Emine ozdamar biography

Emine Sevgi Özdamar (born 10 August 1946) is a writer, director, and actress of Turkish origin who resides in Germany and has resided there for many years.
Emine Sevgi Özdamar is a writer, director, and actress of Turkish origin who resides in Germany and has resided there for many years.
Özdamar's work is written predominantly in German.

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Emine Sevgi Özdamar: 'Life is a Caravanserai'

The first time people encountered this woman with the long black hair in Germany was on television screens. Whenever a role had to be cast for a "Mediterranean"-looking woman, she was the one people called. She played oppressed, headscarf-wearing women or mousy mothers with strong migrant worker-sounding accents. She was clear, however, about the clichés she was reinforcing, and knew that she had long overcome them herself.

Few people realized what literary talent the woman acting in these roles could boast. Emine Sevgi Özdamar is familiar with the feeling of being underestimated. She is even empowered by it.

Thumbing one's nose at the notion of 'migrant' literature

Even the title of her debut roman bucked literary conventions. It's a mini-story of its own — her need to tell stories apparently can't be stopped. The method convinced the demanding jury of the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize. Özdamar won the award in 1991.

'Life is a Caravanserai' by Emine Sevgi Özdamar

Many other prestigious prizes followed, from the Carl Zu

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Emine Sevgi Ozdamar

Emine Sevgi Ozdamar was born in Malatya, Turkey in 1946. She came to Germany for the first time when she was 18 years old. In 1976, she began working at the Volksbuhne in East Berlin. She has lived and worked as a writer and actress since 1986 and resides in Berlin.

For Ozdamar, literature also means life and language is not only a vehicle, but also a substantial part of her personality. At some point, she began writing in German because her mother tongue, Turkish, had lost its innocence during the military dictatorship. "The words had fallen ill," she once described it. Bertolt Brecht's language became her saviour. In the book, the 18-year-old who heads off to Germany at the end of the novel ends up living out her dream.

Just like the author herself. In Berlin, she began working as a director's assistant at the Volksbuhne theatre. Celebrating a successful career as a storyteller, actress and theatre director, she has also been a member of the German Academy for Language and Literature since 2007

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Emine Sevgi Ozdamar, “Black Eye and His Donkey” (1993)

Abstract

In the wake of the 1992 Bachmann Prize controversy, the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit asked Ozdamar to describe her experiences as a migrant writer in Germany. The following text somewhat sidesteps this topical question, opting instead to narrate her engagement with the theatrical process of staging experiential narratives about migration. Karagdz, or black eye, is a Turkish theatrical genre of shadow puppetry that usually serves as a vehicle for social critique and political satire.

Source

My first play was Karagdz in Alamania, written in 1982. It means “Black Eye in Germany.” I wrote it because I had discovered the letter of a Turkish guest worker. I never knew the man personally. He had gone back to Turkey for good, to his home village.

Guest worker is a term I love. When I encounter it, I always picture two people; one is just sitting there as a guest, and the other is working.

The letter was written on a typewriter. The other thing that struck me about it was that at no point did he say anythin