, if at all, grouped together with North Africans as Muslims and Arabs. Sociological studies and surveys may distinguish them from other groups, but confirm the image of a community with little connection to the rest of French society, telling us that, in comparison to other immigrant groups, immigrants from Turkey and their children are, for example, less likely to speak French at home or read French newspapers, and more likely

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to marry someone of the same ethnic background.4 Internet discussion forums provide nuances to the sociological data. The internet site ‘Thé et feu’ (Kaya 2005) includes a discussion of participants’ willingness to marry outside the Turkish community.5 The consensus was overwhelmingly negative. Most participants in the forum mentioned the need for a common family culture and an unwillingness to disobey their parents’ will. Importantly, however, respondents’ interest in marrying a ‘Turk’ did not in most cases mean marrying a Turk from Turkey (or anywhere else), but only from the Turkish community in France. As one respondent, who used the screen name Çokelek, wrote: Etant donné que notre culture est à moitié moitié, que l’on pense de façon cartésienne comme un français, mais qu’on ressent les choses comme un turc, qu’on vit entre les deux cultures … bien sûr que l’on aura l’impression de perdre [quelque chose] si on n’épouse pas [quelq’un] de la même origine que nous … mais de la même manière, si on épouse un turc de Turquie, on aura l’impression de perdre [quelque chose]. [Given that our culture is half and half, that we think in a Cartesian way like a French person, but we feel things like a Turk, that we live between two cultures … of course, we would think we’re losing something if we don’t marry someone from the same origin as ourselves … but in the same way, if we marry a Turk from Turkey, we would also feel like we’re losing something.] (Kaya 2005)

Similarly, one participant in the forum condemned the practice of going to Turkey for an arranged marriage as ‘shameful’. This distinction is important because, at least among this limited sample, it demonstrates a strong sense of community, not one that is dictated by ‘blood’, but rather by the common experiences of having Turkish origins but growing up in France. They clearly distinguish themselves from Turks outside France; yet they also see themselves as distinct from the rest of French society. The search for authenticity Seyit Yakut (C-it) was born in France, but reports that he spoke only Turkish until he started elementary school. He lives and works in Chambéry, near Lyon. He has been writing and performing rap since 1996 and has four albums to date: Tok Tok (2004), Heyecanlanma (2005), Adım (2007) and Ciao Papi (2014). Many of his early songs discuss issues affecting young people in France, regardless of their ethnic origin. These range from popular themes of love and betrayal to more political themes of poverty and social exclusion. He began his musical career rapping in French, but after three years switched to rapping in Turkish. He has said in interviews that he switched to Turkish in order to improve his Turkish and because

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‘Türkiye’nin de ihtiyacı olan müzik. Fransa’nın ise ihtiyacı yok’ ([i]‌t’s a music Turkey needs. As for France, it doesn’t need it) (anon. 2008). He moved to Turkey in 2007 as part of a much anticipated ‘return home’. In an interview published on a Turkish music fan website, he said about his decision to move to Turkey, ‘Sevilmediğim ve istenmediğim yerde neden Fransızca rap yapayım? Müziğimi kendi memleketimde yapmak istiyorum’ (Why would I make French rap in a place where I’m not liked and not wanted? I want to make my music in my own country) (anon. 2008). Indeed, his decision to rap in Turkish was partly motivated by the audience he wanted to address, which at that time he saw as Turks in Turkey, but was also, one may infer, motivated by his understanding of his own identity as Turkish rather than French. Accordingly, some of C-it’s music from this period before leaving for Turkey, and while he was in Turkey, in fact, seems to have little connection to life in France. The songs discuss topics with little geographical specificity or recall themes associated with Turkey. Several of his songs express concern for social injustice. ‘Adım’ (‘My Name’), for example, presents a series of sketches in which C-it takes on the voice of a different character in each stanza, beginning ‘My name is …’, and then describes in a sentence or two the problems of, for example, an unemployed father trying to support his family, a young drug addict, or a woman who loses her son in a war. The stories could be those of any country, but the character names are clearly Turkish and the lyrics occasionally make reference to places or aspects of Turkish life, such as mandatory military service. C-it’s song ‘Hikayem’ (‘My Story’) details stereotypical Turkish themes much more explicitly. The lyrics and the video tell a story of a revenge killing. While the narrator is still a young boy his father is murdered. His mother commits suicide and the boy grows up, living only to take revenge on his father’s killer. The video ends with him killing the man. According to internet reports, the video was banned in both France and Turkey because, censors argued, it promoted revenge killings. In fact, neither the lyrics nor the video

Figure 1.1  C-it (Seyit Yakut), from his video ‘Hikayem’.

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glorify violence. The lyrics repeat over and over ‘Bu ne biçim kader?’ (What kind of fate is this?), expressing, if anything, an almost tragic resignation to something over which the narrator has no control. There is no clear villain either. Even the presumed murderer of the narrator’s father is portrayed sympathetically at the end of the video. When the young man appears at his door, the man he is about to kill is presented as a grandfatherly figure who speaks kindly to the unknown young man. After the shooting, in the final seconds of the video, we hear police sirens and the young man raises his hands in surrender. This is certainly not a narrative of victorious revenge. In a personal interview in 2010, C-it insisted on the fictionality of the storyline and said that it was not only about Turkey:  ‘Öyle Türkleri bir ön plana çıkarma düşüncem de yoktu. … Film gibi bir şey yani bir parça’ (I wasn’t thinking about putting Turks in the foreground … It’s just something like a movie). Although the video appears to have been shot in France, the story is one that clearly calls up stereotypical ideas of the violent Orient that are associated much more with Turkey than with France. While these videos and songs with their focus on Turkish themes may help explain why C-it tried to pursue his career in Turkey, less than a year later he returned to France. In an interview, he admitted that it had been a dream, not practical in reality. The dream of return is a powerful one for immigrants, but seems to be especially so for Turks. According to some studies, the children of Turkish immigrants are more likely than the children of any other immigrant group in France to plan for and attempt the ‘return home’.6 Following C-it’s experience in Turkey, however, he was very critical of the music industry there. He felt the production quality was low and that it was more about publicity and insider connections than about making good music. Whether or not one agrees with his assessment of the industry in general, it does recall familiar debates in rap music about authenticity, especially the assumption that commercial success and political credibility are inherently contradictory (Light 2004). Following his experience in Turkey, C-it concluded that good rap depended on an experience of racism and exclusion that was not part of his life in Turkey. In contrast to his own experience of racism in France, C-it said ‘Türkiye’de ghettolar olmadığı için biraz sahte duruyor rapları. Görmeden, yaşamadan yazıyorlar’ (Because Turkey doesn’t have any ghettos, their rap looks a little fake. They’re writing about stuff they’ve never seen, never experienced) (Yılmaz 2007). Of course, when one is a member of the ethnic and religious majority, it may be more difficult to perceive exclusion than when one is a member of a minority. If one focuses only on rap by ethnically Turkish Sunni Muslim Turks, C-it’s criticism may have some validity. As many scholars of rap music have observed, rap has traditionally distinguished itself through its oppositional stance. In some cases, this has meant a generalised opposition to the law and order of mainstream society; in others, a more specific criticism of class privilege or of societies that discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity. Thus, for rappers who hail from the dominant ethnic group or a relatively privileged middle-class background, their

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rap can lack substance. This was certainly a criticism of middle-class white rap groups in the USA, such as the Beastie Boys, and such a criticism might be applied to members of the ethnic and religious majority in Turkey who perform rap. What C-it’s comments fail to take into account is rap by members of minority groups in Turkey, perhaps because they have little visibility in Turkey. While there are Kurdish rappers in Germany and other parts of Europe (Eccarius-Kelly 2010), and while the legal and social climate for public expressions of Kurdish identity in Turkey, especially through music, has eased in recent years, there are few, if any, well-known rap singers in Turkey itself who identify themselves as Kurdish. Along with the emphasis on life in France, C-it also makes a distinction between the style of his rap and much of the rap made in Turkey. In Turkey, he says, the emphasis is on what he calls ‘flexi rap’, in which the speed of the lyrics is emphasised. He also criticises a style of rap that focuses on women, fast cars and money. He says that in his music he wants listeners to understand the lyrics because the lyrics are about important social issues: ‘Bizimki ghettodan çıkan gangsta rap. Gangsta rap, yavaş ve konuludur, mesaj verir. Sözleri ilk dinleyişte anlarsınız’ (Ours is coming out of the ghetto, gangsta rap. Gangsta rap is slow and has a topic, it gives a message. You understand the words the first time you hear the song) (Yılmaz 2007). The use of the term ‘gangsta rap’ may seem odd at first glance, since, as André Prévos, a scholar of French rap, notes, the traditional themes of American gangsta rap, such as armed gangs and drive-by shootings, are not part of French rappers’ own experience of marginalisation and are not usually part of their music (Prévos 2001a: 46). C-it’s own definition of ‘gangsta rap’, emphasising the political message, demonstrates a local adaptation of the transnational genre of rap: Like many black US rappers, [French rappers] saw themselves as natural commentators and observers of a seldom seen and largely ignored world where poverty, violence, and despair are prevalent. They also saw themselves as voices of criticism of French society at large and of the establishment, as well as of its normative forces, which have led to the personal and social situations they have had to face. (Prévos 2001a: 50)

For these rappers, like C-it, what is important and what makes them authentic, rather than simply commercial, is communicating a political message. As Tony Mitchell (2001) notes in his edited collection on the development of rap outside the USA, this discourse of authenticity is common to rap in many parts of the world, in which the point of reference is often the experience of urban African Americans. Some musicians and critics have argued that it is inappropriate to make comparisons between the specific situation and historical context of African Americans and that of marginalised populations in other parts of the world (e.g. Potter 1995). As others have pointed out, however, the fact remains that young

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people in other parts of the world do make those comparisons, constructing themselves and their music as part of a global ‘hip-hop nation’ that concerns itself with local issues, even while seeing them in the context of worldwide injustices (Bennett 2004: 180; Knudsen 2011). C-it’s disillusionment with the rap scene in Turkey may have contributed to his return to France, but more importantly, he realised that the music he was writing by 2007 had much more to do with life in France than in Turkey. In stark contrast to his earlier statements emphasising his Turkishness and how he was writing for Turks, in a personal interview in 2010 he spoke of a clear distinction between Turks in Turkey and Turks in France: Ben müziğimi Türkiye’de yaşayanlara yapmıyorum, açıkçası Türkiye’de yaşayanlar anlamaz. Mesela Sarkozy’den bahsediyorum, sosyal politikalardan bahsediyorum. Buranın politikasıyla Türkiye’ninki bir değil. Ghetto’dan, burada gördüklerimizden bahsediyorum. Türkiye’de yaşayan bir delikanlı benim şarkılarımda kendini bulamıyorsa bu iş yürümez. [I don’t make my music for people living in Turkey; frankly, people living in Turkey wouldn’t understand it. For example, I talk about Sarkozy; I talk about social political stuff. Politics here are not the same as politics in Turkey. I talk about the ghetto, about what I’ve seen here. If a young guy living in Turkey can’t see himself in my songs, it just doesn’t work.]

His concern with French politics is clear in his song ‘Paket Paket’. Included in his 2007 album Adım, it criticises the ‘broken system’, addressing both young people in the ghetto and then-President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy. Although the song is primarily in Turkish, the issues he mentions are relevant for more than just immigrants from Turkey. He calls on Sarkozy to retract his infamous remarks made during the 2005 riots in France in which he called young people of the housing projects ‘racaille’ (rabble):7 ‘Hadi cay yoksa vay haline / Zaten adımızı ettin racaille / Sarko, söylesene kim takar?’ (Come on, take it back or watch out / You already called us rabble / Sarko, tell me who cares?). Although there are only a few words of French (racaille, mentalité, paradoxale) in a linguistically Turkish song, the political references address an audience not only physically located in France, but also politically engaged in political events there and not necessarily only Turkish. The song begins with the words ‘Bizi üçüncü sınıf insan sanmayın’ (Don’t think of us as third-class people). As is clear from his comments in interviews, however, the ‘us’ is not only the children of Turkish immigrants, but all young people in the suburban housing projects. Although it is written almost entirely in Turkish, the song ‘Ghetto’dan Selam’ (‘Hello from the Ghetto’) contains no specifically Turkish content. Released shortly after the 2005 riots in France, it speaks of the many economic and social inequalities in France that provoked the riots. It paints an almost stereotypical picture of

Politics and belonging: the music of C-it

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ghetto life with references to gangster films (Scarface, Léon), crime, violence and poverty. C-it speaks of those whose ‘ilk ders’ (first lesson) is the terminology of gun targeting: ‘gez, göz, arpacık’ (rear sight, eye, front sight). But the song also calls on listeners to take responsibility for themselves, and expresses impatience with drug users, criminals and even those who see themselves as victims of fate: ‘Baştan dokunma haşa, ota, şırıngaya, coke’a … Kurban mantaliteni çöpe at’ (Don’t touch hashish, weed, syringe or coke … Throw out your victim mentality). If C-it’s music often seems more Turkish in terms of language than of content, the videos that accompany his songs are, however, more mixed. In the videos for his earlier songs, produced with C-it’s collaboration, such as ‘Heyecanlanma’, ‘Adım’ or ‘Komando’, the images are the stock images of rap: aggressive-looking young men in baggy clothes. More recent songs on C-it’s Facebook site, such as ‘Tadı Yok’, ‘Neye Yarar’ and ‘Belli Değil’, are similarly accompanied by still images of C-it in globally recognisable poses and clothes typical of rap singers. Videos circulating on the internet created by fans to accompany the audio, however, suggest that his fans view his songs in a more nationalistic way. Although C-it’s Facebook page contains some sixty photos, and only a handful feature the star and crescent of the Turkish flag, his fans use and reuse those relatively few images and add to them images that proclaim a more strident Turkishness, such as the insignia of the ultra-nationalist Grey Wolves. Nationalistic or not, all the images and videos are set within a scene that is clearly urban France, which suggests that even many of C-it’s most nationalist fans place themselves in urban France. Importantly, neither in C-it’s videos, nor in those created by fans, are there any nostalgic images of a lost homeland (usually an idealised rural life), as is sometimes the case in other music

Figure 1.2  C-it (Seyit Yakut).

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from the Turkish immigrant community. Despite the use of Turkish, C-it performs a version of Turkishness located materially and conceptually in France – or at least banlieue France – all of which suggests a wish to claim his part of France as home, but without losing his Turkish identity. Banlieue identity/French identity Through his lyrics, C-it locates himself within the banlieue, as part of a community that is French and Turkish, and, as noted above, also multiethnic. His stage name, first of all, is a name that speaks to bilingual Franco-Turks. Those who know both Turkish and French will recognise that C-it is simply a phonetic rendering in French of the Turkish name Seyit. As already noted, many of his lyrics focus on politics in France, especially as they impact the lives of those in the banlieue, where he describes a close sense of community: ‘Biz zaten hep ghetto çocuğu deriz burada. Zaten tek bir isim geçer, ghetto 73 diye geçer. Mesela şurada başıma bir şey gelse, belki ne biliyim on dakika içerisinde burada iki yüz kişi toplanır yani’ (We say we’re all ghetto kids here. In any case, there’s just one name that works, what’s called ghetto 73. Say something happens to me here, you know in ten minutes, there’ll be 200 people here) (personal interview 2010). French rappers who want to claim a connection to a particular space in the banlieue often refer to the postal code of their neighbourhood. In this case, 73 is a reference to the postal code for C-it’s neighbourhood (Figure 1.3). Outside this specific district, C-it also speaks of the ‘ghetto’ as a community, and of his relationships with other French rappers of many different backgrounds. The focus on neighbourhood allows a rapper to construct an identity based on multiethnic collaboration and coexistence that strategically minimises the importance of ethnic difference and emphasises socioeconomic differences between the haves and the have-nots, divided by class and postal code. Whereas American rap often describes the problems of urban youth in terms of race or ethnicity, French rap explores marginalisation in other terms. For one thing, French rap is anything but ethnically homogeneous, perhaps most famously represented by the expression ‘Black, Blanc, Beur’, a play on the description of the colours of the French flag (‘bleu, blanc, rouge’) first coined in celebration of France’s multiethnic winning team in the 1988 World Cup and later applied to the world of rap. As Prévos observes, ‘Les groupes ethniques représentés dans les groupes de rap en France sont aussi divers que les populations des banlieues des grandes villes de France’ (The ethnic groups represented in French rap groups are as diverse as the people of the banlieues of the big cities of France) (Prévos 2001b: 907). Indeed, in C-it’s own videos, the opposition is not between races, but rather between inhabitants of the banlieue, whatever their race or ethnicity, and everyone else in French society. This, in fact, is a common representation of life in the housing projects outside France’s major cities. The protagonists of Mathieu

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Figure 1.3  C-it (Seyit Yakut) wearing a ‘73’ t-shirt.

Kassovitz’s 1995 film La Haine, for example, are the sons of a Maghrebi family, an African family and a Jewish family. In the film, the three young men are unified in their opposition to society outside the housing projects, a society represented by the art galleries and upscale apartment buildings of central Paris. Despite the presence of a gang of skinheads, one sees a pattern not of racialised violence, but of violence sparked by class and education difference. Similarly, C-it describes France as a racist country, but within the ghetto and among other musicians he says that race is irrelevant, a claim supported by his musical collaboration with rappers of different races and ethnicities. An indication of this is not only the multiethnic composition of individual groups already noted, but the way rappers of different groups and origins ‘feature’ each other in their videos. ‘Featurings’ refer to brief cameo appearances in other rap musicians’ videos. They provide a way for rappers (especially well-established ones) to promote each other’s work and are especially helpful to new musicians, but featurings also contribute to rap’s self-image as being interested in the music itself, not the money, since it appears to downplay competition among rappers. Featurings also create a sense of rap community that extends beyond the physical boundaries of a given banlieue to encompass banlieues of different French cities and other countries. In addition to featuring, rappers will sometimes promote each other in videos. C-it’s website, for example, includes a video of the Marseille group Psy 4 de la Rime

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endorsing his work, ‘Une big dédicasse du plus grand groupe de rap français et marseillais pour le meilleur rappeur turque de France et du monde’ (A big dedication from the biggest French and Marseilles rap group for the best Turkish rapper of France and the world) (Psy 4 de la Rime 2009). Psy 4 de la Rime, for its part, is made up of three rappers with family origins in the Comoros Islands and a DJ with Moroccan origins, thus providing another example to support C-it’s claim that race or ethnicity plays no part when it comes to relations among rappers. Their self-identification as marseillais is also typical of the loyalty to a particular urban space. While their own declared sense of belonging is marked as Marseillais and French, perhaps because they sing in French, C-it’s identity is marked as Turkish from France, but not as French. This is certainly due, at least in part, to C-it’s own self-identification as Turkish and because he sings in Turkish; yet it raises questions of belonging even among immigrants as to who is truly part of France and who is not. Despite apparent feelings of belonging to a multiethnic banlieue community, relations between that community and the rest of French society are more difficult. C-it himself makes a complaint common to many second-generation Turks in France: ‘Burada zaten yabancılık çekiyorsun, kötü olan Türkiye’ye gidiyorsun orda da yabancılık çekiyorsun. Hani şimdi nereye gidelim Mars’a mı?’ (Here you already feel like a foreigner. The bad thing is you go to Turkey and you feel like a foreigner there. So now where should I  go, Mars?) (personal interview 2010). While the banlieue, its inhabitants and its music may be marginalised with respect to mainstream French society, C-it’s own identity is a product of that banlieue. As his experiences in Turkey demonstrated, he does feel marginalised with respect to the Turkish culture of Turkey. It is true that he speaks of being treated like a foreigner in France, but he also speaks of being part of a strong multiethnic community within the banlieue. While his music, almost entirely in Turkish, may not speak to every member of that community, he certainly speaks about and for that imagined community. C-it’s own creative journey seems a clear example of an artist experimenting with the different possibilities offered by being part of more than one culture. As he works through these ideas of home and host and the borders that may or may not separate the two, his work suggests an identity that is neither one nor the other, but rather an identity that includes both. Conclusion In response to the riots in France in 2005, media and politicians were quick to classify the riots as a sign of alienation felt by the youth of the suburbs. Then, too, members of Parliament responded with calls to censor rap music. Some observers, however, argued that the uprisings actually pointed to a sense of belonging to French society. John P.  Murphy, based on interviews with young people

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of immigrant origin and their comments on the riots, makes a similar observation: the riots did not ‘amount, as has often been claimed, to an assault on “traditional” French values expressing a lack of cultural integration among second- and third-generation immigrants … on the contrary … the young people implicated directly or indirectly in these disturbances are in fact deeply committed to universalist republican values’ (Murphy 2011: 46). In other words, young people only bother to protest in society where they believe they already belong. It is only when they feel they do belong but are being treated unfairly that they take to the streets. C-it’s music, in which he places so much importance on a political message, suggests a desire for more just treatment within a society of which he is already very much a part. After the USA, France has the largest number of rap musicians and audience members in the world.8 In terms of numbers, rap is clearly not a marginal phenomenon in France. To take just one example, as Tony Mitchell notes, French rapper MC Solaar’s album Prose Contact (1994) sold more than a million copies. In the years that followed, with the increased use (and abuse) of downloadable music from the internet, album sales may not have continued to grow but the listening audience has: experts estimate that the audience in France for rap has increased between 1998 and 2008 from 5 to 14 per cent of listening audiences (Gabouard and Offner 2010). Despite its commercial success, artists and fans still see rap as a music whose most important role is to communicate political messages that challenge the status quo (Prévos 2001a: 43). As Michel Raison, in his letter calling for censorship, seems not to have understood, rap music’s oppositional character is not a threat to French democracy, but rather a sign of the willingness of young banlieue inhabitants like C-it to criticise and participate in national public debates. In asserting a particular ethnic identity, C-it also asserts that it can exist only in France. Notes 1 All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 2 See Diallo (2011), LaForestrie (2011) and Walon (2011) for coverage of the controversy in Le Monde. 3 Article 40 of the Constitutional Revision Law alters Article 75 of the 1958 Constitution to stipulate, ‘Les langues régionales appartiennent au patrimoine de la France’ (Congrés Français, 2008) (regional languages constitute a part of French heritage). While recognised, regional languages do not share the same position as the official national language, French. 4 The report edited by Beauchemin et al. (2010) under the auspices of the Institut national d’études démographiques is the most comprehensive recent report on immigrants in France. İrtiş-Dabbagh (2003) and Rollan and Sourou (2006), although older studies, focus specifically on Turkish communities in France.

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5 This web forum was opened in March 2005, went into ‘hibernation’ from 2006 to 2009, and had some limited activity until 2011, when the creation of a new platform for the forum was announced, but there were no postings on the new site. It is difficult to date most of the postings, since they include only the day and month (no indication of year), but the posts quoted here probably date to the most active time of the forum in 2005. 6 As Helenon (2006) notes, for example, North African rappers show much ambivalence about a possible ‘return home’, even when just for summer visits. See esp. pp. 158–9. 7 Sarkozy was touring a suburban housing project when a woman shouted at him, asking what he was going to do about the ‘racaille’ in her neighbourhood. He responded using her own term again, but in the following days he adopted the term as his own (anon. 2005). 8 Mitchell notes the irony that it was a law intended to protect the use of the French national language in radio broadcasting that created the space for the growth of francophone rap music, now deemed by some a threat to French national unity (2001: 12).

2

Home and back again: texts and contexts in the Kebab Show theatre troupe Whether immigrant, exile or refugee, how does one cope with the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes terrifying experience of living in a new country, communicating every day in a foreign language? Speaking that language well may make the experience easier on a practical level, but it remains a foreign language, a reminder that one is far from home. Language is a powerful sign of belonging. With a foreign accent, even if immigrants wish to become part of the new land, they are constantly reminded by the ‘natives’ that they are outsiders, and their claims to be at home are weak. And what of the children of immigrants who speak with no accent and have lived nowhere else, but yet are told they are still outsiders? This chapter considers the role that bilingual and community-language theatre can play in creating a sense of home and belonging in the majority culture by looking at the work of the Franco-Turkish1 theatre troupe Kebab Show, active from 2002 to 2011. The lack of a home acknowledged by others as one’s legitimate home echoes Edward Said’s observation about exiles: ‘You cannot go back to some earlier and perhaps more stable condition of being at home; and, alas, you can never fully arrive, be at one in your new home or situation’ (Said 1994: 54). Given this claim, it is not surprising that Said has described the experience of the exiled writer as one of loss. He acknowledges that this loss can result in a unique and even pleasurable awareness of multiple cultures, but this pleasure only arises out of loss and pain (Said 1994: 59–60). Soren Frank reflects on Said’s insights and observes that ‘the migrant writer stubbornly (and artistically) struggles to recuperate his or her old space and its layers of history and narrative potential, and to come to terms with the new environment’s local specificity’ (Frank 2015: 114). This latter move of ‘coming to terms’ with where one is, I would argue, is an attempt to create a new linguistic and cultural ‘home’ and is not unique to immigrant writers but is shared by most migrants of any profession. All human beings use narratives told to others and to themselves to make sense of where they have been, where they are, and where they hope to be. Accepting that the migrant writer (and indeed migrants generally) experience the loss of space and then act in order to compensate for that loss, this chapter argues that immigrant theatre provides a context in which space and narrative can come together in productive ways.

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It might be objected that it is misleading to use Said’s work on exilic writers to discuss the work of immigrant theatre, but this would ignore the many similarities in the lives of exiles and immigrants. It is often difficult in any case to separate political and economic reasons for migration (Sirkeci 2003), and if their experiences in the new country vary, it has more to do with class or education in the country of origin than with what prompted them to leave. In both cases, the longing for home and the hope for eventual return are much the same. In the specific context of Turkish experience, while there are certainly different words for exile (sürgün) and immigrant (göçmen), the experience of being in a foreign place is designated by a single word, gurbetçilik, and is commonly used to describe the situation of both immigrants and exiles. Gurbetçilik is defined as ‘insanın doğup büyüdü, aile ocağının bulunduğu yerden uzak yer’ (a place far from the place where one was born and grew up, far from the family hearth) (Püsküllüoğlu 1999). Based in Lyon, Kebab Show was made up of approximately fifteen women and men, ranging in age from eighteen to fifty-something:  students, small business owners, homemakers and professionals. The group was founded as an offshoot of a bilingual French-Turkish radio programme of the same name. (The radio show later adopted the name of Made in Turkey in 2005 to distinguish it from the theatre group.) At first glance, the theatre group might seem to have been strongly anchored in the ‘home’ culture:  they performed almost entirely in Turkish and their performances were often adaptations of Turkish works. Yet former members of the group were and are also firmly attached to the ‘host’ culture: the group is made up largely of the children of immigrants from Turkey who were born in France or came to France from Turkey at a young age. For the most part, they are professionally, linguistically and educationally established in France. They say they are more comfortable speaking French than Turkish. In conversation, many of them say that one of the reasons they participated in Kebab Show was to improve their Turkish. Indeed, they echo the sentiments of rapper Seyit Yakut, who, unhappy with his level of Turkish, commented ‘Evde konuşulan Türkçe bir yere kadar’ (The Turkish you speak at home can only take you so far) (Yılmaz 2007).2 Performances and audiences Over nearly a decade Kebab Show produced a number of short sketches and three full-length plays. Apart from immigrants and their children, their audiences also included a few people from outside the community, who through marriage, friendship or individual inclination were interested in Turkish language and culture. Within the community of immigrants from Turkey and their children, each of their three main plays attracted distinct audiences, largely divided by age. Kebab Show cofounders Halil Üstündağ and Muhammet Akyüz have said that one of the purposes of their theatre was to highlight issues important to the community and encourage discussion. It would be inaccurate to call their theatre simply didactic

Home and back again: the Kebab Show theatre troupe

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since it never proposed a unified interpretation or instructions for behaviour. But there was definitely an instrumental and political aspect to their performances that had more to do with provoking discussion outside the theatre than with a particular artistic vision within the theatre. Short sketches, for example, encouraged audience members to vote in French elections or addressed discrimination. In addition to these short pieces performed at festivals and meetings, the troupe also produced three full-length plays. The first play they performed (2003–05), İmamın manken kızı (The Imam’s Daughter the Fashion Model), is based on a novel by popular Islamist author Emine Şenlikoğlu (1997). It is a moralising story about how a young woman is tempted by ‘modernity’ (represented primarily through clothing), goes astray, and in the end is reunited with her parents and her religious faith. Members of Kebab Show have said that this performance attracted an older audience, made up of many first-generation immigrants. This is not surprising, perhaps, since one of the visible signs of the heroine’s fall is her decision to stop veiling and to wear a miniskirt. While some young women whose parents emigrated from Turkey do wear Islamic dress, young people do not necessarily view non-Islamic dress as a sign of moral weakness. In fact, the idea that clothing could be a sign of one’s fall was incongruous to young audience members. As Akyüz noted in a personal interview, while he and Üstündağ, both in their thirties, were aiming for a cautionary message about the risks inherent in striking out on one’s own, ‘Gençler bütün mesajları anlamadılar, sonunda güldüler’ (young people couldn’t get all the messages, and in the end, they laughed). The group’s third play (2009–11), Zamane Evlatları (Children of the Times), was adapted from a radio play script, a didactic tragedy about the woes that befall a family when their young adult children sacrifice their values and their parents in pursuit of wealth. The older son becomes engaged to the daughter of his employer, not because he loves her, but because she represents a fast track to wealth and power. While she is presented unsympathetically and stereotypically as a spoiled rich girl concerned only with parties and nice clothes, her parents, as acted in the play, provide comic relief. They, too, are concerned with wealth and appearances, but are portrayed in such an exaggerated fashion that they become caricatures, rather than villains. While it is clearly within the same melodramatic vein as Imam, it nonetheless also includes moments of humour in the performance, if not the text. Taking the text and its themes less seriously, it seems to have attracted the most age-diverse audience, although Akyüz and Üstündağ say that it was of particular interest to a middle-aged audience, whose own children were approaching adulthood. The plays Imam and Children show little connection with life in France at the level of plot or setting. Both are set in Turkey and include no obvious references to immigration. In the context of their performance in France, however, both clearly express anxieties about children reaching adulthood and turning against their parents’ values. While this concern may not be unique to immigrant parents, it is a

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particularly acute fear for first-generation immigrants who have few societal or institutional supports to enforce the values they wish to transmit from the country of origin, a strategy that Samim Akgönül criticises as a desire to create ‘la première génération perpétuelle’ (the perpetual first generation) (Akgönül 2009:  43). Similarly, Rollan and Sourou (2006) discuss the role of organisations targeting immigrants from Turkey and their children in the Aquitaine region of France, where they argue that the main preoccupation of these organisations is ‘la construction idéologique de l’identité turque en migration’ (the ideological construction of Turkish identity in migration) (59). They further discuss the role of these organisations in establishing Turkish language and culture programmes for the children of Turkish immigrants. In spite of the conservative themes of the plays, warning young people to remain faithful to their parents’ values and culture, as I will argue below, the very performance of the plays is a sign of their belonging to French cultural life. Kebab Show’s second play (2005–06), Fransa, Ben de geldim (France, I’m Here, Too), written by group cofounder Üstündağ, was their only full-length play to deal explicitly with immigration and living with two cultures. Because the play questions the practice of bringing young people from Turkey to marry young Franco-Turks, Akyüz says it was not well received by the first generation, who felt it directly criticised them. They also lacked the linguistic and cultural knowledge to appreciate the bilingual humour. Interspersed with a series of comic vignettes, it is the story of an ‘imported’ bride from Turkey and her adaptation to life in France. Much of the humour depends on word play between languages and on cultural misunderstanding, thus underscoring the divide between Turks from Turkey and Turks from France. According to Kebab Show founders Üstündağ and Akyüz, the play appealed to a young second-generation audience, one with the bilingual competence necessary to understand the linguistic and cultural references in both French and Turkish. As Akyüz said in a personal interview, ‘Franco-Türkler anladı, yani hem Türk hem Fransız kültürüne sahiplenmiş insanlar. Bizim anne babalarımız harbi Türk mantalitesi ve bu esprilerden anlamazlar’ (Franco-Turks got it, I mean people who have a handle on both Turkish and French culture. Our parents with their strict Turkish mentality don’t get the jokes). In the case of jokes they did understand, they were offended by some of the humour which played on words or expressions that were innocuous in one language, but suggested vulgar or offensive meanings in the other. Creating ‘home’ One means by which immigrant communities create a sense of home is through the formation of associations for immigrants from the same national origin. There are literally hundreds of organisations targeting immigrants from Turkey scattered across France (Ataturquie 2009), most visibly in the major immigrant cities of

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Paris, Lyon and Strasbourg, but also in far-flung villages, even those boasting only a handful of families with origins in Turkey. Citing a 2005 report by the Turkish Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs (Çalışma ve Sosyal Güvenlik Bakanlığı), Gaye Petek writes that more than 300 organisations are listed on the registers of the four Turkish consulates in France (Petek 2009: 26). Of course, there are most likely many more that do not register with the consulates. An organisation may be formed around sports teams, political movements, religious practice (Akgönül 2009) or the Turkish hometown of its members. As a leader of an NGO commented, one finds all the diversity of cultural and political life in Turkey also in Turkish organisations in France (Petek 2009). Reflecting the early history of economic immigration from Turkey, many towns and cities with a population of immigrants from Turkey include an organisation for Turkish workers, even if the organisation has moved far beyond its initial concerns of helping those workers adapt to French working life. The trajectory of one such immigrant organisation, the Association de Solidarité avec les Travailleurs Turcs (ASTTu) (Association in Solidarity with Turkish Workers), exemplifies changes in the attitudes of immigrants from Turkey and their families across France. The organisation was founded in Strasbourg in 1974 by a group of French students who had been informally providing literacy instruction to workers from Turkey, as well as organising social events and assistance with French bureaucracy. When a 1981 law finally permitted non-citizens to form their own associations, the immigrants themselves took an active role in running the organisation. While ASTTu continued to provide academic support for the children of immigrants and to organise cultural events of Turkish cinema, music and dance, by 2010 the mission of the organisation was no longer centred on concerns of workers. Reflecting the changing composition of the community, many of whom had been born and educated in France, the organisation focused increasingly on citizenship and participation in French civic life. Given these new concerns, they concluded that ‘la citoyenneté apparaît comme un élément essentiel permettant d’évoquer de nombreuses questions concernant la situation des populations issues de l’immigration’ (citizenship appears as an essential element allowing us to raise a number of questions concerning the situation of people with an immigration background) (ASTU 2015). To reflect this change in emphasis, in 2010 the name of the organisation was changed to ASTU Actions citoyennes interculturelles (ASTU Citizenship and Intercultural Actions). Many organisations of immigrants from Turkey in France, like ASTU, recognise their members’ multiple identities. As organisations, they emphasise participation in French civic life, even as they remain focused on immigrants and their descendants. If we look at the first generation, those who immigrated in the 1970s and 1980s, Turkish identity remains primary, and we see that while they may be willing to identify with the French city in which they live, or even with both France and Turkey, they are unlikely to see themselves as only French. Their children and grandchildren on the other hand, who have been raised in France,

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not surprisingly demonstrate more mixed attachments. While 95 per cent of the children of Turkish immigrants hold French citizenship, 55 per cent hold dual citizenship (Simon 2010: 117, 120). Simon cautions that just holding citizenship does not necessarily mean a feeling of being French, but he notes that among all those born in France to two immigrant parents, 89 per cent report being ‘tout à fait d’accord’ (completely in agreement) or ‘plutôt d’accord’ (somewhat in agreement) with the feeling of being French (Simon 2010: 122). Even for the members of Kebab Show, who called themselves ‘the first and only Turkish theatre troupe in France’ and who defined their project and their audience in terms of national origin, home is not necessarily or simply a national home, either in Turkey or in France. For the children of immigrants, those who came to France as young children or who were born in France – the so-called ‘second generation’  – home is complicated. We know that the old model of one-way no-return immigration and assimilation or integration no longer describes the situation of most immigrants to France, if it ever did, and this is especially true for the ‘second generation’. If we look to what home means for these young people, they have a number of possibilities, none of which is mutually exclusive. National origin is undoubtedly important for many of them. In cultural work coming out of the community of immigrants from Turkey, there is a particular nationalist or patriotic flavour that is not apparent, for example, in the literature or music of North African immigrants and their descendants in France. When one asks the children of immigrants from Turkey where they are from, the answer is often their parents’ hometown(s), or their memleket (Samim Akgönül, quoted in Tapia 2007), where they have spent summer vacations. Yet when they talk about going ‘back’ to Turkey, those small towns and villages are not usually the destination they have in mind. Instead, they talk about going to the big cities of Istanbul, Ankara or Izmir, where they can turn their bilingualism and European education to greater profit than is possible in France itself  – and escape the persistent discrimination faced by immigrants and those with an ‘immigrant background’. As noted in the previous chapter, research shows that young people whose appearance or names indicate their origins in African or Muslim countries face difficulties not faced by others in obtaining housing and jobs (Adida et al. 2010; Roudault 2009). Anecdotal corroboration comes from a businessman of Turkish origin, whose last name is not obviously Turkish. He reported using a French first name rather than his Turkish first name in professional contexts because, as he said, it made it easier to find and work with clients. Thus the large cities of Turkey are viewed as an escape from France, an imagined ‘home’ to which the young people have no real family connection, although the imagined national ties and the assumption of shared values make them attractive destinations. The status of these cities as imagined homes was underscored by one young woman, who noted that a city in Turkey was the only place her immigrant parents would allow her to move to on her own (Perrier 2010).

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Apart from various narratives about familial or imagined homes in Turkey, young people also claim the city or neighbourhood in France where they have grown up or that they have chosen as home. One young woman, considering the career advantages of moving from her hometown in south-west France to Paris, said she found it difficult to imagine living anywhere else, either in France or Turkey. As discussed in the previous chapter, rappers with immigrant origins and without sometimes include the postal codes of their neighbourhoods in videos and lyrics. A defiant assertion of belonging to the marginalised banlieue, it also stakes a claim to these areas as home. Ayşe Çağlar writing about the role of Turkish German media in the ‘identity formation of Turkish German youth in Berlin’ (Çağlar 2004: 54), notes that there is ‘identification with Berlin, but not necessarily with Germany. Different kinds of belonging are reflectively challenged and negotiated around the image of the city’ (55). But these homes in Europe rarely exclude the possibility of other homes in Turkey. In contrast to Said’s notion of a single home of origin, these young people instead show the possibility of multiple homes. To return to Said’s comment that the exilic writer’s experience is one of loss, we have to note that his comment concerns a writer who has first-hand experience of the loss of the place of origin. Said’s writer may have a conflictual relationship with the first home space, but ‘home’ nonetheless refers to a particular place that he or she knows personally. For the descendants of immigrants, however, this referent is mythical, or at best, the product of short visits. If they visit their parents’ home, it is not their home because they have lived there, but becomes theirs through the stories told about it. But just as the ‘imagined communities’ described by Benedict Anderson (1983) are no less important for being imagined, so these imagined homes inspire no less loyalty. Narrative homes In sociological studies, the descendants of Turkish immigrants are shown to maintain much closer ties to their parents’ country of origin and to speak their parents’ native language more than do descendants of other immigrant groups (İrtiş-Dabbagh 2003). They are also more likely to read Turkish newspapers and to marry someone of the same national origin. In their interviews and creative writing in the bilingual literary journal Oluşum/Genèse, for example, young people express a romanticised love and longing for a land they know more through family stories than through lived experience. The journal, published in Nancy, has included several interviews and poems by second-generation Franco-Turks in which the connection to an imagined national home is strong. For example, in the untitled short story written by Özlem Yıldırım (2002) in the form of a letter, the narrator, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, explains to her French fiancé why she is leaving him and moving to Turkey. In another short story, also in the form of a letter, by Keziban Yiğit (2001), the beloved addressed in the letter is not

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a person, but a place: the Turkish heartland. Her letter is a sensual representation of the narrator’s feelings for this beloved she feels she has betrayed. She speaks of her ‘volonté dévorante’ (devouring desire) (25) to visit, discover and contemplate her beloved land. For their parents, one can certainly talk about a literal loss of home and a public place for the home language, but for the children it is more accurate to speak of a narrative loss. By narrative loss, I refer to a loss experienced through the idealised stories parents and grandparents tell their children about life in the country of origin, as well as an individual’s sense of not quite having the desired command of the culture or language, as in the young man lamenting his poor Turkish. As Sarah Ahmed puts it, ‘Migration is not only felt at the level of lived embodiment. Migration is also a matter of generational acts of story-telling about prior histories of movement and dislocation’ (Ahmed 2000: 90). Thus even if the children and grandchildren of immigrants have not directly felt the loss of a home, they have experienced that loss through family stories. Rather than say that their loss is not real, I would argue even that it is exacerbated by having no experienced referent, so that the stories are told about an absence rather than a place that once existed. While discussing these idealised narrative homes, it is useful to remember that these are, in fact, idealisations. Life in the village of origin certainly had its economic and material difficulties. Many feminist critics have also noted that literal homes do not always turn out to be the imagined or desired spaces of safety and community, especially for women (Mallett 2004: 72–3). While this is certainly a valid point for real homes, my argument here is instead about figurative homes created through stories in which negative experiences are minimised. It is these homes recreated through narrative, not the literal homes, that are passed on. If we look at the language of a text as indicating an attempt to compensate for a lost home space, Kebab Show’s first and third plays (The Imam’s Daughter and Children of the Times) with their monolingual texts and their plots set firmly within a Turkish cultural space, do work as texts to reproduce a public place for Turkish – which has otherwise been relegated to private home spaces. The group’s second play, France, I’m Here, Too, performed primarily in Turkish but also in French, on the other hand, is not about recreating a theatrical ‘Little Turkey’, nor a nostalgic recovery of the home language and culture, as might be argued for the two other plays. Although Turkish is the dominant language of the play, understanding the humour depends on knowing both Turkish and French language and culture. The play asserts the legitimacy of the community of immigrants from Turkey and their descendants in France – indeed of a ‘space’ of their own, not as assimilated into the French melting pot, but as a community that can successfully manoeuvre between French and Turkish, linguistically and culturally, something that many of their Turkish-speaking parents and most of the French-speaking community around them cannot do. Constituting another linguistic community within France does not make them any less a part of France. The example of minority language theatre in Canada

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Figure 2.1  Kebab Show, from Fransa, ben de geldim.

may make this belonging more apparent. The separatist tendencies of Quebec are well known; less well known is the situation of French speakers in other parts of English-speaking Canada. Louise Ladouceur provides an interesting case for comparison in her study of French/English bilingual theatre in Canada, in which she underscores the role of an evolving bilingualism in community formation. In provinces where English is the majority language, Ladouceur observes that francophone Canadians are producing theatre that is increasingly marked by ‘heterolingualism’ the further west it is from Quebec. Exposés à un anglais majoritaire qui est aussi la langue véhiculaire de l’espace public, les francophones en situation minoritaire doivent maîtriser les deux langues et aisément passer de l’une à l’autre. Bilingues par nécessité, ils ont développés des mécanismes langagiers hybrides qui informent leur identité francophone. Qu’il soit à peine esquissé ou affiché sans retenue, le bilinguisme propre à chaque communauté francophone minoritaire s’est manifesté à travers des procédés hétérolingues qui varient et font l’objet de perceptions fort différentes selon les lieux et les époques. [Exposed to the majority language English, which is also the lingua franca of public space, in a context where French speakers are a minority, they have to master both languages and switch comfortably from one to the other. Bilingual by necessity, they have developed the hybrid linguistic mechanisms that shape

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Turkish immigration, art and narratives of home their francophone identity. Whether it is barely outlined or asserted without reserve, the bilingualism that belongs to each minority francophone community makes itself apparent through heterolinguistic procedures that vary and are the object of very different perceptions according to the time and place.] (Ladouceur 2010: 186–7)

In situations such as this, bilingualism, or more accurately heterolinguism, is part of community identity. According to Ladouceur’s argument, theatre functions in bilingual contexts as a means not only of maintaining a pre-existing community, but also of creating a new sense of a community in the new linguistic and cultural context in which the group finds itself. According to Ladouceur, whereas French-speakers in Quebec may well view the presence of English in Quebecois theatre as an unwelcome intrusion, francophone Canadians outside Quebec incorporate English into their stage productions not because they are a fragile community, but rather as a way of asserting an identity formed out of their unique experiences of being francophone in an English-majority society. I would argue that this same dynamic is present in Kebab Show’s France, I’m Here, Too. Importantly, in both these contexts, the link between a single language and a given space is weakened. This difference between the community of origin and the new community also played a role in Kebab Show’s productions. As Akyüz argues, referring to the first generation and the newly imported brides and grooms, ‘Türkler de Türk ama biz Fransa’nın Türkleri, onlar Türkiye’nin Türkleri. Yollarımız çoktan beri ayrılmış … Aynı insanlar değiliz artık. Aslında mesaj bu anlayana’ (Turks are Turks but we’re France’s Turks and they’re Turkey’s Turks. We took different paths a long time ago. … We’re not the same people any more. And really that’s the message for someone who understands) (personal interview 2010). This is an important message for both French and Turkish governments. French citizens of Turkish origin are not ‘ambassadors’ or ‘fifth columnists’ for the country of origin. They have created a community whose particularities are possible only in France, not in Turkey or in any other country where immigrants from Turkey may live. To return to the point with which this chapter began, while it is easy to see the cultural and linguistic loss involved in migration, I would like to argue that migrant cultural production can indeed provide a kind of compensation. One form of compensation is the creation of a new community, as described above. Another form takes advantage of the carnivalesque potential specific to theatre:  whatever the reality of power relations in daily life for immigrants, nearly anything is possible in the theatre. Just as underdogs have often used language and linguistic humour as a way of asserting themselves against the powerful, word plays serve as linguistic compensation, an opportunity to take control of the usual position of weakness, to bring majority and minority languages into parity, and to give the bilingual immigrant or child of immigrants a position of power that does not have to be shared or

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negotiated with members of the majority culture. As will be discussed in detail in the next chapter, theories attempting to explain how humour operates are numerous, but one explanation that makes sense even at an intuitive level is that humour is a way of propping up one’s self-esteem by laughing at someone else, whether that other person or group has more or less power than oneself. For example, in the classically unequal interaction between the immigrant and the bureaucracy of the host country, in practice it is usually the immigrant whose linguistic weakness means that she or he will lose in the interaction. In the context of the theatre, however, the immigrant’s children can take the misunderstanding and transform it so that it is a member of the host culture who is at a loss. In the play, France, I’m Here, Too, when an immigrant official asks a recent immigrant from Turkey for her last name, the immigrant responds ‘Türk’. The official insists that she wants to know her name, not her nationality. After several exchanges in which only the bilingual audience gets the joke, the new immigrant’s husband, the son of Turkish immigrants and born in France, arrives and explains to the official that Türk is indeed their last name. Exasperated with the immigration official, he then goes on to tell her that his middle name is Tamer (a common name in Turkish, but which also phonetically sounds like an insult in French); the official looks around for support, finds none and can only say ‘küçük bir sesle … il m’a insultée, il vient de m’insulter’ (with a quiet voice … he insulted me, he just insulted me) (Üstündağ 2010). It is clear, however, that no one will come to her aid. This carnivalesque reversal in which it is the native bureaucrat who is left without a voice stays, of course, within the safe space of the theatre, but is nonetheless a symbolic settling of accounts between home and public languages. While the humour of this particular scene revolves around the conflict between immigrants and French bureaucracy, much of the humour of the play as a whole depends on distinctions between recent immigrants and those of the second generation: not only between characters on stage, but also between the audience members and characters. For example, when the play portrays the misunderstandings of a group of new immigrants from Turkey in a French language classroom, the audience members laugh, at least in part, because they know so much more than the characters on stage. Whereas Kebab Show’s two other plays focus on generational conflict, this play depends on another less obvious distinction, that between the husband, born in France to immigrant parents, and his newly arrived bride. Although the same age as her husband, she has much more in common with his parents than with him. Thus the many members of the audience, also born in France to immigrants from Turkey, can laugh at her misunderstandings and implicitly reinforce their own sense of superiority over this newcomer. Ferguson and Ford (2008), in their review of theories of humour, cite, for example, a study in which middle-class African Americans found anti-African American jokes funnier than lower-class African Americans did. The researchers hypothesised that the middle-class African American subjects saw themselves either as individually different or as members of a group that was different from

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Figure 2.2  Kebab Show, from Fransa, ben de geldim.

the (lower-class) objects of the jokes. Similarly, while outsiders might expect the children of immigrants to identify with Turkish immigrants in general, the reactions of audience members to France, I’m Here, Too suggest more complicated relations and identifications with this ‘community’. The new narrative homes being constructed through cultural production have as much (or more) to do with their lives in France than the lives that their parents and grandparents left behind in Turkey. Theatre culture While the textual level of the plays is extremely important, they also need to be considered in terms of their performance. Because theatre is a social activity, one that happens in the relationship established between the performers and the audience, it is important to recall the larger historical and cultural context surrounding theatre as a social institution. To understand the importance of looking at this context, we can contrast it to book-reading, which although culturally defined, is not inherently a social activity. Book clubs and online discussion groups have made reading more social than we are perhaps used to thinking of it, but reading remains primarily a private activity, one that is not dependent on a public venue. Theatre and other performance arts, on the other hand, are explicitly public

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events. Without public performance, they lose a significant part of their meaning, and as such, they take place within a particular cultural context. Theatre conventions are just that – conventions – and thus culturally and historically determined. Formal indoor theatre, in the way the West has thought about it for several centuries, dates in Turkey to the late nineteenth century, at the earliest. In the Ottoman Empire, live performances were not an elite practice, as they took place more often than not in the streets, consisting of puppet shows or performers combining gags, short sketches, song and dance. From the nineteenth century on, however, theatre and public performance increasingly took on the forms we are familiar with today. The process of westernisation, which had been moving in fits and starts since the eighteenth century, gained speed with the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. In Turkey, westernisation (whether the adoption of the Latin alphabet, changes in dress codes or the promotion of western cultural forms) was a top-down operation. Theatre was supported and promoted as part of Europeanisation and thus took on the elite contours of theatre in twentieth-century Europe. Many Turkish playwrights were supported by the State theatre system, but there was also State sponsorship for the translation and performance of western classics. Judith Miller, writing about how different francophone theatre traditions ‘translate’ or not in different francophone countries, argues that audience expectations about what theatre should look like determine whether a play from another tradition will be successful – even if the play and the audience share the same language. For theater to happen, there has to be shared communication within a group, a group that can, in certain kinds of theatrical experiences, meld into something approaching community. This sharing and melding will differ from culture to culture … For the ability to share and meld is dependent on reception, itself determined by local theatrical conventions. Theatrical conventions include acting traditions, staging traditions, and how to dose the various languages of the stage, such as lighting, music, costumes, makeup, choreography – as well as text. Most often unexamined – at least by the audience, these conventions help determine whether theatre works or not. (Miller 2010: 40)

In Miller’s terms, theatre is a community with its own norms, and just as communities bring people together, they can also exclude. In Republican Turkey, the theatre came to mark off a space for the urban well-heeled or well-educated. Thus, not surprisingly, for Turkish immigrants to France, who overwhelmingly came from poor, rural areas and had little formal education, the theatre is not a space they are likely to claim as their own, either in Turkey or in France. One of Kebab Show’s founders said that a goal of the troupe, in fact, was to bring these members of the Franco-Turkish community into the theatre: ‘nous essayons de montrer que le théâtre n’est pas réservé à une certaine élite et que tout le monde peut aussi

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bien monter sur scène qu’être spectateur’ (we try to show that the theatre is not reserved for an elite and that everyone can get up on stage as much as they can be in the audience) (Bakhtaoui 2010). While Kebab’s Show’s organisers do have a background in theatre, most of the members who joined the group were amateurs. Indeed, although they took their performances quite seriously and achieved an impressive professionalism, the art of the performance was perhaps less important, or rather important only in as much as it helped them achieve their other social goals. They also intended their plays to encourage audience members to discuss issues affecting integration into French society, thus becoming an activist theatre both in form and content, as is apparent from their sketches on voting and discrimination. As Üstündağ said, ‘tiyatroda inanılmaz mesajlar verebilirsiniz’ (in the theatre you can pass on incredible messages) (personal interview 2010). At the end of each performance, members of the group would go out to meet the audience, thus further breaking down the barriers between the theatre ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, although not always without misunderstandings. Following one performance, for example, a member of the troupe, who played the role of a disrespectful daughter, had her ear pulled and was scolded by an elderly audience member for her bad behaviour. Historically, some of the best-known immigrant comedy has come out of Italian and Jewish immigrant communities in the United States, although many other immigrant communities also produced their own theatre. Whereas bilingual theatres such as Kebab Show are the exception in France, such theatres were common in big US cities such as New York in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see for example Aleandri 1999; Kanfer 2006). In the United States of the nineteenth century, there was only a fledgling mainstream theatre culture, especially outside large metropolitan areas, which left a great deal of room for theatre by marginalised groups. In France, on the other hand, there has been a well-developed national theatre since at least the 1600s. (The Comédie Française was founded in 1680, although there had been established small private theatres long before that.) Furthermore, France’s strong tradition of centralising and assimilationist policies – not only of immigrants, but even of indigenous linguistic and cultural minorities – left little space for immigrant, and especially bilingual or non-French, theatre. Finally, following decolonisation, numerous but short-lived immigrant theatre companies came into being all over France in the 1960s and early 1970s (Le Gallic 2013), but it was only in 1975 that these scattered groups came together for the Festival de Théâtre Populaire des Travailleurs Immigrés (The Festival of Popular Theatre by Immigrant Workers). Taking place over three weeks, the festival was organised and funded not by Government initiatives, but rather by two private non-profit organisations:  Cimade, an ecumenical service organisation originally formed to help refugees at the end of the Second World War, and the Maison des Travailleurs Immigrés de Puteaux (House of Immigrant Workers of Puteaux). The private, rather than State, funding for the festival reflects Government priorities of the time, which were oriented towards convincing

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immigrants to return to their countries of origin rather than providing a creative space for them to explore ideas of immigrant identity and belonging in France. In stark contrast to the goals of the immigrant theatre festival, the State-funded television variety show Mosaïque, which aired from 1977 to 1987, preferred to highlight the ‘culture of origin’ of immigrants, with a view to preparing them for eventual ‘return home’ (Escafré-Dublet 2008). Nearly three decades later, by the time Kebab Show started performing, most French authorities were no longer advocating a ‘return home’ for immigrants and their descendants, but they were still reluctant to fund a group like Kebab Show, which, like its predecessors in the 1970s, continued to depend on private sources of funding. Kebab Show organisers said in interviews that they were perceived by French funding sources as communautariste (connoting, as discussed in the previous chapter, a refusal to integrate into the French mainstream), since they were seen to create a space that excluded non-Turkish speakers and promoted isolation of the community instead of encouraging the integration of immigrants from Turkey into mainstream French culture. While the group found other sources of support, primarily Turkish community organisations in France, the lack of support from local government, in particular, served as an indication of their ability to occupy public space. Towards the end of their activity as a troupe, there were occasionally exceptions to this: in January 2010 in a small town outside Strasbourg, for example, they performed for the first time in a municipal theatre, and the non-Turkish-speaking mayor attended the performance. Yet Kebab Show’s specific goal of bringing people to the theatre who would usually not be there clearly makes space, importantly public space, in France for Turkish immigrants of all ages, classes and genders.3 How successful were they? On the one hand, despite a changing membership, they survived as a completely volunteer theatre troupe for nearly a decade from 2002 to 2011. They produced dozens of performances for audiences ranging in size from a few dozen to nearly 300 at a performance in 2010. Yet in the end, the organisers decided that they could reach more Franco-Turks, as they designated their target group, and have a greater impact organising them not through theatre but through the radio programme Made in Turkey, from which the troupe had originated a decade earlier. As a result, once the theatre troupe stopped performing, many of its volunteers and performers began working with the radio programme. Since then, the programme has gone from broadcasting a talk-show just two hours per week to live programming every day of the week, with more than 20,000 followers on its Facebook site. This chapter began with a question about how the back-and-forth between Turkish cultural inspiration and the particularly class- and culture-specific practice of theatre-going might speak to questions of ‘home’ culture and ‘host’ culture. Can theatre in Turkish make France seem more like home (even a second home) or does it instead, as most French policy suggests, reinforce communitarian attempts to remain separate from the rest of French society? To return to the three plays discussed in this chapter, the play written by one of the theatre group’s members that

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depends upon bilingual and bicultural competence, France, I’m Here, Too, certainly locates itself and its audience firmly within French cultural space. The other two plays set in Turkey and performed entirely in Turkish might, at the level of the text, seem to ignore the fact that their audience members live in France, but as performance, the very presence of their audience members in the theatre suggests the opposite. Many of them would not have been in the theatre if they were not in France. In talking about immigration, the language of ‘home’ and ‘stranger’ is frequently used, perhaps even overused, but almost always as though these terms were polar opposites. I appreciate Sarah Ahmed’s observation that even when talking about ‘real’ rather than metaphorical homes, the distinction between the two is not so clear-cut: ‘[H]‌omes always involve encounters between those who stay, those who arrive, and those who leave’ (Ahmed 2000:  88). As she argues, ‘We need to think about ways of understanding this difference without identifying home with the stasis of being’ (89). And, I would add, without seeing the borders of home and outside as set in stone. This is particularly relevant for discussion of immigration. Home is an emotionally laden term, representing among other things a retreat from the world, a place where one can be with one’s own kind, however defined. In the context of immigration, a distinction is made between the ‘home language’ and the language of the majority. In these terms, Kebab Show’s performances might be viewed as a kind of home space, limited to those who know Turkish. Indeed, Kebab Show’s performances brought audience members together as Turkish speakers and as people who self-identify as Turkish, but they did so within a public, French space, engaging in an activity that is very much part of French cultural life – and, it must be added, also part of contemporary urban life in Turkey. And so it is in this sense that they go home and back again to another home as they traverse the cultural spaces from Turkish texts to public French space, which also looks something like a particular urban version of contemporary Turkish space. Notes 1 Members of the theatre group, as well as others in the community of immigrants from Turkey and media targeting these groups, frequently use the term ‘Franco-Turk’ to refer to their own identity. As noted in the introduction, not all immigrants from Turkey (e.g. Kurds, Assyrians) primarily identify themselves as Turkish, nor does either official French or Turkish parlance allow for hyphenated identities. Unless referring to immigrants’ self-identification, I will generally use the longer but less ambiguous ‘immigrants from Turkey’. 2 All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 3 Gender, however, is, as always, the trump card. An organiser of one performance commented that she knew mothers of young children who were unable attend a performance because they had no one to watch their children.

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Home is where the laughter is: humour and narrative control on stage with Ayşe Şahin In a world in which identity is still very tied to nations, an immigrant is by definition someone who is out of place. Anthropologist Liisa Malkki writes about refugees who ‘occupy a problematic, liminal position in the national order of things’ (Malkki 1995: 1–2), emphasising not nationalism, but a way of thinking that orders human beings according to where they supposedly belong or originate from. Ayşe Şahin’s one-woman show, C’est pratique pour tout le monde (It’s Convenient for Everyone) depends on this idea for much of its humour. Her heroine, Selma Oyunoğlu, a devout young Turkish immigrant to France who works in the cloakroom of a swingers’ club, would seem to be clearly out of place. Selma has a chatty, personal relationship with God, and is concerned with keeping his good opinion, even while she is surrounded by practices that the audience understands clash with that desire. Indeed, Şahin said in a personal interview that the inspiration for Selma and her workplace came when an instructor suggested she throw her character ‘dans un endroit où ça se fait pas’ (into a place where that’s not done).1 The originality of the play is that it acknowledges the difficulty of reconciling these opposing perspectives, even as the heroine successfully works to make a place for herself within this environment and settle in. As in many traditional narratives of immigration, Selma’s success depends on an ongoing process of adaptation. Her capacity to adapt makes her an agent in that process, rather than simply a victim. In addition to this, Şahin gives her character two other weapons: humour and narrative control. Taken together, these allow her character to win over her audience and to make them receptive to her critiques concerning immigration. Theorists of humour (e.g. Gagnier 1988; Rappoport 2005) usually explain the mechanisms of humour by referring to one or more of three widely accepted theories. First, as Freud famously suggested, humour can be seen as a way of overcoming inhibitions and dealing with taboo. According to Freud, humans generally exert a great deal of energy repressing emotions related to taboos on aggression and sexual desire. Jokes about hostility and desire remove the need to repress those emotions and the excess energy is released as laughter. While Freud’s emphasis on psychic energies (which in some ways seems surprisingly close to ancient Greek notions of the ‘humours’) fails to persuade many present-day scholars, the idea that jokes provide a safe space in which to address topics that are normally off limits does seem to describe lived experience.

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Second, disparagement or superiority theory focuses on aggression and triumph over an opponent, where humour either causes the opponent’s downfall or confirms it. This is perhaps one of the oldest theories of humour and the basis on which many philosophers, beginning with Plato, condemned humour and laughter as being the tools of the weak and the malicious. This was due in part to viewing laughter and humour as one and the same thing and failing to acknowledge that not all laughter has to be directed at another person. Still, this undoubtedly continues to be a major aspect of humour today, especially in racial and ethnic humour, as I will detail further below. Finally, incongruity theory argues that we laugh when something unexpected happens, or, in the case of language, when a text has an initial expected meaning and a simultaneous unexpected meaning, such as in puns or double entendre. This theory explains particularly well not jokes about immigrants (which of course have more to do with the mocking laughter described by disparagement theories) but rather by immigrants, as they notice and comment on differences between cultures and on the differences between their expectations and reality. A subtler form of incongruity humour becomes apparent if we pay attention to the exploitative employment conditions that Selma appears to accept with awareness but without criticism. We will come back to this, and consider how gender plays into the mix later in this chapter. Most theorists of humour agree that it is often used as a weapon, by both the powerful and the weak. For the powerful, jokes may allow them to belittle the powerless and increase their own sense of superiority. When the powerless object to this treatment, they are accused of lacking a sense of humour, but as one commenter noted, this is akin to asking someone to laugh at the sight of their own blood (Weisstein, quoted in Case and Lippard 2009: 244). For the less powerful, jokes are a way ‘to express identities and perspectives in opposition to those of the dominant group’ (243), once again with reduced social risk, since ‘it’s only a joke’. As Joanne Gilbert puts it: Within the topsy-turvy world of stand-up comic performance, hierarchies are inverted, power relations are subverted, and a good time is had by all. Because it can avoid inflaming audiences by framing incisive – even incendiary – sociocultural critique as mere ‘entertainment’, comedy is undeniably a unique and powerful form of communication. (Gilbert 2004: xii)

Gilbert’s observations seem applicable to many forms of comedy, not only stand-up. In any case, while Şahin’s performance is not stand-up comedy in the strict sense, it shares many characteristics of stand-up. Admittedly, Şahin never steps out of her role and does not speak as her real-life self on stage as stand-up comics usually do. It is also true that stand-up comedy usually does not have a single narrative from the beginning to the end of the show, as Şahin’s does. Yet stand-up comics do take

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on roles part of the time, and many of the individual scenes from her play could easily be excerpted for stand-up routines. And the overall effect of Şahin’s theatre is certainly one that combines entertainment and implicit critique. Şahin’s humour draws on all three aspects of humour and mixes them in such a way that it is difficult to fit them into any one category. The most obvious jokes revolve around the club and the foibles and misunderstandings of its clients, thus falling within the category of jokes about the taboo. These are the jokes that would be possible even if Selma were not an immigrant, and thus, in that sense, place her on a level with her audience. For example, she tells the story of a customer who threatens to jump from the club’s roof because his girlfriend refuses to have sex with him. Relying on voice impersonations, gestures and stereotypes, Selma describes in detail the customer’s conversation with his girlfriend and how he eventually slips and falls, only to be saved by landing on a group of Japanese tourists busily filming the event. Selma and the audience share the same position with regard to the joke. They are witnesses, rather than participants, and Selma is not the object of the joke. Much of the humour in the play, however, depends on the difference between Selma and her audience, and this is where the humour of incongruity and disparagement come into play. This humour is first constituted by the incongruity of a practising Muslim working in a sex club with no indication that she sees herself as unfaithful to her own moral principles. She underscores this incongruity not only between herself and her audience, but also between her present self and earlier self as a new arrival in France. Şahin initially plays on many of the stereotypes of Muslim women immigrants, ranging from Selma’s conservative clothing to her posters of popular Turkish singers. The incongruity is exacerbated by the naivety of her character, which is not that of the current Selma we see on stage but of her earlier self. This distance permits an attitude that is not disparagement, but that shares some of the mechanisms of disparagement. This type of humour also depends on Selma’s earlier self misunderstanding both language and social codes. But even here, the difference is nuanced. It may show Selma as naive, but it also shows her as someone in the process of changing and gaining increasing knowledge and understanding, rather than as a static stereotype. As she introduces the audience into her world, she puts herself in the role of someone who can explain how things work to the audience. She acknowledges that she has misunderstood things in the past: Ça fait 8 mois que je travaille ici. C’est tellement spécialisé comme milieu que c’est long d’apprendre tout le vocabulaire. Par exemple le mot bondage – vous connaissez le mot bondage – c’est quand les gens aiment bien être attaché avec les petites cordelettes, et bien le bondage, je confondais avec bronzage. Je croyais que Mr Wilson il avait des cabines UV à l’étage.

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Turkish immigration, art and narratives of home [I’ve been working here for eight months. It’s such a specialised environment that it takes a long time to learn all the terminology. For example, the word bondage – you know the word bondage – it’s when people like to be tied up with small ropes; well, bondage, I was mixing it up with suntanning [in French, bronzage]. I thought Mr Wilson had tanning beds upstairs.]2

That she can now, in the present time of the play, explain such things to the audience shows that she is not stuck in her position as an outsider. Whereas with Kebab Show, as discussed in the previous chapter, the humour depended on audience members being able to distinguish themselves from more recent immigrants, part of the humour in Şahin’s play depends on the heroine being able to distinguish her present self from herself of only a few months earlier. Immigrant humour In choosing humour as her theatrical genre, Şahin takes part in a long tradition of immigrant humour. Humour has long been the weapon of choice for the powerless, and in the hands of immigrants, the contradictions of different cultures as seen by people who know both cultures have provided rich material for comedy. When it comes to politically sensitive ethnic humour, however, the debate continues. Discussing the role of humour in the history of immigration and race relations, Leon Rappoport has argued that if we better understand racial, ethnic and gender jokes, we will be able to weaken their negative effects on us. While the call for analysis of disparaging jokes make sense, Rappoport’s argument that such jokes do little harm is less convincing. As he himself writes about an earlier generation of jokes: By making these people the butt of jokes showing them to be stupid or lazy, dirty, dishonest, or sexually promiscuous, it became easier to view them as inferior beings only fit for manual labor. In other words, such humor contributed to the acceptance of prejudiced attitudes and helped to soothe the moral conscience of white Christian Americans who profited from racism. (Rappoport 2005: 58–9)

In general, Rappoport’s other comments minimising the harm done by jokes are more applicable to immigrant jokes than to ethnic or racial jokes. It is important to distinguish between immigrant and ethnic humour. The enormous difference that exists between them, of course, is that ethnic humour essentialises a supposedly unchanging characteristic of a given group whereas humour by or about immigrants is by definition limited to the lifespan of the first generation  – or should be. Unfortunately, as discussed in the introduction to this volume, when it comes to the discourse surrounding immigration, the stigma of immigration

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is increasingly taking on the contours of a genetic quality passed on from parent to child. Today the internet, television and stand-up comedy clubs are filled with actors and comedians using their experiences as immigrants or the children of immigrants for effects that are simultaneously critical and funny, as citing only a few examples will indicate. In Germany, Serdar Somuncu and Kaya Yanar use comedy to talk about immigration. They have very different styles, with Yanar playing with stereotypes and Somuncu preferring comedy that puts the audience on the spot (Joss 2013), but both comedians use humour to point out the limits and prejudices of current discourses surrounding immigration. In France, the television program Jemal’s Comedy Club, which aired from 2006 to 2008, featured young comedians of different ethnic and immigration backgrounds, who challenged many of the national taboos prohibiting open discussion of race or ethnicity. In a society that avoids any public reference to the diverse ethnic or religious backgrounds of its citizens, comedians in this programme ‘convient le public à se rappeler avec force que la France d’aujourd’hui est surtout une nation où se côtoient diverses origines, nationalités et religions’ (call forcefully on the public to remember that today’s France is above all a nation where different origins, nationalities and religions rub shoulders) (Béru 2011: 165). Apart from the specifics of immigrant humour, using humour has long been a popular strategy to make unpopular criticisms of the status quo. Şahin’s theatre makes use of humour strategies visible in far earlier works. Montesquieu’s eighteenth-century Persian Letters (1973 [1758]) for example, used the naive perspective of an outsider to comment on the foibles of French society. In that epistolary novel, the travellers Rica and Usbek are two Persian nobles in exile in Paris. In order to make sense of the organisation of Parisian society around them, they can only use a combination of logic and comparing their experiences with what they knew in Persia. Thus, for example, they see the Pope as a Christian imam. They understand the opera (not completely incorrectly) as a place where the audience members are a greater part of the performance than are those onstage. This literary strategy accomplishes three goals simultaneously. First, the reader is put in the flattering position of the knowledgeable observer, who can see what is ‘really’ going on in the scenes, or at least how those scenes are supposed to be understood. Second, the reader sees that Rica and Usbek’s supposedly mistaken understanding actually reveals an underlying truth – and criticism. Third, it deflects animosity away from the naive visitors, since they are not making a direct criticism of Parisian society, but only showing their own misunderstanding. Thus they remain sympathetic characters – even for a reader who may disagree with the critiques themselves. Similarly, the strength and humour of Şahin’s play rest on seeing events through the eyes of an outsider. Selma’s foreignness appears onstage when she first enters in a long coat, headscarf and flat shoes (before she removes them to reveal her ‘Vanessa’ costume). She fits the French stereotype of the immigrant cleaning woman (Figure 3.1). Şahin’s character Selma, like Rica and Usbek, is a foreigner,

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Figure 3.1  Ayşe Şahin as Selma Oyunoğlu in C’est pratique pour tout le monde.

and inclined like Rica to find the best in every situation and every person she encounters. In part, this is certainly due to her misunderstanding of events around her. In part, it is the classic optimism of the immigrant (and of the immigrant novel), who is convinced that whatever hardships she faces now, they will inevitably lead to something better. In the course of the play, Selma’s plans range from the romantic, with her sometime boyfriend Moktar, to the professional, taking on new skills and responsibilities. She is anything but static, but her movement all leads to her goal of a residency permit, the famous carte de séjour. Selma differs from Rica and Usbek in that she has every intention of settling in and making herself at home. Unlike those earlier travellers, who eventually leave France and who never really become part of their temporary home, Şahin’s Selma is an optimist precisely in order to become part of the world she has chosen. In a relativistic tour-de-force, we see the most sexually explicit practices placed within what the protagonist perceives to be the norm of the host culture, even while she herself remains uncorrupted. She dispenses advice on sexual positions to the club’s customers and discusses the proper seasoning of couscous with the same well-meaning concern – and newly acquired expertise, since North African

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couscous is no more part of her cultural knowledge than the sexual positions she discusses. This premise allows Şahin to comment on both the host culture and the adaptations of the immigrant who wishes to ‘integrate’. In many ways Şahin’s monologue falls into the tropes expected of immigrant narratives. The position of the false innocent, who assumes that whatever happens to her in her new host country is normal, provides much of the comic relief as she describes the practices of her club’s clients and her own role. But it also allows the play to criticise the material difficulties of immigrant life without the heroine making herself disagreeable with complaints. For example, she describes working two jobs so that she is on duty nearly twenty-four hours a day, but notes how convenient it is (hence the ‘pratique’ in the play’s title) for everyone, since the workplaces are near each other and she can sleep at one of them. Even the title of the play contains the irony of the faux naïf. Her situation may be convenient for everyone to some extent, but is certainly more convenient to her employer than to Selma herself. Apart from literally occupying centre-stage and being the focus of her own stories in this one-woman play, Selma further controls who else speaks and what the audience can hear them say. She speaks to others in the play, either on the telephone or in conversations with other characters, whose voices we do not hear, and whose words we can only guess through Selma’s reactions to them. As she tells the story of her interactions with her employer, her customers and her coworkers, the audience has only her perspective. Not surprisingly perhaps, in her narrative, she always seems to come out as the one who makes things work and who is unfazed by the difficulties of her life. As the narrator, she is at the centre of her own stories, describing how she saves one near disaster after another. When the club’s stripper almost loses her G-string, it is Selma who leaps onto the stage, needle and thread in hand, ready to save the day. Such stories assert her ‘can-do’ attitude common to many immigrant narratives, but also provide a place for her to show she can be trusted to work for the collective good. Indeed, Selma frequently refers to this sense of a collective, since her individual success depends on the success of her adopted workplace, which – for better or worse – is also her home. Indeed, the entire play is an invitation into Selma’s life in France, in which she is the knowledgeable insider. The stage set, which always shows the same decor, is the back of the cloakroom of the swingers’ club where Selma reigns. This personal space within the club where she works is covered with posters of arabesque Turkish singers, and she tells a long absurd story about the importance of their moustaches and a fictional contest called the Golden Moustache, all of this playing on stereotypical images of moustachioed Turkish immigrants. Selma’s off-the-cuff commentary on these various markers of difference breaks the traditional fourth wall of the theatre, as though she were inviting the audience into her world but is conscious that she must explain that world to them. By assuming the role of host to the audience, she implicitly marks herself as ‘at home’. Positioning herself as host also works because she is inviting them not only into her Turkish-inflected home, but also to her French home of the swingers’ club

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where she is more knowledgeable than many of the audience members. As the knowledgeable insider, this puts her in a position of narrative control: [I]‌l ne faut pas confondre un couple mélangiste et un couple échangiste. Pas de panique, j’explique … Alors un couple mélangiste et bien … il aimera bien s’exciter avec tout le monde, mais il ne couchera qu’entre lui, alors qu’un couple échangiste et bien il aimera bien s’exciter avec tout le monde et y couchera avec tout le monde. Il faut bien s’accrocher pour saisir, moi au début … je me trompais tout le temps. Je disais mélangisme pour échangisme et ça faisait un bordel pas possible avec les clients. [[Y]‌ou shouldn’t confuse a mixing couple with a swapping couple. Don’t panic, I’ll explain … So a mixing couple … well they like foreplay with everyone but they won’t sleep with anyone else, while a swapping couple, well they like foreplay with everyone and they sleep with everyone. You really have to pay attention to get it; me, at the beginning … I  used to get it wrong all the time. I  said mixing for swapping and that made an impossible mess with the customers.]

She may be a newcomer to France, but she is better informed than the audience about how things work at the swingers’ club. She explains the subtleties of her job, sympathising with the audience that it all may seem rather complicated at the beginning, but that just as she has, they will also come to understand it. Linguistic humour As discussed in the previous chapter, code switching and loan words are common features of immigrant performance. Although Şahin says she spoke no French before starting elementary school, her entire education has been in French and she has said in an interview that she is more comfortable using French than Turkish. Indeed, an interesting aspect of C’est pratique pour tout le monde is undoubtedly the cultural and linguistic play between Turkish and French. Şahin’s performance takes place largely in French but nonetheless allows her to explore the alterity and richness of living in two languages and cultures – what Edward Said has referred to as ‘an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that … is contrapuntal’ (Said 2000:  186). As Şahin said in a personal interview, ‘[S]‌i on a deux cultures on est plus conscient des codes parce qu’on est obligé d’agir avec les deux’ (If you have two cultures you are more conscious of the codes because you have to act with both of them). The protagonist’s name is Selma Oyunoğlu, which to her non-Turkish speaking audience would sound foreign, perhaps even typically Turkish with its ‘-oğlu’ ending. Turkish speakers, of course, would recognise the ‘oyun’ part of her name as the Turkish word for a game or play. Şahin says she chose the name because of Selma’s playful character.

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The text of the play itself includes only a few examples of this kind of bilingual word play, although there are moments of misunderstanding in French among the immigrant employees with whom Selma works. Talking about her coworker Fatou, a refugee from the Rwandan genocide who lost part of one of her arms, Selma describes Fatou’s situation with good-natured matter-of-factness, apparently unconcerned with sparing Fatou’s feelings, or perhaps in keeping with her character, unaware that there is anything particularly unusual about Fatou. ‘Elle dit qu’elle se sent moins habile avec son moignon, qu’elle se sent amputée … Ou empotée je sais plus’ (She says she feels less capable with her stump, that she feels amputated … or did she say clumsy? I don’t know any more). Her confusion arises from two words that sound similar in French:  empotée (clumsy) and amputée (amputated). She exits briefly offstage, and the audience hears her call out, ‘Fatou, c’est am-pu-tée ou em-po-tée que tu t’sens?’ (Fatou, is it amputated or clumsy that you feel?). She reappears on stage and announces, ‘Elle se sent empotée’ (She feels clumsy). If the hierarchy of national language and immigrant language is usually difficult to challenge, by introducing English into the mix, Şahin reminds her audience that French is not the only game in town. She brings English into the play through Selma’s boss, Scott Wilson, who is an English speaker. When Selma narrates her conversations with him, she acts out the dialogues, deepening her voice and assuming an American accent as she imitates him in French interspersing it with a few words of English. In another scene, she acts out a conversation between herself and one of the club’s customers, supposedly Elton John. As she adopts different roles, accents and languages, including lines in English, she concludes the narration, saying in French ‘Tout ça en français. Bien oui, je parle pas anglais, j’ai pas fait de grandes études’ (All that in French. Well, I don’t speak English. I didn’t get much schooling), thus throwing the audience and their linguistic expectations even further off balance. As for Turkish, the most significant presence in the play is when Selma prays. When it comes to prayer, which Muslims are required to do five times a day, Selma is obliged to make accommodations with her employer and her twenty-four-hour work schedule:  she prays with a stopwatch, almost as though she were a video being played at three or four times normal speed. The opening of the prayer is in Arabic, as is typical in Turkey, but Şahin then continues in Turkish. In the middle of the prayer, which lasts onstage perhaps two minutes, the audience hears, interspersed with the Turkish, other words drawn from a transnational vocabulary of advertising: ‘BMW’, ‘Mercedes’, ‘Renault’, ‘convertible’, ‘airbag’ and other terms related to cars. Even non-Turkish speakers may realise that she is asking God to give her a car. Turkish speakers hear that she’s negotiating with God, pointing out what others around her already have. Asked about this scene, Şahin says that ‘la dualité se trouvait dans le langage, parler en français c’est impossible. Parler en français c’est un peu une convention théâtrale; elle ne parle pas français, elle parle turc’ (duality is found in the language, it is impossible to speak in French.

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Speaking French is sort of a theatrical convention; she doesn’t speak French, she speaks Turkish) (Şahin 2010). The prayer allows Şahin to communicate the foreignness experienced by her character, without alienating her audience, by bringing Turkish onto the French-speaking stage in a context that is both humorous and limited. The title of the play was originally bilingual, with the French Mettez du sexe dans votre vie (Put Some Sex in Your Life) in large letters and the Turkish below in smaller print, Hayatınızı seksleyin. Şahin says she liked the bilingualism of the title, as well as the neologism ‘seksleyin’, and felt it fitted the play, but friends and colleagues eventually convinced her to change the title because they said the word sex in the title would either discourage people from coming or that they would think it was a café-theatre piece rather than serious theatre. In the end, the new title, C’est pratique pour tout le monde, was taken from the text of the play. Appropriately, the title acknowledges not only the context of Selma’s life, but also the accommodations Şahin had to make to present the play and ensure an audience, creating a welcoming, or hospitable, title. Physical humour While much of the humour of the play depends on what is said, it also relies on what is done and what is shown. Selma is a busy woman, keeping the club running on an even keel, answering customers’ questions, keeping the peace between her boss and other employees and finding a few minutes here and there for herself. Thus she is often frenetically moving on- and offstage. In her official work persona as ‘Vanessa’, she strikes exaggerated poses intended to be sexy. That they come off as clownish rather than erotic suggests that she has not quite worked out the social codes. Since clowning is a particularly physical kind of performance, it seems an ideal form for exploring different cultural norms of the body. Şahin stated that one of the things that interests her is what the body is permitted to do in different cultures: ‘Quand je fais Selma, je couvre tout avec le foulard et quand je fais Vanessa, c’est complètement différent. Qu’est-ce qu’on peut faire du corps dans une culture où on a la droit de bouger un peu plus, dans une autre non?’ (When I do Selma, I cover everything with a scarf, and when I do Vanessa, it’s completely different. What can one do with the body in one culture where one has the right to move a bit more, in another not?) (personal interview 2009). She says that she came to theatre because she appreciates the physicality of performing onstage and it gave her the chance to explore such questions. In an interview, Şahin described the conflicts of growing up surrounded by a relatively permissive culture while at home her family imposed many restrictions. When younger, she says her only response was to reject her parents and their culture entirely. Now in her thirties, she says she has come to terms with this conflict through the theatre: ‘l’art pour moi c’est une manière de jouer avec tout

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ça. Le monde me semble tellement incongru’ (art for me is a way to play with all that. The world is so incongruous) (personal interview 2009). One of the more original aspects of Şahin’s work is her interest in the costume and tradition of clowns, which was one focus of her theatre studies. She says that so far she has only been comfortable performing while ‘disguised’. Even in her play L’Odyssée (The Odyssey), which has no obvious connection to her experience of growing up in a Turkish family while living in France, both performers are dressed in traditional clown costumes and white make-up. L’Odyssée, produced and performed with Sophie Pérèz (as part of their cofounded group, Théâtre in Vivo), is the comic story of two women who are sent into space, one of whom is domineering and the other virtually autistic. Şahin says, however, that she thinks her character’s status as an outsider in that play is related to her own personal history. Those who study clowns would not find this observation surprising. In his ‘Portrait de l’artiste en saltimbanque’ (‘Portrait of the Artist as a Clown’), Jean Starobinski looks at the literary use of the clown in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and argues that representations of clowns are ‘disguised self-portraits’ (Starobinski 1969). The character Selma is not in typical clown make-up and costume, but her clothes and make-up verge on the clownish: skin-tight trousers and spike heels, both in leopard print, and a tight-fitting top that leaves both arms and one shoulder bare. Her wig is bleached blonde and obviously fake. Her make-up includes bright red rouge. When Selma takes on the personality of ‘Vanessa’ to greet customers or answer the telephone, one suspects that she’s drawing on stereotypical images of loose women, especially European ones, from old Turkish melodramas. When clients call, she lowers her voice to a husky alto and thrusts her hips and bosom in moves she believes fit the character she mimics. The overall effect, however, is a kind of female-to-female drag, as she exaggerates – clownishly – stereotypical sexualised behaviour (Figure  3.2). But it is clear that this is an assumed personality, a disguise or uniform put on for work. Creating a character who is both clown and immigrant is fitting, if one remembers that clowns have historically often represented the underdog, who, in all his naivety, crosses borders and establishes himself in places deemed inappropriate for him. Clowns have been a part of European theatre since at least the sixteenth century, evolving out of the role of the chaotic, transgressive character Vice in medieval allegories (Starobinski 1969: 1052). As we know from Renaissance drama, the clown or jester was a character who, as he moved freely among different classes, could speak critically or mockingly to the powerful and usually suffer no consequences. As the critic Jean Starobinski argues, because the clown is ‘toujours et partout un exclu … il gagne un droit à l’omniprésence’ (always and everywhere shut out … he earns the right to be everywhere) (quoted in Harris 2002: 881). The figure of the clown is one that embodies contradiction. On the one hand, clowns have traditionally had access across social boundaries, but it is precisely their lack of conformity to norms and their difference from the rest of society that allow such mobility.

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Figure 3.2  Ayşe Şahin as ‘Vanessa’ in C’est pratique pour tout le monde.

Drawing on the contradictory nature of the clown, Nadia Harris convincingly demonstrates a connection between the difference of the clown and that of the immigrant or foreigner. Discussing a woman clown figure in a novel by the francophone Egyptian writer Andrée Chedid, Harris notes that ‘l’expérience partagée de l’altérité est à l’origine de la relation privilégiée qui s’était tout naturellement établie entre la femme-bouffon et les familles d’immigrés nouvellement installées dans les banlieues’ (the shared experience of alterity is at the origin of the privileged relationship that establishes itself quite naturally between the woman-clown and the immigrant families recently established in the suburbs) (Harris 2002: 885). She adds ‘En la femme-bouffon exhibant les inscriptions de l’altérité dans son corps, son costume et ses gestes est représenté l’étranger visiblement étranger de nos sociétés multiculturelles d’aujourd’hui, l’étranger ennemi de nos communautés politiques, religieuses ou ethniques’ (In the woman-clown displaying the inscription of alterity in her body, her costume and her gestures, is represented the visibly foreign foreigner in our multicultural societies today, the foreign enemy of our political, religious or ethnic communities) (Harris 2002: 888). Harris argues for a connection, based on shared exclusion, and, I would add, shared visible difference, between the clown and the immigrant families in Chedid’s novel. In the case of Şahin’s play, the audience finds a shared alterity between her immigrant heroine and her workplace, both decidedly on the margins of mainstream society.

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In the context of immigration, however, one wants to avoid glorifying existence at the margins, since this plays into the usual stereotypes of immigrant enclaves with little hope of joining the rest of society. Postmodern theory often celebrates the marginal, the individual who defies boundaries and borders. In the lives of immigrants, however, this can look a lot like exclusion and powerlessness. On the contrary, I would like to argue that Şahin’s character shows how a character seen as marginal can move the margin through humour. Mikhail Bakhtin uses a similar language of physical contact in his discussion of comedy: Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact with the reality where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it. Laughter demolishes fear and piety, before an object, before a world, making of it an object of familiar contact and thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it. (Bakhtin 1981: 23)

As Şahin places Selma and her workplace literally centre-stage, she encourages the audience to identify with Selma’s concerns, thus bringing them into the same space. Some have seen carnivalesque figures like the clown as only temporary disruptions in the dominant order, a kind of pressure valve, but as Bakhtin shows, if an audience can be brought to imagine the world in a new way, they might come to question the world as it is. As Andrew Robinson writes about the carnivalesque, ‘It is joyous in affirming that the norms, necessities and/or systems of the present are temporary, historically variable and relative, and one day will come to an end’ (Robinson 2011). Such disruptions as seen in the theatre may chip away at the usual definitions of inside and outside, as night by night the performance proposes another vision of how the world might be organised. Much like the process of immigrant settling, in which, little by little, space is adapted and adapted to, Şahin’s character of Selma adapts to her new environment but also invites the audience to join her there. Religious adaptations An important aspect of such adaptations is that of religious practice. Like many immigrants, Selma has professional and economic aspirations, and therefore is willing to sacrifice in the now for the promise of a better future. Her religious practice therefore requires accommodations and negotiations with herself, her employer and God. Regarding the religious injunction to cover her hair, she is a careful calculator and negotiator:  she explains, ‘c’est écrit quelque part dans

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le Coran que tu brûles soixante années en enfer par cheveu:  c’est le quota’ (it’s written somewhere in the Qur’an that you will burn sixty years for each hair that shows:  that’s the ratio). Her employer suggests a wig, but she does not want to be punished for showing someone else’s hair either. In the end, she decides on a synthetic wig: ‘Y’a pas de quota dans le Coran pour le plastique’ (There’s no ratio in the Koran for plastic). She’s not worried about her tight trousers, however: ‘j’ai calculé, j’ai que deux jambes, 60 fois 2 ça fait 120, 120 années en enfer, ça va, c’est supportable pour mon âme’ (I added it up, I have two legs, 60 times 2, that makes 120, 120 years in hell, that’s OK, my soul can handle that). Selma is frequently conscious of God overhearing her conversations, but treats him not as omniscient divinity, but rather as another audience member who only knows what he hears her say, so she is careful to ensure there are no misunderstandings. This mistrust of the spoken word underscores the realistic anxiety of being misunderstood in a language that is not one’s own. At one point she describes herself as a ‘jeune femme active’ (active young woman) but immediately realises the double meaning of this phrase in French, and in a brief address to God reassures him that she is not sexually active. Similarly, at the end of a prayer, she says, ‘Amen’ in French rather than ‘Amin’ in Turkish. She immediately apologises to God, but explains to the audience, ‘C’est l’intégration ça’ (Well, that’s integration). Gendered humour Şahin’s humour is not explicitly gendered or feminist, like that of contemporary French comedian Florence Foresti or US comedian Ellen DeGeneres. She does not address the patriarchal structures of her work environment, nor does she discuss anything that might be considered specifically ‘women’s experiences’. Her religious concerns and the accommodations she must make (the wig, the revealing clothes) are closely related to her gender, but these remain an implicitly, rather than explicitly, gendered concern. Yet the form of her play makes use of planned chaos and non-linearity that others have identified as typical of feminine humour. Regenia Gagnier, in her analysis of Victorian women’s writing, concludes that ‘women’s humour tends towards anarchy rather than the status quo, to prolonged disruption rather than, in Freudian theory, momentary release’ (1988: 145). With a few famous exceptions, comedy has traditionally been dominated by men (Case and Lippard 2009), and this is even more true for physical comedy. One is hard pressed to think of a female comedian who engages in the slapstick antics of Laurel and Hardy or Charlie Chaplin. Humour scholar Gagnier, referring to the work of cross-cultural anthropologist Mahadev Apte, suggests a useful connection between the lack of physical humour and sexuality. Gagnier writes that ‘men fear women’s humour for much the same reason that they fear women’s sexual freedom – because they encourage women’s aggression and promiscuity and thus

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disrupt the social order, that therefore men desire to control women’s humour just as they desire to control women’s sexuality’ (1988: 137). Female comedians who have played on the physical seem to confirm this observation. To take just one example, the 1950s US comedian Lucille Ball was successful, in part, because she emphasised a specifically inept and non-threatening physicality, circumscribed by her male counterpart. Until recently, women’s humour has indeed often depended on jokes and sketches that minimised and mocked their own competency in daily life: the ditzy blonde, the bumbling housewife. As Gagnier notes, scholars of humour have had difficulty explaining why disempowered groups will appear to laugh at jokes directed at them (1988: 136). Juni and Katz (2001) focus on self-effacing Jewish humour and consider it in terms of psychological defence and acculturation. Unlike Freud, who suggested that self-effacing humour indicated the presence of masochism, Juni and Katz see it as a survival mechanism during the process of assimilation. The oppressed minority takes the weapon of insult and applies it to themselves, thus leaving the oppressor nothing to use against them and furthermore having a choice (of sorts) as to when and how to apply the insulting humour. A pyrrhic victory at best, as Juni and Katz point out; when an oppressed group sees that it has nothing to lose, their goal is not their own victory, but their oppressor’s defeat. As noted earlier in this chapter, while Şahin’s character Selma does comment on her own earlier misunderstandings and mistakes, she distances herself from that earlier persona. In the present of the performance, she represents herself as competent and in control. This is important in a context in which, objectively speaking, she has very little control. As is evident from her non-stop work schedule and her workplace sleeping quarters, there are many aspects of her life that are decidedly out of her control. Importantly, however, she is very aware of her position and wants the audience to know that however precarious her position, she is not a complete victim. Not unlike her negotiations with God concerning her hair and clothing, she appears to have made a similar calculation in terms of her work conditions. In the final moments of the play as she begins to exit offstage, the stage directions indicate ‘En chemin, elle a pensé à quelque chose, cela se voit à sa façon de s’arrêter, en ralentissant. Elle se retourne lentement, en confidence au public, parce qu’elle n’aimerait pas qu’on la prenne pour une idiote, afin de remettre la chose au point elle ajoute …’ (On the way, she thinks of something, visible from the way she stops, slowing. She turns slowly, confiding to the audience, because she wouldn’t want them to think she is an idiot, she adds …). What she adds is the important information that she puts up with all of this because her employer has promised her a residency permit and legal working papers. She may not have control over her working conditions, but she does not present herself as a victim either. Instead, she presents herself as someone who has chosen those conditions, calculating the eventual benefits. Şahin’s adaptation of the title, like the adaptations of her character Selma to her work environment, recall the many adaptations of the Turkish community to life

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in France. Her attention to the audience in choosing the title, as discussed earlier in this chapter, is one more sign of the hospitality of Şahin’s work, a hospitality that she links to her belief in what she sees as theatre’s ‘fonction collective et citoyenne’ (collective and civic function).3 She laments directors and actors who fail to give enough importance to the audience, who are the very reason for theatre’s existence: ‘à mon sens il y a un nombrilisme, un manque d’empathie vis à vis de l’autre par la forme et les valeurs même de la société qui prône l’individualisme au sein de notre profession’ (to my way of thinking, there’s navel-gazing, a lack of empathy for the other in the form and even the values of society that encourages individualism in the heart of our profession).4 Such responsiveness to the other recalls Derrida’s call not just for an ethics of hospitality, but rather defining hospitality as ethics. Nadia Setti echoes the possibility of such ethics when she describes theatre as a place ‘where each one, from whatever side or position she or he comes, meets the other, wonders about the other’s presence, origin, experience and reality’ (2009: 327). Through Selma’s narration, the audience comes to understand that she has changed. She may not be more French (however that is defined), but she has become part of life in France. The fact that she has changed at all is important. Şahin’s performances, which are almost entirely in French, target a French-speaking audience. She says that because the Turkish community in Bordeaux are generally not theatre-goers, few of her audience members have ties to Turkey. Yet in a political climate in which Islam and immigration have come to be conflated with security concerns, treating these issues as a matter of comedy, even of clowning, draws on a long tradition of dealing with political issues through humour. Rather than as a threat, Selma is portrayed as an underdog, doing her best in an exploitative environment. Şahin’s plays, performed in French, may not target Turkish-speaking audiences, but in creating a sympathetic character for non-Turkish audiences, she contributes to a dialogue that can only improve understanding of immigrant communities, as she demonstrates that an immigrant is not necessarily someone who is out of place, but only someone in the process of adapting to a new place, which is also adapting to her – in other words, someone who is settling. Notes 1 All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 2 Quotations from the play are my own tranlsations, based on the unpublished manuscript generously shared by Ayşe Şahin. 3 Ayşe Şahin, personal correspondence. 4 Ayşe Şahin, personal correspondence.

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A Turk in Paris: Karagöz’s cultural and linguistic migration When people and cultures migrate they inevitably both change and are changed by the culture they join. This chapter argues that one sign of settling is an artist’s ability and willingness to critique not only the host culture, but also his or her own culture of origin. Puppeteer Ruşen Yıldız uses the traditional genre of Turkish shadow theatre, but writes his own scripts and performs in French inflected by the slang of immigrant housing projects. Even while Yıldız avoids simply recreating exotic folklore for a western audience, he also draws on the historical and cultural roots of Karagöz to criticise the structures of immigration, the patriarchal tendencies of some immigrant communities, and injustice wherever it may be. Like Ayşe Şahin, he uses humour to create an accessible world for his audience. Unlike Şahin, however, the target of his comedy includes members of the audience. He addresses difficulties specific to Turkish immigrant communities, but places those within a larger context of social injustice. Thus immigrants are seen as victims, witnesses and perpetrators in accounts of injustice, but injustice is not limited to contexts of immigration. Calls for justice depend in part on remembering and testifying to past experiences of injustice. In this regard, the work of Diana Taylor in The Archive and the Repertoire (2003) is helpful, as she examines the way cultural memory comes to be embodied on the stage. She makes a useful distinction between the archive, described as the fixed, distant and material elements of culture, and the repertoire, the ephemeral, embodied performance that works to transmit cultural knowledge. While it may be tempting to see them in opposition to one another, or that one is more important than the other, Taylor argues that it is the interaction between the two that allows for what she calls ‘acts of transfer’ of cultural memory. Taylor makes this argument in the context of efforts to re-remember or to remember differently past acts of injustice. As she writes, ‘performance transmits memories, makes political claims, and manifests a group’s sense of identity’ (xvii). This is important in contexts in which it is the history and perspectives of the less powerful or marginalised that do not survive in the archive, but may indeed be present in the repertoire. This is a particularly useful approach to looking at the cultural production of immigrant communities. While it is tempting to view the archive as dead, with little or only oppressive relevance to the oppressed, Taylor convincingly argues that the interaction of the archive and the repertoire allow for individuals

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to use the archive to create new meanings. To describe this interaction, Taylor uses the idea of the scenario. In contrast to a narrative that is fixed, a scenario provides only a setting or a rough outline of what might happen. The details are recreated with each performance, which allows performers to use the stale formulas of the archive to create adaptable performances that tell new, often critical stories. Taylor writes that a scenario ‘works through reactivation rather than duplication’ (2003: 32). This chapter will consider how Yıldız reactivates the traditional form of Turkish shadow theatre in order to address the stories of immigrants and others in contemporary France. This idea of performances that combine the archive and the repertoire suggests the radical, if often unrealised, potential of traditional theatrical forms. However enthusiastically immigrants may embrace the new country, they also usually seek to preserve something of the culture of origin, including language, songs, stories and other artistic forms. Yet cultural forms are always subject to change, and in a context of separation from geographical and communal spaces in which those cultural forms were initiated, the change is both more apparent and more fraught – a powerful example of the process of settling. This chapter takes up one final example of stage performance, one that draws on the long-established form of Turkish shadow theatre, but changes it in order to represent a cultural memory that has more to do with the process of settling in France than it does with its origins in Turkey. Referred to by the main character’s name, Karagöz shows were regularly performed in the Ottoman Empire from the seventeenth century, most famously as part of the evening festivities during the month of Ramadan. Although usually viewed as popular theatre, Karagöz was watched by people of all classes and ages and by women and men. Puppeteer Ruşen Yıldız maintains many of the traditional formal aspects of Karagöz theatre, even as he adapts it to address immigration and other issues in contemporary France, and, as I will argue in this chapter, in his faithfulness to the ideas and structure of the original he provides a particularly strong critique of certain aspects of Turkish culture present in France, as well as more general critiques of injustice perpetrated by the powerful on the weak. Historical Karagöz The original Karagöz plays revolve around the interactions of two main characters: Karagöz, portrayed as simple, even crude, uneducated but street-wise, often in search of work; and Hacivat, middle-class, the opposite of Karagöz, educated, who speaks a more refined Turkish, knows the world and is even a bit snobbish. The plays are traditionally structured by some combination of the following elements (And 1975:  44–5). First, as part of the introduction, or mukadimme, an ornament or object (göstermelik) often related to the plot of the main story may be projected on the screen. This is followed by the prologue (giriş), in which Hacivat first appears, and in the past might have included a prayer for the wellbeing of the Sultan and a song or poem; Karagöz misunderstands and mocks Hacivat’s

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pompous style and they end this section of the play by arguing and fighting. The subsequent section of the play is a dialogue, or muhavere, in which the two characters exchange jokes and riddles, thus signalling a move from the seriousness of everyday life to the carnivalesque world of the play (Miller 2013). According to Metin And, ‘The essential feature of all dialogues is liberation from the constraints of logic, a mocking attitude of habits like meaningless politeness, fossilized conventions and the insistence on false syllogism’ (1975: 45). This is followed by the main story, or fasl, chosen from one of dozens of set scenarios, each one able to stand by itself without relation to any of the others. The play concludes with a brief epilogue, or bitiş, in verse, in which Hacivat accuses Karagöz of having ruined the show and Karagöz asks for forgiveness, thus bringing the audience back to the usual order of the world outside the play. Historically, the scenarios (fasl) that make up the bulk of the performance were handed down from puppeteer to puppeteer, but they were not set scripts to be followed. Instead, they were loose frameworks upon which each puppeteer could improvise, adapting the action to suit his own inclinations or those of his audience (And 1975: 60–1). Given this room for adaptation, Karagöz theatre should not be mistaken for a fixed, ahistorical genre. The scenarios might portray customs, parody a tradition, or narrate any scene from social life, such as a circumcision or wedding. Stories would also draw on popular tales, such as the love story Ferhad and Şirin. In many plays, the character Karagöz tries to find a new job or open a business, sometimes in partnership with Hacivat, but in the end he always fails to achieve the hoped-for wealth. The plot for many stories depends on Karagöz being out of place, attempting to enter or occupy a space from which he is normally excluded on the basis of class or, in more risqué versions, gender. He may initially succeed, but more often than not, returns to his accustomed place. ‘What was deconstructed during the play was put back together again at the end of the performance: the characters had not gone through any permanent changes and they would start their adventures all over again the following night’ (Mizrahi 1991:  202). The room for improvisation was vast, and the relation between the puppeteer and his audience was reciprocal. Karagöz puppeteers were well known for adapting their performances to suit the tastes and interests of each audience. Canan Balan writes about nineteenth-century audiences: ‘In case they did not like the finale, the puppeteer could change it accordingly. Indeed, in some cases, the audience had a determining factor even in the plots’ (2008: 183). This flexibility provided a framework that made it easy for the puppeteer to respond not only to the immediate reactions of the audience, but also to the political events and scandals of the day. Metin And cites numerous reports from European travellers who saw open critiques of highly placed officials in the Ottoman court. One witness, Joseph Pierre Agnès Méry, writes in 1855: Countries like America, England and France are much more restricted in political criticism than Turkey, which is a country ruled by an absolute monarch. Karagöz acts like some sort of unfettered press … Even the Grand Vizier

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Apart from such political critiques, the oral form also allowed plays and their characters to evolve easily to reflect other changes in Ottoman society. When Sultan Mahmud II (1808–39) abolished the janissaries (court military) in 1826, for example, the stock character of the janissary soldier, known for his drinking and fighting, no longer made sense to the audiences for Karagöz theatre, and puppeteers replaced his character with another rowdy figure known as Efe (Öztürk 2006: 301). Similarly, in the late nineteenth century, plays began to include references to technological innovations such as the steam engine or cinema, as well as to the newly built Galata Bridge (Ze’evi 2006: 133). In addition to such changes coming from within the Karagöz theatre, by the second half of the nineteenth century, outside pressures of political censorship and changing moral codes began to curtail the theatre’s historical freedom. The sultan and religious authorities had long been exempt from Karagöz’s sharp criticism, but the extent of the restrictions gradually increased to protect more and more of the governing elite. When the theatre poked fun at high officials in the court, accusing them of corruption, Sultan Abdulaziz (1861–76) issued decrees threatening puppeteers with severe penalties if they persisted in criticising high officials (Öztürk 2006: 298). Such outright censorship of Karagöz’s adventures certainly weakened it, but later Government interventions, based on supposedly progressive new ideas of public morality and social utility imported from the West, would eventually do even more to tame its challenges to established powers. As others have noted, Karagöz’s essence, in its mockery of both the elite and sexual norms, exemplifies Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1984) notion of the carnivalesque (Miller 2013; Smith 2004; Ze’evi 2006). Bakhtin describes three aspects of the carnivalesque. First, the carnival provides a context that created a ‘nonofficial, extraecclesiatical and extrapolitical aspect of the world … [and] built a second world and a second life outside officialdom, a world in which all medieval people participated more or less’ (1984: 6). Similarly, in the strictly hierarchical and segregated society of the Ottoman Empire, Karagöz theatre imagined a space in which members of any ethnic group or social class might interact and in which a cobbler might be as likely as a vizier to come out on top. Second, Bakhtin’s carnival includes comic versions of official texts. While Karagöz performances as a whole were intended to be comic, part of their comedy depended on Hacivat’s imitations of formal modes of speaking and Karagöz’s mockery of them. As a character Karagöz is not presented as consciously creating parodic interpretations, but his responses to Hacivat’s formality highlight the inherent parody. Finally, Bakhtin saw in the

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carnival an exaggerated emphasis on bodily themes, ‘fertility, growth, and a brimming over abundance’ (1984: 19). It was precisely such themes in Karagöz performances that most shocked European visitors. Typical of many European responses to the open discussion of sexual relations and the explicit portrayal of Karagöz’s phallus, one English visitor in 1845 described the plays as ‘beyond all enduring obscene’ (quoted in Öztürk 2006: 297). Not surprisingly, reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, influenced by European norms, sought to make Karagöz more fitting for a culture that they increasingly compared to what they viewed as the more evolved culture of Europe. The first step was to ‘cleanse’ the plays of their overt and vulgar references to sex (Öztürk 2006). As Peter Klempner observes, ‘public entertainment could not be of a lewd or bawdy nature if the creation of a new national identity with Western sexual morality were to come to fruition’ (2013: 27). Thus the plays were stripped of ‘all references to politics, sex, and obscene expressions’ (26). While it is easy to criticise such obvious censorship, I would argue that it is the seemingly benign intervention of recording and codifying the plays that had a more pernicious effect in the end. As unscripted performances that could be modified at the whim of the puppeteer or audience, historically, the plays could only be controlled or censored after a performance. When the last Ottoman court puppeteer, Nazif Bey, collected and recorded on paper set scripts for many of the plays in 1918, however, he effectively ended the freedom that improvised plays had previously provided. In Taylor’s terms, the plays moved from the embodied performance, or repertoire, which could represent cultural memory of the oppressed, to the stale and fixed archive, subject to official power. Eventually, the Government of the new Turkish Republic in the 1930s and 1940s expanded this regulatory impulse and sought to make Karagöz a mouthpiece for Government programmes of modernisation, in particular those provided through the People’s Houses, intended to educate the new citizen. A few intellectuals and puppeteers of the time criticised this move. Özturk cites journalist Burhan Felek, who writes in 1944: Karagöz could not be successful in the theatrical attempt of People’s Houses. It is so unsuccessful that even Karagöz has lost his personality: Now he is sometimes a scientist, sometimes too clever. On the screen, he praises this and that. These are the ‘tortures’ which Karagöz never deserves. If Karagöz goes on acting like this, he is doomed to go down more than today and to die not to come back again. (Öztürk 2006: 308)

Making Karagöz a spokesman for the Government contradicted his essential identity as an underdog and outsider, always on the margins attempting to gain access to the centre. Other attempts at innovation have met with mixed success, as puppeteers have tried to write new scenarios and introduce references to

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contemporary life. Metin And argued in the mid-1970s that ‘the possibility for innovation in Turkish traditional theatre is limited, since it relies heavily on its vital relationship with the social structure of the Empire’ (And 1975:  77), and indeed, the more ethnically and religiously homogeneous Turkey of the last few decades may deprive Karagöz theatre of much of the conflict central to its comedy. Nowadays, many contemporary productions of Karagöz are performed in schools and shopping malls and directed at children. Given the younger audience, the productions tend to emphasise the slapstick over the political. Indeed, some observers have expressed strong criticism of this change in Karagöz. Ismail Özgür Soğancı, for example, notes the way images of Karagöz are used in advertising and writes that ‘traditional Turkish shadow theatre became an item of easy consumption with little historical, cultural and artistic essence’ (2005: 34). Yet one might argue on the contrary that such uses point to Karagöz’s continuing cultural relevance. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) seems to have had such significance in mind when it included Karagöz theatre on its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2009, noting its importance in ‘transmitting community cultural values and identity’ (UNESCO 2009). In the organisation’s general information about the criteria for designation as intangible cultural heritage, they write, ‘It thrives on its basis in communities and depends on those whose knowledge of the traditions, skills and customs are passed on to the rest of the community, from generation to generation, or to other communities’ (UNESCO 2014, emphasis added). As I will argue in the rest of this chapter, as much as reproducing Karagöz for Turkish immigrants, it is also the transmission to other communities that is keeping Karagöz theatre alive and relevant. Ironically, it may be outside Turkey that Karagöz theatre has the possibility of remaining faithful to its original spirit, even as it undergoes significant innovation. The relationships within a multicultural society in which members of different classes and ethnicities are constantly jostling for position, typical of the Ottoman Empire, may find their modern-day equivalent in the multicultural society of contemporary France. Karagöz in France Puppeteer Ruşen Yıldız, who immigrated to France as a young child with his family in 1974, has been creating original Karagöz puppets and plays and performing since 1996. He also leads puppet-making workshops for children and adults. Although Yıldız has performed primarily in his own region of south-western France, recently he has been gaining wider recognition, in part through performances supported by immigrant organisations, schools, the national museum of immigration history (Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration) and festivals such as La Saison de la Turquie. Given that the original Karagöz was a marginalised figure, a labourer always in search of work, Yıldız remains faithful to Karagöz’s

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Figure 4.1  Rüşen Yıldız backstage.

original character, even as he moves this traditionally marginalised character from the eighteenth- or nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire to twenty-first-century France and portrays him, at first, as an undocumented worker. In personal interviews Yıldız said one of the reasons he likes working with Karagöz is that he sees in the character of Karagöz a nomadic figure, who is already someone with two cultures. Much of the action of the original Karagöz is propelled by his attempting to move beyond the space determined by his class, religion and gender. Other characters in the traditional Karagöz reflect the multiethnic world of the Ottoman Empire. There are Jews, Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, Bulgarians, Hungarians and other Europeans, all identified by stereotypical dialects and costumes. These, too, translate easily to contemporary France with its own diverse population. More generally, Yıldız is interested in what he calls ‘migritude’, a neologism derived from the word migrant that recalls négritude, a term derived from nègre, an outdated and derogatory French word for a person of African origin. The négritude movement, initiated in the 1930s, sought to reclaim the word nègre and glorify African culture in opposition to western denigration of African cultures. It implicitly appealed to a diasporic identification in which people of African descent the world over could find common cause in their essentialised ethnic roots. In a world in which the words migrant or immigrant rarely have positive connotations, Yıldız’s ‘migritude’ valorises the experiences of immigrants.1 Rather than an essentialised ethnic identity, however, the term addresses a commonality of experience. This is an important message for immigrants in France, who often organise along the lines of their national or ethnic origins, rather than in terms of shared legal status. Migritude, unlike négritude, includes the possibility of inclusive political action based on chosen affiliation rather than assumed common ethnicity (filiation). In an interview published in the French-language version of the Turkish

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newspaper Zaman, Yıldız tells how a young Moroccan man came to tell him at the end of a performance in Belgium that the play had just told the story of his own immigrant father (anon. 2009), a testament to the way Yıldız’s plays transcend naturalised ethnic and national identities. Given the diversity of Yıldız’s audiences, this is unlikely to be an isolated case. Yıldız’s first two plays, Karagöz en migration (Karagöz Migrates), performed 2001–03, and Karagöz et l’Honneur (Karagöz and Honour), performed 2002–04, introduce the audience to Yıldız’s version of the traditional character and follow his adaptation to life in France. In 2004, he combined the two plays into a single play entitled L’Epopée de Karagöz (The Epic of Karagöz). In this play, Karagöz, like his Ottoman predecessor, is the common man with financial worries and family problems, but unlike the earlier Karagöz he is also an undocumented immigrant to France. Yıldız renames France ‘Paprasland’, clearly related to the pejorative word in French for paperwork, paperasserie, and calls Karagöz’s country of origin ‘Yaourtistan’, using the French word for yogurt with the -stan ending of several Turkic countries. Whereas women in the original plays rarely have names, in Yıldız’s version, Karagöz’s wife becomes Gürbet and his daughter Sila (Figure 4.2). While neither is a particularly unusual name in Turkish, their meanings are significant in the context of immigration: Gürbet means anywhere far from home, and Sila refers to the return home after a long absence. Similar to the Turkish phrases in Şahin’s otherwise francophone play discussed in the previous chapter, such insider

Figure 4.2  Gürbet in her apartment.

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linguistic references provide a connection for Turkish speakers without alienating other audience members. When Karagöz and Hacivat first attempt to enter Paprasland, they are intercepted by Louis Marc, who offers to get them across the border and give them jobs, if they can pass a test. Hacivat, pretentiously aware of his own knowledge, speaks flawless French, even introducing himself according to standard French bureaucratic practice with his last name first. Karagöz, on the other hand, speaks in nearly incomprehensible pidgin: ‘moi crois appeler Karagöz Tepeköylü, ma famille dire, quand petits moutons tenir sur pattes, toi naître même saison que Hacivat. Et moi qualfié berger haute montagne’ (me believe to call Karagöz Tepeköylü, my family to say, when little sheep to stay on feet, you born same season as Hacivat. And me qualified shepherd high mountain) (L’Epopée de Karagöz).2 But just as in the traditional plays, it is Karagöz who triumphs, at least temporarily. Jean Marc turns Hacivat back and accepts Karagöz. Following the classic pattern of Turkish immigrants, after a few years Karagöz brings his wife and children to live with him. An apparent success story of adaptation in Paprasland, his character exemplifies the double perspective of the migrant. On the one hand, he can claim that ‘partout c’est chez nous’ (we’re at home everywhere) (L’Epopée de Karagöz); on the other, he recognises that to be at home everywhere risks belonging nowhere. When he returns to Yaourtistan, for example, he discovers that even the house he paid for has been appropriated by his friend Hacivat, and he has become an unwelcome outsider. At the end of the Epic of Karagöz, he observes, ‘Et nous avons disparus en abandonnant un peu de nous-mêmes sur chacune de ces terres où nous avons vécus’ (By leaving a bit of ourselves on each of these lands where we have lived, we have disappeared) (L’Epopée de Karagöz). The overall message of settling in the play is far more positive, but lines like these also evoke strongly the loss involved in settling.

Figure 4.3  The journey home to Yaourtistan.

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More or less comfortably established in France, Karagöz faces other challenges as his children grow up negotiating the norms of two cultures. After Karagöz’s daughter is seen kissing her French boyfriend, Karagöz and his wife hurry to find her a husband before other Turkish immigrants hear of the scandal. Her French boyfriend abandons her because he refuses to be circumcised in order to marry her. In Yıldız’s summary of Karagöz et l’Honneur, he notes that the parents are even more zealous in enforcing the tradition than they would have been in Yaourtistan (Yıldız 2014). Just as important as the human characters in this play, a vulture-like figure called Honour plays its own part. As Yıldız explains, Honour is ‘un double personnage, à la fois incarnant l’ordre établi de la morale, et symbolisant la soif de verser du sang à tout prix’ (a double character, both embodying the established moral order and symbolising a thirst to spill blood at any cost) (Hayali 2015). The daughter is married to a young man brought from Turkey in order to marry her, but she fools her naive groom and escapes on the wedding night. The parents, fortunately, refuse to bow to the dictates of Honour, and in the end, Karagöz says to his wife ‘Gürbet, dis-moi, de quelle droit on leur ferait vivre notre vie … Acceptons de les [laisser] accomplir leur propre destiné’ (Tell me, Gürbet, by what right would we make them live our lives … Let’s leave them to fulfil their own destiny). In the final line of the play before the epilogue, Karagöz’s wife Gürbet chases Honour away, saying ‘Assez! Suffit comme ça! Ça fait une éternité que tu te nourris de notre sang, sors de notre corps, laisse nous vivre libre! [sic]’ (That’s enough! You’ve been feeding off our blood for eternity; get away from us, let us be free!) (L’Epopée de Karagöz). Despite the initial return to stereotypical themes of honour and forced marriage, this play obviously ends on a positive note, but more than just providing a happy ending for the young woman and her family, it declares a challenge to the traditional norms surrounding the idea of honour and its preservation. In many respects, Yıldız’s plays remain faithful translations of traditional shadow theatre: the main character still struggles to get ahead and the plays still use comedy to highlight social injustice. In the example above, while it may seem surprising to find such a challenge in a traditional genre, in fact, as a perpetual underdog, Karagöz has little invested in the status quo. When his wife worries that their friends and neighbours will laugh and make fun of them, Karagöz responds ‘On peut nous rire au nez, moi j’ai l’habitude’ (They can laugh in our faces; I’m used to it) (L’Epopée de Karagöz). Some of the most visible changes Yıldız makes are also the most in keeping with the traditional plays. When Karagöz first arrives in Paprasland and is housed in a workers’ dormitory, he is woken up by a robot who keeps track of his every second and deducts pennies for each second spent resting when he is supposed to be working (Figure 4.4). A clear present-day reference to the dehumanised way that workers, both immigrant and non-immigrant, are treated, the use of the robot points to the way that the powerful exploit the powerless. But it also recalls some of the more fantastic creatures such as dragons or genies, who might have appeared in the traditional Karagöz. Thus in terms of

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Figure 4.4  Karagöz in the factory.

tone and style, even content, the plays are remarkably faithful to the original, even as they address present-day concerns. The most significant adaptation of the plays to their new home in France may involve Karagöz’s own trajectory. If the original plays tell over and over a story of Karagöz’s attempted rise and inevitable fall back to his accustomed place low in the hierarchy, Yıldız’s Karagöz seems to achieve limited but continued economic success. Whereas the traditional Karagöz is constantly on the move, attempting to improve his situation, Yıldız’s Karagöz is relatively stable in terms of employment and he does achieve some degree of upward mobility. After the first play, in which he works in a factory, he succeeds in opening a small restaurant, ‘DönerBurger’, and he is able to send money back to Yaourtistan to have a house built. In each play he seems to settle increasingly into his new life, even as he continually faces new challenges that always keep him from being definitively settled. On the surface, his position as an immigrant mirrors that of Karagöz as an underdog in Ottoman society, but unlike his predecessor, he does achieve some sort of lasting change in his fortunes. Subversive puppets Historically, puppet theatre has been able to say and do what comic theatre with human actors could not. As Peter Schumann, the grand master of American puppet theatre, writes, puppet theatre is an: anarchic art, subversive and untamable by nature, an art which is easier researched in police records, than in theater chronicles, an art which by fate

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As noted earlier in this chapter, Karagöz theatre itself often mocked official powers in the Ottoman Empire, saying what no one else could say openly. Agreeing with Schumann, many practitioners and observers of puppet theatre have argued for the subversive potential of puppets, and there are indeed numerous examples of puppets being used for progressive ends, some specifically within the context of immigration. For example, from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s, Yiddish-speaking immigrants to the United States created puppets and plays that reflected their experiences and political concerns. The left-leaning political content became particularly clear when they were invited to the Soviet Union to perform their plays  – and then prevented from performing when their plays apparently went counter to prevailing political and cultural trends (Portnoy 2001: 119–20). Closer to the context in which Yıldız performs his plays, France itself has a long tradition of political humour transmitted through puppets, that of the Guignol puppets. The original Guignol created in Lyon in the early nineteenth century was, like Karagöz, a working-class figure, usually involved in plans to fool his employer or a get-rich-quick scheme (Francis 2011: 164). This popular theatre form provided the inspiration for the Guignols de l’info, a televised programme in France, begun in 1988, which takes the satirical aspect of the original Guignol, but focuses on contemporary political events, with most of the puppets representing well-known media personalities and political figures (Collovald and Neveu 1996: 90). Despite subversive potential, it is important to recognise, however, that puppets can of course also be used for conservative ends, in which they support the established powers and opinions. As noted above, leaders of the new Turkish Republic attempted to use Karagöz as a mouthpiece for Government policy. Apart from such obvious instrumental use of puppets, they can also implicitly support conservative norms as easily as any other genre. Early Karagöz theatre, for example, included female figures only as dancers, courtesans, witches, and wives or daughters, and generally gave them only very limited roles (And 1975: 52). Similarly, while the theatre reflected the ethnic and religious diversity of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, it reflected them in often unflattering stereotypes. Thus, for example, the Jew is portrayed as a money-lender and a miser; the immigrant from the Balkans speaks very slowly and is a wrestler; the Greek speaks the worst Turkish; and the Armenian is a humourless, plodding servant (And 1975: 58–9). In his theatre, Yıldız criticises those involved in illegal immigration and French bureaucrats responsible for legal immigration, but these are easy targets, ones Yıldız can make fun of without alienating his working-class and immigrant audience. For example, in the Epic of Karagöz, when Hacivat and Karagöz first try to enter Paprasland illegally, Hacivat thinks Karagöz is making too much noise

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and, ever the expert, informs him:  ‘La règle d’or c’est la discrétion. Surtout pas de bruit et d’odeur’ (The golden rule here is discretion. Above all no noise and no smells) (Yıldız 2004), a passing if clear reference to Jacques Chirac’s infamous comments in 1991 concerning an ‘overdose’ of immigrants, whom he stereotypically described as having too many children, making too much noise and cooking foods with odours offensive to their French neighbours (Le Puill 1991). Beyond such easy targets as exploitative employers and anti-immigrant political rhetoric, Yıldız’s plays represent a further step, in that they also call on immigrants to think critically about their own attitudes and behaviour. Such a self-critique may suggest another opening for immigrant communities. The opposition is no longer only between immigrants and non-immigrants, but also within the community itself. Accordingly, Yıldız returns to the theme of arranged marriages and honour in his play La Rumeur de Karagöz (Karagöz’s Gossip), but this time tells the story of an ‘imported’ bride brought from Turkey to marry Karagöz’s son. Apart from the specific issues of arranged marriages and honour, the play also comments more generally on community pressure and on misunderstanding between parents who have immigrated and their children who have grown up in France. Yıldız refers to issues specific to Turkish immigrants, but sets them within a larger context of immigration that includes immigrants from all over the world. This is reflected, for example, in his use of banlieue slang of the multiethnic suburbs of France’s large cities, which are predominantly occupied by immigrants and their descendants. Thus while it might be argued that honour crimes and imported brides have little to do with some other immigrant communities, the more general question of generational conflict and reconciling different cultural practices is an issue for any immigrant community. This play, certainly more pessimistic than Yıldız’s earlier plays, also makes a stronger critique of gender norms. Karagöz’s teenage son speaks the slang of the banlieue, peppered with verlan and Americanisms. He has a French girlfriend. But for all of his apparent belonging to Paprasland and its values, when his sense of masculine ‘honour’ is threatened, he acquiesces to demands that he ‘clean’ the stain to his honour and kill his bride, who has failed to produce the required blood on their wedding night. This is a troubling play for many audiences. For more traditional members of the audience, Yıldız is criticising his own community and doing so in French for consumption by audiences who are not members of that community. As Yıldız said in an interview, audience members sometimes criticise him for giving a ‘bad image’ of Turkish immigrants (M. D. 2004). For those sympathetic to the critique, the slapstick beginning of the play clashes with the serious message and tragic conclusion. The plays examined thus far focus on the experiences of immigrants. If they are not communitarian expressions of identity, they are at least oriented to immigrant audiences. Yıldız’s other work draws more directly on Turkish cultural traditions, staying much closer, in Taylor’s terms, to the archive, but ironically, it is this other work that addresses larger issues of injustice, not limited to immigration.

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His play La Légende de Karagöz (The Legend of Karagöz) returns to the origins of the Karagöz tales. According to one traditional account, the original Karagöz and Hacivat were employed to work on the construction of a mosque commissioned by the Sultan. As one version of the story tells it, as they distracted the other workers with their jokes and stories, construction slowed down. Angry at the delays, the Sultan ordered the two to be executed. Once construction was finally completed, the Sultan so regretted having killed them that his vizier created the puppets to bring them back to life. Yıldız adapts this story with a modern twist: the Sultan, instead of building a mosque, decides to produce electricity in his empire, but among disagreements, a decision must be made to use nuclear, wind or something else to generate the power. In this modern version, the surface source of conflict (electrical plant instead of a mosque) changes, but the underlying injustice of the powerful over the weak remains. In other works, Yıldız creates plays that mimic the style of classic folk stories of how the powerless can triumph in the face of seemingly absolute power. His play Le Sort de Karagöz (Karagöz’s Hex) adheres most closely to the traditional content. It takes Karagöz back to the Ottoman Empire for an absurd story that might have been part of Karagöz’s nineteenth-century repertoire: when Karagöz and Hacivat find themselves penniless, cannot give anything to a beggar and then insult her, the beggar puts a spell on Karagöz, stealing his ears, and on Hacivat, stealing his tongue. They turn this ill fortune to their advantage, however, and convince the Sultan to hire them as deaf-mute spies. Similarly, Yıldız also used the techniques of shadow theatre to create a fairy tale for young children called La Bergère des ours (The Shepherdess of Bears) (2007), as well as a piece for older children and adults based on the traditional folk stories and character of Nasrettin Hoca, Faudrait être un âne (You Would Have to Be a Donkey), which he performed in 2007–08. While these might seem far from the contemporary social and political themes of his earlier Karagöz plays, as Yıldız explains, ‘C’est une invitation, entre narration enfantine et pensée profonde, à méditer sur l’injustice, la paresse, l’étroitesse d’esprit … les privilèges’ (It’s an invitation, between childish narrative and deep thought, to meditate on injustice, laziness, narrowness of spirit … privileges) (Yıldız 2015). Like the Karagöz plays, these other plays, inspired by traditional sources, translate well because power and inequality are always power and inequality. It might seem that Karagöz, as a traditional art form dating back centuries in the Ottoman Empire, is the Turkish art form par excellence, and performing Karagöz might seem to have little to do with life in France. Similarly, if scores of Karagöz performances in France have attracted audiences for more than a decade and a half, one might wonder if the appeal is akin to the attraction of Turkish classical music or the whirling dervishes for western audiences: exotic but not about present reality. That Yıldız performs in French, however, provides one sign that he is not targeting a solely Turkish audience. That the plays address social justice, not just for immigrants, but for everyone, is another. Yıldız’s plays show the signs of their migration from Turkey to France, and from Turkish to French. It is true that the stock characters of Turkish

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shadow theatre remain, but placed in new linguistic and cultural spaces, they change. As his characters, plots and performances cross literary, national, linguistic and ethnic borders (not always peacefully), they provide a complex example to explore how these borders can be transformed or eliminated altogether. The key to this approach is suggested by the context within the original plays, a neighbourhood shared by members of many different ethnicities, religions and classes interacting because they share the same space rather than any essentialised identity. ‘The houses of Karagöz and Hacivat are adjacent, their upper windows overlooking the neighborhood square … If [characters] do not reside there, they frequent the neighborhood for their work. Others are newcomers who upset the balance of the place and bring excitement and anxiety’ (Ze’evi 2006: 138). As Ze’evi notes, it is not only the neighbourhood within the play, but also the neighbourhood within which the plays are performed. Yıldız’s Karagöz, like the original, is still the misfit, working to find his place, but one who nonetheless belongs to his neighbourhood. And his efforts, reflecting those of immigrants, are efforts that affect more than just immigrants. With Yıldız’s reinvention of Karagöz, he creates new memories of settling, in which immigrant struggles for justice are part of wider struggles for justice. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, Diana Taylor argues that performance is about more than just reproducing traditional forms, but also creates space in which those traditional forms (the archive) can be transformed through performance. To see Yıldız’s Karagöz as simply carnivalesque, a temporary disruption that leaves the status quo unaffected, is to miss the real import of his plays, which is instead the creation of a new ‘normal’ – in other words, to change the status quo. The original Karagöz, however much he might change in the course of a play, by the end always returned to his original status; Yıldız’s Karagöz, on the other hand, experiences lasting change. Karagöz and, by extension, other immigrants in France are not a temporary disruption that will go away or melt into the majority population. They are in the process of belonging and of transforming the space they inhabit, and these plays are one way of transmitting the memory of that process, of creating a social identity that anchors immigrants to France, even as they also continue to feel ties to Turkey. Notes 1 Other artists and writers have also, independently, used this term. See, for example, Patel (2010). Jacques Chevrier argues that francophone African writers so rarely work and live in Africa that, rather than using the term négritude, one must speak of a ‘littérature de la migritude’ (literature of migritude) (Zanganeh 2005). 2 All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. Quotations from the plays are my own translations, based on the unpublished manuscripts generously shared by Ruşen Yıldız.

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The right to (offer) hospitality in Sema Kılıçkaya’s Le Chant des tourterelles In 1938 an internationally organised referendum resulted in Turkey’s annexation of Hatay Province, home to a large number of Alevi Muslims, who spoke Arabic rather than Turkish. While the people themselves had remained in the same place, they suddenly found themselves to be de facto immigrants, the newest ‘arrivals’ in a young and nationalistic Turkey. Members of a despised religious and linguistic minority, they were hardly welcomed into their new national home. Members of the Turkish speaking majority viewed them as unwelcome interlopers, at best unwelcome guests who would have to adapt to their new national hosts. Sema Kılıçkaya’s novel, Le Chant des tourterelles (2009), begins in this historical context and follows the lives of one extended Alevi family over three generations. It might seem surprising that a historical novel that takes place almost entirely in Turkey was promoted by its publishers as one of the first novels in French about the experience of Turkish immigrants to France. Indeed, the novel ends before the protagonists have even left Turkish soil, at the moment when a young woman and her daughter, the descendants of these early Alevi ‘immigrants’ to Turkey, approach the European coast of Istanbul on the first stage of their journey to France. What links this Turkish tale of home and an untold tale of immigration and settling in France, however, are stories that in their telling make a claim of being at home. As characters’ identities as host or guest change throughout Kılıçkaya’s novel, it argues that the relationships among hospitality, home and belonging are not linear so that one leads to the other, but rather circular so that each makes the others possible. Jacques Derrida, in his final years, took up the topic of hospitality several times in his writing and in public speaking. In typical Derridean fashion, he discusses two different concepts of hospitality and then points out how they are inherently contradictory and yet inseparable. In a lecture on rights for immigrants and refugees originally presented to the International Parliament of Writers in Strasbourg in 1996 and later published as ‘On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness’ (Derrida 2001), Derrida describes on the one hand unconditional hospitality in which the host takes in the other without condition, requiring neither reciprocation nor justification. On the other hand is what he terms conditional hospitality, i.e. a hospitality limited by laws, that determine who can be welcomed and for how long. Unconditional hospitality means giving up any power over one’s possessions or home to the point where the host has nothing and no place of his or her own from which to offer hospitality,

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thus making unconditional hospitality logically impossible. Homer provides a classic example of such hospitality in the Odyssey. Once Penelope opens the doors of her home unconditionally and cannot say who may enter or demand that anyone leave, and once the suitors begin to help themselves freely to the house’s food, drink and women, can one really say that Penelope offers hospitality? Or is it simply a scene of plunder? Conditional hospitality, in contrast, does not offer everything and indeed makes demands on the guest, such as appropriate behaviour, gratitude, respect or, to refer again to the Odyssey, a good story. Conditional hospitality, although obviously possible and the form of hospitality we know best, cannot be considered truly unlimited hospitality. In pointing out such an inherent contradiction, however, Derrida does not mean to leave us unable to act, but rather to imagine hospitality offered in an ethical space between these two options. As he writes, ‘This is the double law of hospitality: to calculate the risks, yes, but without closing the door on the incalculable, that is, on the future and the foreigner’ (Derrida 2005: 6). In another work on hospitality, Derrida addresses the role of language in this attempt to offer unconditional hospitality: ‘Inviting, receiving, asylum, lodging, go by way of the language or the address to the other. As Levinas says from another point of view, language is hospitality’ (Derrida 2000: 133, 35). Hospitality is often given with the expectation that the guest will say her name, tell something of her story, explain why she is there. Given the important role of language in offering and receiving hospitality, Derrida wonders if unconditional hospitality doesn’t consist in suspending language, a particular determinate language, and even the address to the other. Shouldn’t we also submit to a sort of holding back of the temptation to ask the other who he is, what her name is, where he comes from, etc.? Shouldn’t we abstain from asking another these questions, which herald so many required conditions, and thus limits, to a hospitality thereby constrained and thereby confined into a law and a duty? (Derrida 2000: 135)

In the everyday world of immigration, questions of origin, reasons for immigration and so on show language used as a tool to condition and limit hospitality. Derrida’s comments made more than a decade ago have taken on increasing practical resonance as more and more countries require immigrants to prove language competency either for admission or for permanent residence (Goodman 2011; Hogan-Brun et  al. 2009). Regardless of the questions asked, a language immediately designates native and non-native speakers, as well as non-speakers of a language – in other words, those who belong and those who do not, those who are legitimate owners of language and those who are not. But Derrida’s comments, especially regarding the ‘address to the other’, suggest something more radical, not just the use of a particular language, but of language in general: in the context in which hospitality is to be offered, any question, any communication at all, limits the possibility of unconditional hospitality.

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Mireille Rosello, in her book Postcolonial Hospitality, draws on Derrida’s work to discuss hospitality in postcolonial and immigrant contexts, focusing in particular on the display of ownership and power inherent in offering hospitality. One cannot offer hospitality, she argues, in a place one does not own, or at least, over which one does not have power. As she points out, in order to offer hospitality, a person must have a space of her or his own: ‘If one cannot offer hospitality, one has an address, not a home’ (Rosello 2001: 18). She quotes Derrida: To dare say welcome is perhaps to insinuate that one is at home here, that one knows what it means to be at home, and that at home one receives, invites, or offers hospitality, thus appropriating a space for oneself, a space to welcome [accueillir] the other, or, worse, welcoming the other in order to appropriate for oneself a place and then speak the language of hospitality. (quoted in Rosello 2001: 17)

The power relations involved in hospitality become particularly apparent when the language of hospitality is applied to immigration, such that immigrants, like good guests, must quietly abide by the rules set by their hosts. Whether in literary works or sociological studies, this language of hospitality does great damage when it obscures the real relationship between immigrants and the ‘host’ country. Speaking of the many immigration programmes that have specifically sought out qualified workers, Mireille Rosello asks, is an employee a guest? ‘[H]‌ospitality as a metaphor blurs the distinction between a discourse of rights and a discourse of generosity, the language of social contracts and the language of excess and gift-giving’ (Rosello 2001: 9). Seen as guests, immigrants have few rights; seen as workers and fellow inhabitants of a shared space, they can make claims to common rights and responsibilities. Such a critique of the language of hospitality when referring to immigration is necessary and convincing, and it is important to acknowledge the power dynamics inherent in any situation of hospitality, whether literal or figurative. This same language of hospitality, however, can be appropriated and turned to other ends, specifically to provide immigrants with a means of belonging, rather than exclusion. By assuming the rights and responsibilities of the host, an immigrant also claims a position of power. It is not unmitigated power, since the position of host must be recognised by the other, but when it succeeds, it is a strategic approach: as the immigrant or guest creates the appearance (and reality) of generosity, she also takes something for herself, the power of the host and insider. Immigration literature Much immigrant literature accepts the logic of the immigrant as a guest who must adapt to the requirements of his or her hosts. Indeed, a common structure for

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immigrant novels is the ‘coming of age’ story in which the narrator recounts his or her trajectory from sheltered or troubled childhood in an immigrant family to integration (whether wholly successful or not) into the mainstream of the host country, a transition that we might view in terms of moving from being a guest to being at home, in a position to offer hospitality. As Madelaine Hron puts it in her book on immigration literature, the immigration genre ‘entails a journey … More importantly, however the immigrant narrative reflects a particular type of journey – a Bildungsroman, an educational journey where the immigrant learns to assimilate various sociocultural norms’ (Hron 2009:  16). In the French context, there are a large number of such immigrant narratives, often thinly disguised autobiographies or outright memoirs. For example, in Azouz Begag’s Le Gone du Chaâba, a young boy leaves his native Algeria to join his parents in a shantytown outside Lyon where he discovers a new world thanks to the school he attends. Kılıçkaya’s novel also uses the idea of immigration as journey but transforms the usual story through two narrative choices. First, she eschews any individual story and instead writes the story of immigration as a family epic, letting the focus of the novel shift among different characters and generations. Second, she narrates many different migrations undertaken by different characters, so that the eventual migration to France goes completely untold and thus, from the point of view of the novel, is not necessarily the most important or the most traumatic. It also avoids putting her characters in the position of guests who are at the mercy of their hosts. Some of Kılıçkaya’s short stories, published in the early to mid-2000s, show a similar interest in reworking other familiar narratives of immigration literature. Before returning to issues of belonging and hospitality in Kılıçkaya’s work, it will be useful to consider how it treats other issues common to immigrant literature, particularly concerning family relations and connections to the country of origin. Her story ‘Naïmé’ (Kılıçkaya 2004), for example, begins with a frequent theme of immigrant literature, that of a love affair between two young people from different ethnic communities that ends with them running away. Here again movement away from an immigrant community propels the narrative, but rather than this forbidden love serving as the subject of the story, it is merely the premise. The real subject of the story is indicated by the title. The title character is not the young woman who runs away, but the sister who is left behind. After the older sister runs away, her family tries to prevent further disgrace by quickly marrying off the two younger sisters. Naïmé, only sixteen, finds herself in an unhappy marriage, bullied and ordered about by her mother-in-law, when one day a postcard arrives from her sister. ‘C’était une carte toute chaude, dorée et lumineuse, qui représentait le désert et un ciel si bleu que Naïmé en aurait pleuré’ (It was a card that was all warm, golden and luminous, which showed a picture of the desert and a sky so blue that it could have made Naïmé cry) (2004: 28).1 Over the following weeks and months, she spends long moments looking at the postcard until one day, as she stands in the kitchen, her mother-in-law yelling from another room for more tea, Naïmé, who ‘attendait une petite trouée, une échappée, une ouverture pour pouvoir se

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glisser, se fondre dans la carte’ (was waiting for a small gap, a space, an opening she could slip through, where she could melt into the card) (28), simply disappears. The narrator explains that Naïmé must be crazy: ‘Cette genre de choses n’arrive pas’ (This kind of thing doesn’t happen) (28), but when her motherin-law comes to the kitchen, Naïmé is gone. For readers of immigration literature in France, the most prolific and widely known body of work is that of North Africans and their descendants, commonly referred to as beurs. In addition to the theme of star-crossed lovers, Kılıçkaya’s story recalls other themes familiar to readers of literature by writers of North African immigrant origin, in particular those stories of young women who want to continue their studies and are tired of serving brothers and fathers and constantly refusing marriage proposals. Such stories usually have one of two endings, either tragic or, more commonly, with the young woman triumphing over all odds and pursuing her own dreams. Kılıçkaya’s story is interesting for the way in which it presents a real problem in many immigrant communities, but does so from an original point of view, that of the sister left behind. She also finds a creative resolution to the story that avoids both tragedy and the cliché happy ending. It might be argued that the story is escapist or even defeatist in that it suggests that there is no realistic solution to Naïmé’s dilemma. But in doing so, it also underscores how few options are available to Naïmé and other young women in similar situations. Novels detailing the experience of immigration are often narrated in the first person or focalised through the eyes of a single protagonist. By creating a multi-generational and extended family narrative, Kılıçkaya moves the emphasis away from any single character. To be sure, a few characters (Djémilé in Le Chant des tourterelles, her son Souane and her eventual daughter-in-law Sévime) stand out, but their real importance as central characters only becomes apparent in the epilogue of the novel, in which a first-person narrator steps forward and addresses her father: ‘Voilà le récit de ta jeunesse … Un récit que tu n’as eu de cesse de me raconter au cours des trente ans de mon existence … Dans mes rêves, je remonte les rues de ma ville natale, à la recherche de la maison de ma grand-mère, si belle disait-on’ (There is the tale of your youth … A tale that you never stopped telling me in my thirty years of existence … In my dreams, I go up the streets of the city of my birth, looking for the house of my grandmother whom everyone said was so beautiful) (Kılıçkaya 2009: 209–10). Thus the narrative perspective in the final two pages of the novel is revealed to be that of the granddaughter of Djémilé, ‘la belle’, the young girl who accompanies her mother as they cross the Bosporus on their way to France. This has the contradictory effect of making the first-person narrator both invisible and central to the narrative. Another frequent theme in immigrant literature is the dream of a return to the country of origin, either for the parents when they retire or for their children when they are adults. Kılıçkaya’s short story ‘Un Eté à Gölcük’ (‘A Summer in Gölcük’) (2002), is told from the point of view of Ismail, an immigrant established in France

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who returns to Turkey for his summer holidays. Although the story takes place in the aftermath of the 1999 earthquake, it is neither a nostalgic evocation of the country of origin nor simply a denunciation of its problems. The protagonist Ismail works with others to rescue victims from the rubble, but is unable to save his friend who had also been vacationing there. There are brief references to the corruption of building contractors that left many buildings too weak to withstand the earthquake, as well as references to the failures of the Turkish State to respond adequately to the disaster. The story ends, however, by distancing Ismail from the problems in Turkey, as it shows him in his apartment in France watching televised news coverage of continuing earthquake recovery efforts. That events in Turkey are the subject of the story and yet the story breaks with those events underscores a detachment between the two spaces. Such a narrative choice is certainly aesthetically appealing as it avoids the stale formulas of much immigrant writing, especially idealised images of the ‘home’ country on the one hand and bitter criticism on the other. By concluding the story this way, it also locates the protagonist literally and figuratively at home in France. Kılıçkaya’s novel explores the idea of return both within and across national borders, emphasising local belonging and attachment to cities and neighbourhoods, rather than to nations. Djémilé twice leaves her native Antakya and both times can dream of nothing but return. Similarly, her son Souane leaves family behind in order to work in Switzerland, but returns to Antakya, feeling as if he had been orphaned while away from home. Despite the emphasis on return, the narrative also acknowledges that home may change while one is away. Souane, for example, finding no place to fit back into, ‘devait se rendre compte que le retour était encore plus difficile que le départ’ (had to realise that return was even more difficult than the departure) (Kılıçkaya 2009: 202). The structure of the novel itself insists on the importance of local home, a place where all the main characters were born or have grown up, and nearly the entire novel takes place in this one city. Thus while the novel anticipates a future permanent emigration, it asserts the importance of a family home and history prior to emigration rather than after (as is usually the case in immigrant novels), and thus allows the reader to see the characters in their relatively more powerful guise as hosts. In short, the novel is about people who will become immigrants, not about their lives as immigrants. This attachment to the family’s place of origin may be expected in first-generation narratives, but is not typical of second- and third-generation immigrant novels in France, especially those written by younger writers. Fiction produced by North African immigrants and their offspring, for example, rarely shows such attachment, either in terms of the structure of the novel or of the sentiments of the characters. The country of origin may be a place for summer holidays (enthusiastically anticipated by parents, dreaded by their children) and it may be a place that older immigrants look forward to for retirement or burial, but it is not usually the centre of an immigrant

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narrative. At least two factors may contribute to this difference in Kılıçkaya’s novel. First, since North Africans established themselves in France earlier than did Turks, they might reasonably be expected to have weaker ties to their countries of origin. Whereas North Africans have been settling in France in large numbers since the 1940s, Turkish immigration dates only to the late 1960s and early 1970s, and like that of many immigrant communities, grew especially quickly after the 1974 law that permitted family reunification. Thus the descendants of North African immigrants are one or even two generations more distant from direct experience of the country of origin than are the descendants of Turkish immigration. Second, the political and economic situations of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia have often made return to these countries impractical and generally undesired. Of course, this was especially true in the Algeria of the 1990s during the civil war. Such political and economic conditions may make a nostalgic evocation of the country of origin less likely than is the case for Turkey, to which Turkish immigrants and their children do, in fact, return, albeit in small numbers. Turkey also had a political and economic trajectory beginning in 1980 that, with occasional bumps along the way, was steadily improving until the early 2010s. Even in the third generation after immigration, French and German citizens of Turkish origin maintain ongoing economic and affective ties to the villages and small towns where their parents or grandparents were born. The emphasis on life before emigration sets Kılıçkaya’s novel apart from many other novels of immigration in France, but an even more striking difference is the central place of cultural conflict within the country of origin. In most immigration literature, cultural misunderstanding and conflict in the receiving country are standard fare, as immigrant characters adapt to living in a new culture. Such literature, however, is rarely concerned with conflicts of identity or belonging in the country of origin. Like many other traditions of immigrant writing, literature by immigrants of North African origin, for example, may describe an often idyllic rural childhood that provides a sharp contrast to the gritty shantytowns or housing projects of urban France, but conflicts between, for example, Arabs and Berbers are provided with little space as they are not central to the immigrant’s struggles in the new country. Kılıçkaya’s focus on conflict (and cooperation) among different ethnic and religious communities in the country of origin is central to the narrative because it prefigures possibilities for living together in the eventual country of immigration. Kılıçkaya’s novel acknowledges the power dynamics involved in hospitality, but moves the debate away from present-day immigration to look instead from within the perspective of the country of origin. Thus hospitality in the novel is not solely an issue of immigration but rather one of interactions more generally among individuals and communities. That is not to say, of course, that all human interactions are positive. As I will discuss in the next section, neighbourhoods, like homes, are spaces that can be supportive or oppressive – or both at the same time. Kılıçkaya’s novel depicts all of these aspects.

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Neighbourhood Neighbourhood and neighbourliness, often represented in the novel as hospitality or generosity, can make up for poverty or religious difference. The character presented as famous for her hospitality, Djémilé, had left her native Antakya with her husband and moved to Syria when the province was annexed to Turkey. After the death of her husband five years later, she returns, an immigrant and outsider to her native town, obliged to apply for a Turkish identity card and to ‘Turkify’ her last name. Despite her poverty, she gives away freely what little she might have sold, namely her ability to read fortunes in coffee grounds and her knowledge of plants to create herbal cures and lotions. ‘Djémilé avait appris tout cela mais il ne lui serait jamais venu à l’esprit qu’elle pouvait en faire négoce, ne serait-ce que pour subvenir aux besoins de sa famille … Ses remèdes pour soulager les douleurs de règles ou stimuler la fertilité, elle les donnait généreusement à ses voisines, sans une arrière-pensée’ (Djémilé had learned all that but it never would have occurred to her that she could make a business out of it, even if it was to provide for the needs of her family … Her cures to ease monthly pains or encourage fertility she gave generously to her neighbours without a second thought) (Kılıçkaya 2009: 23). Similarly, despite Djémilé’s status as a young widow, the narrative, reflecting the opinion of Djémilé’s neighbours, describes her hospitality in warm terms, suggesting that her generosity and hospitality help her to reassert her belonging to

Figure 5.1  Sema Kılıçkaya receives the 2014 Seligmann Prize against Racism for her novel Le Royaume sans racines, the sequel to Le Chant des tourterelles.

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the neighbourhood, as a local who can offer hospitality to others:  ‘C’était une hôtesse hors pair! … Djémilé recevait beaucoup. Elle adorait les visites. Les jours fastes étaient passés à faire bombance avec les amis, la famille et les voisins qui venaient’ (She was a hostess beyond comparison ! … She had guests over all the time. She loved company. Days of plenty were spent feasting with friends, family and neighbours) (24). This hospitality is not without consequences, however: ‘Son insouciance et sa frivolité, cependant, lui firent traverser, à elle et à ses enfants, des moments très difficiles. Certains soirs, il fallut racler le fond de la marmite pour quelques cuillères de potage, ou se contenter de pain et d’oignon’ (Her heedlessness and frivolity, however, did cause her and her children to go through some difficult moments. Some evenings, they had to scrape the bottom of the pot for a few spoons of soup or be happy with some bread and onion) (24). Her friend Rétibé admonishes her, quoting a Turkish proverb: ‘On n’étend ses pieds que de la longueur de la couverture’ (One shouldn’t stretch one’s feet further than the length of one’s quilt) (25). Yet such a prudent message goes counter not only to the overall place accorded to hospitality in the novel, but also to the way Djémilé re-establishes her belonging to the community through her hospitality. Neighbourhood as hospitality plays a role also in the relations among members of different religions. ‘Tante Bessimé … ne manquait jamais de fêter la Pâque orthodoxe de sa voisine Helena. Pour Sévime, le premier mai était devenu un rituel, une fête qu’elle attendait avec autant d’impatience que la fête de ramadan ou encore la Noël qu’elle célébrait avec la famille Georgeos’ (Aunt Bessimé … never missed celebrating Orthodox Easter with her neighbour Helena. For Sévime, the first day of May had become a ritual, a holiday that she waited for with as much anticipation as Ramadan or even Christmas, which she celebrated with the Georgeos family) (72). The issue of how one interacts with neighbours arises repeatedly. Sévime’s older brother describes good relationships among the different religious communities in which sharing the same neighbourhood is more important than a difference of religion: ‘Nous accompagnons nos voisins, juifs ou orthodoxes, dans leur lieu de prière seulement lorsqu’il y a un mariage ou des obsèques. C’est un acte de charité. Ce sont nos voisins, tout de même’ (We only join our Jewish or Orthodox neighbours in their place of worship when there’s a marriage or a funeral. It’s an act of charity. They are our neighbours, after all) (87). Her father, however, argues more grandly, quoting the poet Kahlil Gibran (1863–1931) to argue for neighbourliness and respect for difference as a religious duty: ‘Le poète a écrit: “Tu es mon frère et je t’aime. Je t’aime te prosternant dans ta mosquée, t’agenouillant dans ta synagogue et priant dans ton église. Nous sommes tous deux enfants d’une même religion” ’ (The poet said ‘You are my brother and I love you. I love you bowing in your mosque, kneeling in your synagogue and praying in your church. We are both children of the same religion’) (87). This theme of shared holidays and tranquil intercommunal relationships is a familiar one in Turkish literature or in the oral histories elicited in discussions of the first decades of the Turkish Republic. Amy Mills (2008), for example, notes that current and former minority residents of the

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once multiethnic Istanbul neighbourhood Kuzguncuk recount similar narratives of cooperation among different religious communities. Those who still live in the neighbourhood rarely mention moments of ethnic tension or violence. Former residents, who no longer live in Turkey and emigrated to Israel, echo these same kinds of narratives of cooperation but, importantly, also note the discrimination and trauma faced by minorities. To put Mills’ arguments in my own terms, I would argue that the inclusion or exclusion of negative memories has much to do with the perceived audience for these narratives. As Mills writes, current residents are wary of drawing majority attention to themselves if they make too much of past troubles. The issue of audience or listener is important and one I will come back to at the end of this chapter. As in the narratives collected by Mills, many novels and recollections about the early days of the Turkish Republic ignore a more conflict-ridden history in which it was precisely neighbours and fellow citizens who made those who were not Muslim or ethnically Turkish feel unwelcome in their own cities and villages. Apart from brief oblique references to policies of Turkification, Kılıçkaya’s novel at first glance seems to share official State amnesia about the violence that erupted periodically against minority communities in Turkey. This may be attributed, not to wilful ignorance, but to the relatively easier situation of minorities in distant Antakya compared to larger, western cities. Laws in the 1930s barring Greeks from many professions, the wealth tax of 1942 and anti-minority riots in 1955 disproportionately affected wealthier urban minorities and resulted in accelerated emigration of Jewish and Greek minorities from urban Turkey (Aktar 2009). It is true that the population exchanges of the early 1920s affected both rural and urban minorities throughout Turkey, but at the time the novel opens, those events are already nearly two decades in the past and would not have affected Hatay in any case, since it was not then part of Turkey. Like members of other minorities, Kılıçkaya’s protagonists, Arabic-speaking Alevis of Hatay Province, were also treated as unwelcome guests who had to be on their best behaviour, even when they were living in regions that had been their home for centuries. Looking back at the history of ethnic violence and discrimination in modern Turkey, however, it can be argued that Alevis have created a place for themselves in Turkish society in a way that members of other minority groups have not,2 but this outcome was hardly obvious in the 1930s. Messages of neighbourliness are occasionally contested by other characters and events in the novel, where neighbourhoods and religions are strictly segregated. Even at a young age, Sévime knows that her cousin’s adolescent crush on a young Jewish man is impossible: ‘En effet, la distance que la religion mettait entre Salwa et Ismaël était celle qui séparait deux continents’ (Indeed, the distance that religion put between Salwa and Ismaël was as great as that which separates two continents) (Kılıçkaya 2009: 71). Tellingly, she accepts this as a matter of fact rather than an injustice to be overcome. But the primary conflict of the novel is not between Alevis and Jews or Christians, but between Arabic-speaking Alevi Muslims and

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Turkish-speaking Sunni Muslims, all of whom are Turkish citizens and Muslims. The football games that Sévime’s future husband, Souane, plays as a boy are always between a team of Alevis and one of Sunnis, and the games often end in a brawl. The Alevis view the Turkish-speaking Sunni population as outsiders, who live in other neighbourhoods excluded from Sévime and Souane’s community by language and religion. Regarding the marriage of Djémilé’s sister to a Sunni Turk, a neighbour comments ‘Il n’y rien de bon dans un mariage avec les Turcs’ (There’s nothing good in a marriage with Turks) (22). Sévime’s sister-in-law berates her Alevi family whenever they choose to follow Sunni Muslim practice, such as fasting or praying in the mosque. Sévime, as a young girl, must pass through a Sunni neighbourhood that she refers to as ‘Turkish’ in order go from her own neighbourhood to that of her aunt. ‘Le passage par cette partie de la ville représentait toujours un épreuve’ (Crossing this part of town was always a trial) (69). The locals shout insults, ‘Pis fellah! Sale paysanne! Pis Arap! Sale arabe!’ (Dirty peasant! Dirty Arab!) (70), and throw rocks at her as she runs at top speed to cross this enemy territory, a situation in which enemy territory and home territory are all located within the same city among ostensibly fellow citizens. The emphasis on neighbourhood recalls the banlieue identity vaunted by minority rappers in contemporary France, as discussed in the first chapter of this volume. Neighbourhood identities become important when a community cannot identify with the larger national collective – or when that collectivity refuses to include them. Ethnicity within the banlieue holds relatively little importance compared to the larger societal conflict between those in the banlieue and those outside it: in other words, between those who see themselves as without power and those they see as holding power. Similarly, for Kılıçkaya’s protagonists, being Jewish, Christian or Alevi matters little compared to the shared antagonism against the Sunni Turks whom they see as neighbourhood outsiders and representatives – not coincidentally – of an oppressive State. There are, of course, limits to this solidarity, as is apparent in the story of the ill-fated romance between Salwa and Ismaël. Kılıçkaya’s protagonists in the early years of the Turkish Republic, like inhabitants of the French banlieue, nonetheless find a greater sense of belonging in local neighbourhoods than in a national identity that requires them to be something else and to speak another language in order to be recognised as full citizens. Of course, neighbourliness can also mean pressure, too much interference in others’ affairs, where neighbours are invoked as a force to control behaviour, especially that of women. Kılıçkaya does present this aspect of the neighbourhood, for example, when she describes the wild rumours that surround Djémilé’s return to Antakya, but in the end, the rumours are depicted as having little real effect on Djémilé’s ability to settle back into her former community. When the negative aspect of neighbourhood is depicted with real effect, it is personified by the unlikeable character of Sévime’s sister-in-law, who poisons the relationship between her husband and his brother, Souane. In the late 1960s, she criticises another woman for wearing trousers, and Sévime for a sleeveless dress:  ‘Je ne sortirai pas avec

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une belle-sœur habillée de la sorte! Que vont dire les voisins?’ (I won’t go out with a sister-in-law dressed like that! What will the neighbours say?) (2009: 163). Thus Kılıçkaya correctly depicts the negative potential of close-knit neighbourhoods but deprives it of narrative importance by linking it to such an intolerant and unsympathetic character. Many of the debates and conflicts in the microcosm of Sévime’s extended family revolve around the discussion of who is part of the community and what norms are to be followed. In other words, it is the back and forth of a debate between saying, on the one hand, we are neighbours, all the same, and on the other, we may live in the same space, but we are fundamentally different. Taken together, these examples make a case neither for a romanticised time of harmonious interaction among different religious and ethnic communities, nor for a scene of uninterrupted intercommunal conflict. More than anything, they demonstrate the complexity of relations among different communities in early Republican Turkey. But they also show how intercommunal relations that work depend on each group accepting the other’s right to offer and receive hospitality, which, as noted at the beginning of this chapter, depends importantly on property rights and on acknowledging the other’s belonging to a particular space. Tellingly, it is between the Turkish-speaking Sunni and the Arabic-speaking Alevi where this acknowledgement of the other’s right to be at home and offer hospitality most often fails in this novel. Implicit in the notion of neighbourhood, as discussed so far, is the idea of community based not on family or ethnicity, but on chosen alliances. Edward Said’s distinction between filiation and affiliation holds true for Kılıçkaya’s novel, as well. The importance of neighbourliness suggests an affiliative identity for many of the characters in the novel, but the space of neighbourliness is also a family space. When Djémilé returns to Antakya after ten years in Syria with her first husband, it is the place that calls to her, and she rejoices in the local and familiar:  ‘Il lui semblait que chaque arbre, chaque roc qu’elle apercevait sur le chemin du retour plongeaient leurs racines très profond dans la terre des ancêtres, loin du fracas de l’inconnu’ (It seemed to her that each tree, each rock that she saw along the way back had its roots buried very deep in the land of the ancestors, far from the noise of the unknown) (Kılıçkaya 2009: 19). After returning to Antakya, she remarries, and once again leaves with her husband, this time for Adana. When he dies, she again returns to the city of Antakya, but this time, the narrative describes her return not to a generalised space, but to a particularly familial space, ‘le berceau vers lequel elle s’en retournait’ (the cradle to which she returned) (20). Similarly, if Antakya is Djémilé’s ‘cradle’, her son finds he is an orphan without his native city. When he flees the domination of his older brother to seek work in Switzerland, he discovers that his attachment to the land of origin is one of familial connection. Thinking of his compatriots at home, he wonders ‘Est-ce qu’ils auraient compris l’incommensurable misère de celui qui en perdant sa langage et les siens, perd sa dignité d’homme? Souane avait perdu sa mère patrie. L’orphelin voulait rentrer’ (Would they have understood the incomparable

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misery of the man who, in losing his language and his people, loses his human dignity? Souane had lost his motherland. The orphan wanted to go home) (203). Thus while the novel portrays chosen communities of affiliation, those relations do not exclude the importance of family relations of filiation. Along with the focus on local space, the novel also emphasises local time. Admittedly, the event that opens the novel and initiates the movement of the main character, Djémilé – namely the 1938 annexation of Hatay to Turkey – is an event of national and international importance. Yet generally, the mention of such large events serves to punctuate other, local events that for the characters in the novel are far more important. As the novel recounts the death of Djémilé’s old friend Rétibé, for example, it also describes the radio broadcast of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, making clear that Rétibé’s death is clearly the more significant one for the novel and its characters. This is not to say that the world of the novel is an unchanging place forgotten by time. On the contrary, it is a space marked by continual change, ranging from the births, marriages and deaths that affect any community, to the changes wrought by technology (the introduction of the radio or television) or fashion (women’s trousers and miniskirts). Yet those large-scale changes matter because of their effects at the local level. Turkish narratives As noted in the introduction to this book, Turkish immigrant communities in France are little known compared to many other immigrant communities. The relative invisibility of Turkish immigrants in France may be due in part to the absence of written narratives, not just documenting their experience, but also testifying to their existence on French soil. The paucity of literature in French about Turkish immigration matters because writing the experiences of a community legitimises that community, creating a place for it in the imagination of its readers. As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, Derrida’s writing on hospitality points to a strong link between language rights and property rights. Just as interrogation (designating one’s right to speak and in which language) makes unconditional hospitality impossible, by speaking out in the language of the land, the speaker asserts her right to space in that land. Given the prolific and commercial success of novels about immigration in France, the question might be asked about why Kılıçkaya’s novel is one of so few that tell the story in French of Turkish immigration to France. Here a reminder of the specificities of Turkish immigration will be helpful. First, as is the case with Kılıçkaya’s characters, most immigrants from Turkey arrived in France with little formal schooling even in Turkish. Second, as specialists in education have noted, there is a strong correlation between the educational level of parents and their children’s educational achievement. Not surprisingly then, as sociologist Verda İrtiş-Dabbagh has observed, the children of Turkish immigrants with little or no

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formal education have tended to choose professional-track education that allows them to leave school earlier and begin earning a salary (İrtiş-Dabbagh 2003). While these factors may not prevent the emergence of new literary work, they do not facilitate it either. Germany, of course, has a well-known and extensive body of work in German by Turkish immigrants, as well as by their children and grandchildren. Turkish immigrants to Germany, however, arrived earlier than those in France, and they arrived with higher levels of education. As the children and grandchildren of Turkish immigrants come of age in France, more new writers are likely to emerge, who will have yet other stories to tell about the unique experience of immigration from Turkey to France. This is not to say that Turks have not written at all about their lives in France, but for the most part, they have written as outsiders with no strong claim to belonging. For example, Paris has long been a destination for political dissidents, artists and intellectuals fleeing conflict in Turkey, but when they have written of their experiences in France, they have tended to write in Turkish for an audience located in Turkey.3 Many saw France as a temporary exile, as they waited for political change in Turkey. Even when they have become long-term residents and citizens, however, there has been little written in French that reflects the concerns of a larger immigrant community. Nedim Gürsel, for example, an academic and novelist from Turkey who has lived in France since the 1980 military coup in Turkey, uses French primarily for his academic work while he uses Turkish for his novels, which furthermore concern Turkey far more than they concern life in France. If we think of a work of literature as a hospitable invitation, a work from a writer in France but written in Turkish about Turkish topics invites a more distant audience than one comprising readers located in France. The work of the theatre performers and musicians considered so far in this book has involved performance both in the sense of staged performance and in the sense of performing identity. A work of literature, which involves neither stage performance nor direct interaction between artist and audience, might not seem to lend itself to analysis in these terms. After all, how can one perform without being on stage? Yet literature, too, involves an audience:  the reader. The immediacy of the live interaction between performer and audience may be missing, but the same can also be said for musicians, whose music is listened to far more often on CDs or over the internet than in live performances.4 The novels and short stories of writer Sema Kılıçkaya, indeed, raise many of the same issues of identity and belonging as the theatrical and musical works already discussed. While these other performed works can be directly connected to the space and time of the performer, and the published written text inevitably involves a physical distance between the writer and her work, this distance is often lessened in many works of immigration literature through the use of an autobiographical or first-person narrator, which creates a connection between the writer and the work. Despite this distance inherent in the written word, I would argue that Kılıçkaya’s work nonetheless encourages dialogue with French readers. We might be tempted

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to pass over the fact that she writes in French, since she has spent most of her life and been educated in France. As someone who makes her living as a translator and who works in multiple languages, however, her decision to write in French must be seen as a decision, not a simple default. As already noted, other Turkish writers have written in Turkish (and thus for Turkish audiences) about their experiences in France. Kılıçkaya’s gesture of writing in French clearly seeks a French-speaking audience, most likely located in France. She further expands that gesture by explaining terms related to religious practices, food, holidays and forms of address in the setting of her novel that might not otherwise be familiar to those of her French readers with no personal connections to Turkey.5 This hospitality of the writer and the text, however, must be met by a receptive reader. Judith Still, writing about Derrida’s work on hospitality, focuses on the role of the reader in relation to the text, and asks: What is it to be a reader, to read, not just in the simple sense of casting your eye over words and turning the page, but to be formed as a reader by a text – to be host and guest with respect to a text? Letting it welcome you in and give you sustenance, warmth and shelter – and welcoming it reciprocally, without prejudice, into your heart. (Still 2005: 88)

Still goes on to describe how she has been shaped by Derrida’s writing. Theoretical and fictional texts may work differently on their readers, but both require an exchange with the reader. I  have suggested that Kılıçkaya’s text is hospitable or welcoming to the reader, but as Still points out, following Derrida’s own arguments about the non-difference between guest and host, the reader must be willing to accept that hospitality and offer it in turn. Kılıçkaya’s novel refuses the usual immigrant narrative of assimilation or integration into the receiving country. The problem with such typical narratives is the way in which the sending and receiving countries and their cultures are portrayed as incompatible, so that it is up to the individual migrant to move from one to the other, or to create a synthesis of the two. As noted in the introduction to this book, Leslie Adelson (2002) objects to this model, which maintains the two cultures as irredeemably different. Another critic makes a similar point when she discusses migration literature and argues for a literature that eliminates the ‘opposition between the modern and the traditional, the country of destination and the country of origin’ (Mardorossian 2003: 21). Indeed, Kılıçkaya’s narrative demonstrates that many of the issues faced by new immigrants, such as nationalism and pressure to assimilate, can occur even in an immigrant’s country of birth, thus effectively minimising the difference between sending and receiving countries. Not many immigrant narratives, of any national tradition, recognise such similarities. Furthermore, that at least some of her characters demonstrate solidarity in spite of cultural differences suggests a possible model for the country of immigration.

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By depicting conflicts and alliances among different ethnic and religious communities in the country of origin, as well as previous histories of movement, the narrative makes it clear that migration and discrimination do not exist only in the country of immigration. Focusing her narrative on Turkey, Kılıçkaya also displaces any trauma away from her narrator’s life in France to her parents’ and grandparents’ lives in Turkey. While the reader may well imagine the difficulties of settling in a new country, the explicit account is left untold.6 An interested reader could certainly make connections between the difficulties experienced by the narrator’s Arabic-speaking grandparents in a young and nationalistic Turkey of the 1940s and 1950s and the difficulties experienced by her Turkified parents in the France of the 1970s and 1980s, but these comparisons are left unstated, resulting in a narrative that is far less critical of the receiving country than many other immigrant narratives published in France. The novel raises questions of hospitality in the context of community and neighbourhood. Who belongs, and who has the right to offer hospitality? These questions must also apply to the narrator’s parents in France, although this connection is left implicit. As we see with the narrator’s grandmother Djémilé, appropriating the right to offer hospitality is one way of claiming belonging, of claiming that one is home. I began this chapter with the claim of Kılıçkaya’s publishers that this is a novel about Turkish immigration to France. In terms of explicit subject, the novel is not really about immigration to France, but in terms of the issues it raises about home and hospitality, Kılıçkaya calls on the reader to think about current discourses around immigration. Her narrator and the narrator’s parents do not need to ask for hospitality because they are already at home. Kılıçkaya’s writing suggests new creative possibilities for immigrants from Turkey and their descendants. Whereas the bulk of artistic production by the Franco-Turkish community has been in more ephemeral forms that depend on performance (such as music and theatre), literary production has been almost non-existent. This is in stark contrast to prolific literary production by writers of North African origin in France and by writers of Turkish origin in Germany. As one of the first fictional accounts of Turkish immigration to France written by a descendant of that immigration, Kiliçkaya’s novel is historically important and suggests that the Turkish community in France is achieving a degree of settling in France similar to that of Turks in Germany. In addition to this sociological and historical aspect of her work, it is also important because of what it asks of her readers. Kılıçkaya tells a story that links home and belonging with hospitality. She writes in French, which is certainly an invitation to French readers to step into her narrative home. While it is a generous gesture, it is also one that makes a claim on the reader: the reader must acknowledge that the writer offers hospitality in French, and thus her story of immigration is also a story of claiming a home in French from which to offer hospitality. However unwelcome immigrants and their children may be, they are definitely at home and do not require hospitality (or tolerance) but rather community and

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recognition of their right to offer hospitality. Derrida sees both property rights (which confer the right to be a host) and language (which connotes belonging to a particular space) as necessary in order to offer hospitality; Kılıçkaya’s novel, on the other hand, argues that neither of these is necessary in order to offer hospitality. Instead, offering hospitality puts the host in the position of someone at home: a figurative if not always literal property owner. Hospitality, property (ownership), and belonging thus work in a circular fashion, each depending on the other, with none of them prior to the other. Whereas Derrida argues that only a property owner can offer hospitality, Kılıçkaya’s characters stake their claim to space and mark their belonging by being hosts. They offer hospitality because they are at home and they are at home because they offer hospitality. Notes 1 All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 2 Although Turkish census figures do not count Alevis as a separate category, scholars estimate the current population to be 15–20  million, roughly 20–25% of the population (Paul and Seyrek 2014). In stark contrast, the numbers of other minorities such as Orthodox Greeks, Jews and Armenians have been steadily decreasing for the last century. In 1914, there were 1.5  million Greeks and 1.2  million Armenians in an overall population of 12 million in what is today Turkey. In 2005, there were just 3,000 Greeks and 50,000 Armenians in an overall population estimated at 65 million (İçduygu et al. 2008). 3 See, for example, Kuzucuoğlu (2004) and German (2001). 4 Auslander (1999: 11) argues for the ‘mutual dependence of the live and the mediatized’. As he observes, an important economic purpose of live concert events, for example, is to encourage the sale of recordings. As for the relationship between artist and audience, he argues that any sense of community is not between the artist and the audience member, but rather among audience members themselves, where a sense of community emerges from ‘being part of an audience that clearly values something you value’ (55). 5 This idea of explanation as hospitality is perhaps even clearer in the context of performance. Dobson (2010), for example, notes that audience members at a classical music concert reported greater feelings of ‘inclusion and participation’ when explanations from the stage helped them to understand the performance better, thus ‘developing a valued sense of performer–audience rapport’. Dobson does not frame this in terms of hospitality, although this attempt to make audience members comfortable certainly reflects similar processes of hospitality. 6 Kılıçkaya has since published such a novel, Le Royaume sans racines (2013), which details Souane’s and Sévime’s settling in France (Schneider 2016, forthcoming).

Conclusion: settling in

A striking thing about the artists interviewed for this study is the effort they have made to maintain their linguistic and cultural connections to Turkey, even while participating fully in life in France. They have completed their education in France, speak and write French (in many cases more comfortably than Turkish) and work in France. Despite problems of discrimination, they are all firmly anchored in France, and none of them envisions a permanent return to Turkey; yet Turkish culture and language play an important role in how they express their identities. For some artists, the use of Turkish allows them to address activist messages more easily to their Turkish-speaking audiences; for others, the use of Turkish is a personal decision intended to improve their own knowledge of Turkish. And for those artists who choose to produce their work in French, Turkish culture still contributes to the forms and content of their work. As mentioned in the introduction to this volume, artistic production with its individual and idiosyncratic nature does not lend itself to generalisations. Nonetheless, one does see patterns in the artists’ work in terms of audience and approach. On the one hand, for some artists, such as C-it and Kebab Show, their art has an explicitly activist purpose, in which they seek to speak directly to immigrants from Turkey and their descendants and make them aware of social issues affecting their lives in France. They have said in interviews that they expect (however indirectly) to inspire political and social awareness, as well as action. On the other hand, while artists such as Ayşe Şahin and Ruşen Yıldız certainly raise questions of identity and make humorous critiques of immigrant living and working conditions, they do not address only immigrant communities from Turkey but also other immigrants and non-immigrants. This is perhaps most evident in the dominance of French, rather than Turkish, in their work. Similarly, Sema Kılıçkaya’s novel and short stories in French also involve questions of identity and belonging, but focus on the individual experience of identity formation within other larger communities. In all cases, the work remains centred on life in France, either in language or in aims. The sociological literature on immigrants from Turkey and their children in France presents a picture of them as a closed community with only minimal contact with the mainstream of society or with other immigrant groups. Rollan

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and Sourou (2006), in a study of immigrants from Turkey living in and around Bordeaux, refer to this as the famous Turkish ‘repli’ (withdrawal). Studies in other regions of France (Akgönül et  al. 2008) and studies across France as a whole (Beauchemin et al. 2010; İrtiş-Dabbagh 2003) note a similar lack of connection with other groups. Among the characteristics they cite are relatively low rates of marriage with non-Turks (Poinsot 2009), consumption of Turkish media (newspapers, satellite television) rather than French media (İrtiş-Dabbagh 2003) and a higher tendency than other immigrant groups for the second generation to retain Turkish citizenship (Simon 2010). Without disputing the numerical reality of such tendencies, other researchers have argued that close community ties do not inevitably mean a disconnect from mainstream national culture (Aksoy and Robins 2000; Sökefeld 2003). In the French case, this is evidenced by a much higher level of voter participation in French elections (44.5 per cent of those eligible to vote) than in Turkish elections (7.8 per cent) (Kaya and Kentel 2005: 87, 96). More recent media reports note an increasing participation of Franco-Turks in French politics, both as candidates (Bonzon 2014) and as actors in the debate in France about outlawing denial of the Armenian genocide (Bahri 2012). The artists discussed in this study may not contradict the larger statistics, but their work still suggests a spectrum of possibilities for retaining aspects of Turkish culture even while interacting with the mainstream. Kebab Show and C-it are at one end of the spectrum with their Turkish performances aimed at Turkish-speaking audiences. Yet even they are concerned not with issues that affect Turkish citizens in Turkey, but rather with the issues that affect immigrants from Turkey and their descendants in France (such as discrimination and voting rights). At the other end of the spectrum are artists such as Ruşen Yıldız and Ayşe Şahin, who perform in French, or Sema Kılıçkaya, who writes in French, without specifically targeting Turkish speakers, and yet they incorporate aspects of Turkish culture in their work and address issues that affect all immigrants, including immigrants from Turkey. The work of these artists suggests a new direction for the descendants of immigrants from Turkey in France. Whether these artists are contributing to a new trend or merely reflecting change that is already happening within the community, their work suggests that future studies of immigrants from Turkey and their descendants in France may have far less to say about their so-called withdrawal. Academic literature since the 1990s has observed two trends that relate to the study of immigrants from Turkey and their children. First, as Benedict Anderson noted in his discussion of ‘long distance nationalism’ (1998:  73–4), a sense of national belonging no longer depends on sharing the same geographic space. Even while accepting Anderson’s observations about members of a given diaspora organising in order to influence events in the country of origin, I  would argue that immigrants from Turkey and especially their children also demonstrate the importance of the internet for organising locally in the country where they live. A group like Kebab Show, through their radio programme streamed over the internet and through their Facebook page, may indeed open a space for participants

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to comment on events in Turkey and even to raise funds for various causes, but importantly, they also come together via social media in order to organise as members of an ethnic community located in France, where their concern is their position in France and the policies of the French Government. Second, local connections continue to be important for immigrant communities. As was apparent in interviews with rap artist C-it, he may consider himself Turkish and not French (despite his French citizenship), but his sense of community, his neighbourhood – or ‘hood’, in the street language of rap music – is his particular district of Chambéry, France, and the multiethnic population that lives there. Ruşen Yıldız, unlike C-it, expresses little attachment to Turkish identity, but with his emphasis on ‘migritude’, and connection to immigrants as a community, is not that far from C-it’s multiethnic ‘hood’, even if his audience is more linguistically diverse. The communities made up of immigrants from Turkey and their descendants and their creative work highlighted in this study clearly reflect worldwide trends of both transnational and subnational belonging. The discussion of local and transnational communities, especially in the context of Anderson’s ‘long distance nationalists’, inevitably recalls stories of diaspora. Indeed, the media and members of immigrant communities from Turkey frequently use the term, but it is one I have avoided in this study because I am skeptical that it brings anything to the discussion that is not already there in other, less contested terminology. Numerous scholars have observed that the term diaspora has come to be used so broadly as almost to lose any real meaning (e.g. Brubaker 2005: 3), referring to any ethnic or religious group that maintain a sense of connection to each other and to a homeland, even if they have no realistic intention of returning to that land. As the term diaspora comes to encompass ever more groups, the designation seems to present each one as a clearly bounded entity. Drawing on James Clifford’s much earlier work (1994) describing diaspora not merely as an orientation to a distant homeland, but also as a means to form a community in a new space, Rogers Brubaker has argued for seeing diaspora not as descriptive, but rather as a practice: ‘It does not so much describe the world as seek to remake it’ (2005: 12, original emphasis). Khachig Tölölyan, however, suggests that young people resist this ‘remaking’ by refusing to claim a diasporic identity as their only identity. Much like the artists discussed in this volume, the young people Tölölyan discusses do claim ‘an ethnodiasporic identity’, but resist the ways a solely diasporic identity would prescribe their behaviour (Tölölyan 2012: 10) and prefer to move flexibly among identities, among which diasporic identity is only one of many. Discussions of immigration have often talked about the children of immigrants as being ‘between’ two cultures, uncomfortably sitting between chairs or crossing bridges. Tunisian writer Albert Memmi famously wrote in the 1950s ‘A cheval sur deux civilisations, j’allais me retrouver également à cheval sur deux classes et à vouloir s’asseoir sur deux chaises, on n’est assis nulle part’ (As I sat on the fence between two civilisations, I realised I was just as much between classes, and that

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in trying to sit on two chairs, one generally ends up sitting nowhere) (Memmi 1966:  123). For Memmi, there may be different chairs, but they all have fixed points, and his only option is to try uncomfortably to sit on more than one at a time. German rap musician Aziza A., of Turkish origin, adapts this metaphor, not just adding another chair into the mix, but also changing ‘the place of the chair constantly within a set of weblike relations’ (Burul 2003: 214). This is a useful way of thinking about the interaction of cultures because it does not assume that there are already fixed places or identities that one must move among, but instead reminds us that those identities are also always shifting. Another common metaphor is that of a bridge. Kaya and Kentel (2005) suggest the bridge as a positive model and evaluate the capacity of Turks in France and Germany to serve as this bridge between Europe and Turkey. Among those born in France with parents from Turkey, they observe that more than 70 per cent of respondents express either greater feelings of affiliation to France or equal affiliation to both France and Turkey. Kaya and Kentel refer to this second group as members of ‘bridging groups’ (2005: 69). They identify an important and positive trend among the children of immigrants from Turkey, but the metaphor of a bridge maintains the idea of completely separate spaces, and with the descendants of immigrants serving as a bridge, the metaphor allows little possibility of movement or change. Leslie Adelson, as noted in the introduction, also looks at the metaphor of a bridge where the second generation is suspended and argues that the focus on being part of two cultures maintains the illusion that these two cultures ‘are separated by an absolute cultural divide’ (Adelson 2002: 246). Adelson convincingly argues that in the context of literature, Turkish-German writers at any rate are already a part of German culture, affecting it and being affected by it. Writing about Turkish communities in Germany, Ruth Mandel makes a similar argument, noting that ‘a process of reciprocal transformation and social differentiation has taken place in German society to such an extent that in many realms it already is impossible to distinguish two distant, bounded totalities’ (Mandel 2008: 17). While immigrant communities as a whole may have had a similar effect in France, it would be overstating the case to make such a claim regarding the influence of immigrants from Turkey in particular. It is certainly difficult in many cases to distinguish totalities, in Mandel’s words, but this has as much to do with global transformations of local cultures as it does with a particular influence of immigrants from Turkey and their descendants. They constitute too small a population within France to claim this sort of reciprocal influence; nevertheless, very much like the situation Mandel describes, most members of these communities are too enmeshed in their lives in France to be marked as fundamentally separate from the larger national community. While some young people in France with family origins in Turkey may repeat the clichés of being caught between two different cultures as they talk about their lives, their work does not reflect such a divide. Instead, it often looks as though they are creating a new, third space of creativity that draws on two cultures and

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goes beyond them. Many of the artists discussed in this study are part of global youth culture, created through media and the internet and with little dependence on particular geographic spaces or national identity. When they do turn to their parents’ culture, they are interested neither in simply reproducing folklore nor in rejecting it completely. No art exists in national isolation, and some examples of this are particularly clear: Ruşen Yıldız transforms traditional Karagöz while C-it uses arabesque melodies and rhythms in his music. Transformations like these allow for new affiliations that do not depend on being between cultures or rooted in one or the other, but allow instead for synthesis and creation of a new, third space that starts in the local (both Turkish and French), but in the end also resonates with larger issues of global youth culture. In discussing the experiences of immigrants and their children, the language we use matters. Whether we mean language in the sense of a given language, such as French or Turkish, or language in the sense of the particular words we choose, a fundamental assumption underlying this entire study is that language shapes what and how we see. As noted in the introduction to this volume, much of the language used to discuss immigration tends to emphasise linear notions of progress or regression along a line of integration, assimilation or some other measure of officially recognised belonging. The work of these artists demonstrates, however, that such narratives do not adequately describe the experiences of immigration as lived by immigrants and their children. Instead, the artists’ work underscores the complexity of having access to more than one culture, presenting this complexity as a source of richness. Both their comments on their own work and the work itself speak volumes about their participation in life in France, testifying to what I have called settling, in contrast to the usual terms of assimilation, insertion or integration. These artists are neither assimilated to some pre-existing and unchanging culture, nor are they inserted with their parents’ culture of origin whole and unaffected by their lives in France. To label them and their work as having reached some final fixed status of integration would similarly be misleading. They are involved in an ongoing process, in which their artistic work demonstrates chosen and conscious movement and adaptation, in terms of both language and content. As detailed in the previous chapters, they may move between languages or perform primarily in French or Turkish. At times, they may use Turkish cultural forms, and at others draw on contemporary French forms. It is important to recognise, however, that neither they nor their work is fixed in some space of ‘happy hybridity’ (Lo 2000), but are, on the other hand, changing. The ability to move between cultures and languages does not mean that one is destined to remain in an unchanging in-between. The meeting of cultures often involves conflict and discomfort, but this is also the process through which new relations are established. Settling describes a process that is not smooth, but one that is in the end optimistic. The well-known theorist of hybridity Homi Bhabha sees hybridisation ‘as a form of cultural negotiation, a viewing of one culture from

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the perspective of another, testing what is best in each, not one in opposition to the other, however, but each in negotiation with the other’ (Zappen 2000). Similarly, Ien Ang proposes an idea of hybridity that emphasises ‘the porousness of identities and, more importantly … that all identities evolve and take shape through daily and multiple interrelationships with myriad, differently positioned others’ (Ang 2003: 152). Bhabha’s and Ang’s discussions of hybridity emphasise culture and the meeting of cultures as an ongoing process involving continually changing entities. Too often, however, hybridity has been understood as a permanent location of in-between, a misunderstanding made more likely by the grammatical form of the term itself, as a noun that suggests a static condition. Settling, on the other hand, as a present participle, contains within its grammatical form the idea of continuing actions. The term has the additional advantage of suggesting the idea of settling for, accepting (for the moment), what is not perfect or final, which also implies the possibility of change. This does not mean that immigrants and their descendants, as they adapt and settle, are condemned to never-ending in-betweenness and otherness, or at least, not any more so than are non-immigrants. Human beings often negotiate different aspects of their identity, including but not limited to class, race and gender. Such changing modes of belonging are part of being human. This is not to minimise the particular political and personal struggles of immigrants or to say their struggles are the same as everyone else’s, but rather to reduce the alterity of those struggles, struggles that are not limited to marked others. None of the artists discussed in this volume remain fixed in a single type of performance. Kebab Show suspended performance for four years to focus their energies on the radio programme Made in Turkey, but in 2015 brought their theatre troupe back to the stage under a new name, Kebabshow Rasim Köroğlu. C-it continues his musical and geographical back-and-forth between Turkey and France and has begun work on a fifth album. Ruşen Yıldız, after years of exploring the possibilities of Karagöz, has started to translate and adapt the work of Turkish writer Nazım Hikmet and has collaborated on productions seeking to combat violence within romantic relationships. Ayşe Şahin, even as she creates a new one-woman theatre company, Je suis de bonne Cie (I’m Good Co.), has started to devote more time to writing original scripts. Sema Kılıçkaya’s second novel, Le Royaume sans racines (2013), received the 2014 Seligmann Prize against Racism, and she has published a third novel, Quatre-vingt-dix-sept (2015), in which she leaves questions of immigration in the background in order to look at belonging and identity in Turkey, particularly in the wake of the Gezi Park demonstrations. Each of these artists continues the process of settling, inspired by changing material and political concerns, leaving the door open to other future possibilities. One final cluster of concepts that has run throughout this study concerns the idea of home and the related terms of hospitality, host and guest. Because these are such emotionally charged terms and ones it is tempting to see as self-evident, in the final section of this chapter, I would like to take one more look at these terms to see what stories can be told with them. Each term tells a story, makes assumptions

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about the actors, and draws conclusions about what is deemed appropriate action based on those stories and assumptions. It is unlikely that there is one ideal term, one ideal story, that can tell the truth of every person’s individual experience; thus it is important to be conscious of the stories implied in the words chosen. As discussed earlier in this book, Derrida weaves a narrative of different kinds of hospitality that are more or less open to the guest, more or less open to the other. Drawing on his writing on hospitality, Meyda Yeğenoğlu argues for a more generous version of hospitality in Europe, one in which ‘Europeans’ would give up some of their sovereignty as hosts in order to open the door, so to speak, to Muslims in Europe. In this laudable call for a political hospitality that comes closer to Derrida’s unconditional ethical hospitality, however, Yeğenoğlu passes over the fact that many of the ‘Muslims’ are also already Europeans, at home and, in theory at least, not in need of hospitality. In such a case, a narrative of hospitality is misplaced. She is certainly right that in some European imaginaries the ‘Muslim’, regardless of nationality or birth, is viewed as an outsider, against whom ‘Europeans’ define themselves, and this results in what she calls the ‘over-Islamization of Muslims’ (Yeğenoğlu 2012: 119). Because her argument concerns the idea of Muslims (often read as a synonym for immigrants from Muslim countries) as outsiders by definition, she does not distinguish among those who are not Muslim or the many versions of Muslim identity and practice. One of the purposes of this book has been to provide alternative stories of belonging that might counter the exclusionary definitions of European identity that Yeğenoğlu criticises. Implicit in the idea of hospitality is a division between hosts and guests, between those who both belong to a place and own it and those who do not (e.g. Derrida 2000, 2001; Rosello 2001; Still 2006). The language of ‘guest workers’ used in Germany, for example, meant that by definition immigrants were not at home and did not belong. When their children were born in Germany, the narrative that explained their presence as guests resulted in inappropriate government policies and contributed to the alienation of the descendants of immigrants. In the words of a German activist whose grandmother came from Turkey, ‘We as a nation … weren’t sensitive and welcoming to new Germans, especially people of Turkish origin who have been in Germany for decades. Many of these people don’t feel at home here. They don’t feel like they’re a part of Germany. They don’t feel appreciated. They’ve never been thanked for their contributions to Germany’ (Scaturro 2014). France never adopted the term of guest worker, preferring instead the term immigré travailleur (immigrant worker), which carried its own story of single, temporary workers, rather than one of families living permanently in France. As immigrant families put down roots in France, government policies continued to assume that once they retired and were no longer workers, they would also cease being immigrants and would return to their countries of origin (Escafré-Dublet 2008). Accordingly, even in France, an entire semantic field has developed around this idea of the immigrant as guest. Thus, for example, the academic and political literature speaks of home and host countries, with the underlying assumption that

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the newcomers (and their children) have left their home (country), where they had an unquestioned right to live and work, to arrive in the host country, where like any guest, they (and their descendants born in the country) are subject to the goodwill of the host. If immigrants and their descendants appropriate the role of host, as argued earlier in this volume, the power relations inherent in the concepts of host and guest may be challenged, but not eliminated. If employing the language of guest and host for recent immigrants is already problematic, it is even more so in the case of their children, who live in the country in which they were born and educated. Both Şahin and Kılıçkaya explore the possibilities of reshaping the language of hospitality, and their work questions the usual divisions of host and guest. The related concept of home calls up a range of associations, but metaphors drawn from the physical world should be used with caution. It is difficult to separate the concepts of guest and host from relations of power; with home, it is important to assume neither that it is inevitably a space of gendered oppression nor that it is one of blissful belonging. The absence of neat borders between communities in the context of immigration should also make one suspicious of spatial metaphors that imply certain borders, especially those of inside and outside the home. Understanding settling in terms of the process of creating home risks being caught up in an understanding of home as a fixed and closed physical space. While buildings may be fixed in one place with solid doors and walls, how those doors are opened or closed and who may enter depends on the inhabitants. We can also have many homes, many languages and many cultures. As Sarah Ahmed (2000) writes, communities (and, I would argue, homes) are created through stories, and these can be invented or transformed to create homes that meet the needs and desires of long-term, temporary and new inhabitants. Homes and language are also too often assumed to be monolithic: ‘Even the notion that “language” becomes a “home” for those in exile or diaspora presupposes that a territorial “home” is the place of authenticity, from which language as “home” can only distinguish itself in sorrow or celebration’ (Adelson 2002: 247). Adelson here refers to the common theme of the writer separated from the ‘national home’, who can continue to live a kind of virtual nationality by writing in his or her national language. Adelson’s critique is more than a critique of nostalgia, but also a critique of the premise that a writer can have only one authentic language, one authentic home. The work of the artists discussed in this volume may privilege one language or another, but the actual or implied simultaneous presence of the other language suggests a response to Adelson, demonstrating that language as home is not necessarily monolithic. Despite these caveats about spatial metaphors in describing artistic production, they remain a useful conceptual tool; like any tool, however, it depends on how they are used. Sarah Ahmed’s (2000) development of the metaphor of home is compelling. Rather than conceiving of home as an unchanging place of exclusive and biological belonging, she argues that homes can be places of

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chosen belonging, where people agree to live together for affective, economic or other reasons. They may be related, but often are not. According to her use of the term, home is not a fortress that expels strangers, but rather a space that requires strangers to create a connection with those in the home. Ahmed uses this metaphor of home in order to discuss places where community and belonging are never assumed, but rather created. Thus ‘home’, which comes to stand in for community, is built together by those who wish to have access to it, not necessarily to live there exclusively, but to be able to come and go, to consider it one of multiple homes and places of belonging. A  utopian vision perhaps if applied to national homes, but a useful thought experiment for imagining other modes of belonging. This idea of chosen community is powerful, and one that I believe applies to the artists considered in this study. Home is at least in part a question of imagination. Imagined in terms of descent, home is exclusionary, but imagined in terms of chosen belonging, it opens the doors to all who want to participate. The artists in this study use Turkish language and culture for both affective and political reasons, but those reasons have little to do with Turkey itself, and far more to do with how they imagine themselves and their work as part of creating a home, part of settling, in France.

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Index Note: ‘n.’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page. works can be found under artists’ names. Adelson, Leslie 9–10, 20, 112 affiliation 8, 83–4, 103–4, 113 Alevis 92, 101–2 anti-communautarisme 33 see also communautarisme assimilation 18–20, 23, 33, 106, 113 associations, Turkish-French 48–9 audience 5, 17, 108n.4, 110 bilingual 55–6, 84–5 literature and 105–6 location, politics, 43 music and 24, 35, 38 theatre and 25, 46–8, 56–60, 63–9 passim, 76, 79–80, 88–9 Bakhtin, Mikhail see carnivalesque banlieue 11–12, 29, 40–2 see also neighbourhood bilingualism 19, 34–5, 40, 84–5 humour and see humour, bilingualism theatre and 25, 53–4, 58 carnivalesque 54–5, 73, 79–81 censorship Karagöz 80–2 rap music 28, 35–6, 43 colour blind approach 13, 24 communautarisme 19, 21, 24, 27, 30–3, 59 see also anti-communautarisme diaspora 110–11

discrimination 10–14, 19, 29–30, 50, 101, 107 droit à la différence (right to difference) 11, 31 see also multiculturalism European Union Turkish membership and 2–3, 112, 115 exclusion 36, 72–3, 115 see also discrimination exile 45–6, 51, 105, 116 filiation see affiliation Fransa Günlüğü (Datebook France) 16 Front National 11, 33 gender 4–5, 25, 60n.3, 86, 89, 116 see also humour and gender Glick-Schiller, Nina see methodological nationalism government policy citizenship and 2 immigration and 13, 19, 21–2 return of immigrants and 19–20 see also return migration theatre and 58–60 gurbetçilik 46, 84 Hatay 92, 101 hospitality 25–6, 67–8, 107, 114–15 Derrida, Jacques and 76, 92–3, 106 Rosello, Mireille 94

Index humour 25 bilingualism and 48, 52, 54–5, 58, 68–70 gender and 74–5 theories of 55–6, 61–2, 75 hybridity 113–14 identity politics see communautarisme immigration from Turkey to France, history of 6–7, 97–8 insertion see multiculturalism integration 21–2, 23, 31–2, 50, 113 internet activity 16–17, 34, 39, 110–11 Karagöz plays political critique and 79–80, 88–90 structure of 78–9 Kebab Show 24 Fransa, Ben de geldim (France, I’m Here, Too) 48, 52, 55 İmamın manken kızı (The Imam’s Daughter the Fashion Model) 47 Zamane Evlatları (Children of the Times) 47 marginalisation see exclusion Merkel, Angela 20 metaphors of immigration 10 methodological nationalism 8 migritude 83, 91n.1 Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-Development 12–13 see also government policy minorities in Turkey 100–1 minority languages 22, 29, 43n.3, 53–4, 92 Mosaïque 59 multiculturalism 19–20, 113 criticisms of 20–1, 30–1 see also droit à la différence narrative homes 51–2, 56, 107

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neighbourhood 51, 91, 99–103, 111 see also banlieue Oluşum/Genèse 16 Partie des Indigènes de la République 33 post-migrant 23 racaille 38 Radio Made in Turkey 16, 46, 59, 114 rap music 24 industry 36, 43 language 38–9 political expression 28, 36–9, 43 religious practice 73–4, 99–100 return migration 26, 35–6, 44n.6, 58–9, 85, 96–8, 115 see also government policy, return of immigrants riots of 2005 11–12, 38, 42–3 Said, Edward see affiliation; exile Sarkozy, Nicolas 2, 12–13, 38 second generation 8–10, 15, 48, 54 settling 1–2, 23, 25–6, 73, 76–7, 85, 91, 92, 113–14, 116 slang 89 SOS Racisme 33 statistics 13–15, 30 Taylor, Diana 77–8, 81 theatre conventions of 57 history of immigrant 58–9 history of in Turkey 57 Trajectoires et origines: Enquête sur la diversité des populations en France 14 Turkification 99, 101, 107 Turkish ‘repli’ (withdrawal) 15, 33–4, 51 Türkiyeli 7, 27n.5