Turkish Dutch break through as writers, why only now?

23-year-old writer Lale Gül is a star. From her book I’m going to live 140,000 copies have been sold. The book is already being translated into German and twenty producers want to make it into a film.

In the book, Gül critically describes her own life as the daughter of Turkish guest workers and the strict Islamic environment in which she grew up. She “pulverizes her parents’ truth,” she says. “Actually, in every sentence, and with every word I’ve written, I’ve made someone angry. It’s a controversial subject.”

news hour Gül speaks at her publisher’s premises. Since the publication of the book, she has become threatened. Therefore stopped she writes about Islam and lives in an anonymous place.

It was obvious that the book would make a lot of sense. Maybe that’s why it would become a bestseller. But other Turkish-Dutch authors, often children of guest workers, have also been breaking through in recent years. Why only decades after they settled here?

Crush between cultures

Children of immigrants and guest workers who settled in the Netherlands from the 1960s, were caught between the Turkish culture of their parents and their environment and the Dutch culture of school, sports and library. The gap was wide, says entrepreneur and columnist Aylin Bilic, who is also of Turkish descent. It didn’t help that the Netherlands was under the spell of multiculturalism at the time, she says: you had to be and remain yourself.

“We mainly invested in feeling at home. Invested in music, folk dance, religion, television. That is noble in itself, but the question is whether you give people enough responsibility to settle in, to be able to live in the Netherlands. carrots.”

The answer: that responsibility left a lot to be desired. Gül’s parents had their backs to Dutch society. They had set their sights on their own neighborhood and their homeland, Turkey. The taboo predominated, writes Gül. You couldn’t do anything, you had to do everything.

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Gül’s book is exactly about this. It touched a sensitive nerve. Turkish-Dutch fellow sufferers recognized their own history in it. But children who grew up in strongly religious Christian families also thanked her, as did peers who struggle with their sexual identity.

But after the publication of her book, she was rejected by her own family and threatened by the community in which she grew up. Gül: “I have sometimes thought: what have I done to myself. The message is actually: you are on your own.”

‘Here I only had the street’

As a Turkish-Dutch author, Gül is not alone. Previously published the award-winning novel Be invisible by Murat Isik (2017). And recently reprinted it multiple times in a short time The prison years by Erdal Balci, about his childhood in the Utrecht immigrant neighborhood Lombok.

Balci came to the Netherlands at the age of 11 in 1980. His father worked here as a guest worker in metal construction. He brought his family over. A big change from the countryside of Turkey where he grew up. Balci: “We had whole mountains to ourselves. Here we had the street.”

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As a street fighter, he first had to learn to stand up for himself in his new environment. His parents were displaced and sought refuge in the migrant community. “In Turkey, my mother still experimented with showing her hair, wearing it loose. In the Netherlands, my parents turned into very pious people for a few years, who even started learning Arabic to read the Koran.”

Gul recognizes this. “At home you only spoke Turkish, you only watched Turkish TV, Turkish news. You did your shopping at the Turkish supermarket. You were here physically, but mentally you grew up in Turkey.”

Like many other children of guest workers, Gül grew up assuming that she would one day return to her homeland. No one therefore insisted on a good command of the Dutch language. Not their parents, not their environment, not the Dutch government. It is therefore not surprising that for a long time few Turkish-Dutch writers broke through: they were not there.

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My motto is: fight the enormous influence of group and religion. But indifference reigns in the Netherlands.

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It is still difficult for them to break through, says Balci. The Dutch literary establishment does not like his message. Like Gül, he is highly critical of the community he grew up in. “I don’t participate in the connection hysteria. From: we have to talk, we have to dialogue. My motto is: fight underdevelopment. Fight the enormous influence of group and religion.”

His books were and are not discussed. “I’ve been writing for thirteen years now. Four novels later, not a word of reviews has appeared in the newspapers.”

He thinks it is very telling for the Dutch to look away. “Indifference reigns in the Netherlands. As long as people don’t bother or there is no threat of attacks, they say: It’s their culture, let them relax.”

But he is now being read, just like Gül. Selling Turkish-Dutch fiction and non-fiction. Children of guest workers, with bestsellers in the Dutch language.

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