It may be a topic of high interest to discuss why only in the last five years or so we have so many authors in Germany with a migration history sharing their stories or novels based on their personal stories. Today though I will rather focus on the positive side of the story: the more such stories the better to re-write (at least) the literary history, both in terms of topics and autorship.
Terafik by Nilufar Karkhiran Khozani is my latest discovery belonging to this emerging literary category in Germany. The author - as the main character of the book, who shares the same name with the author, Nilufar Karkhiran - is born in Gießen in a German-Iranian family. Terafik - a Persian pronunciation of the work Trafik, by adding vowels between two consonants - is the story of getting back to roots - she is even making various genograms and trying to learn and speak Persian.
Her father, a convinced leftist, who even was a member of the SPD, German´s socialist party in the West Germany, went back to Iran after getting bankrupt. She broke any contact with her mother and built a life on her own, as a therapist in Berlin. While in Iran, she is visiting various relatives, trying to understand their life stories and eventually reconnect with her father, who remarried.
It is a journey she took searching a homeland, a Heimat, as it is called in German. The novel is rather focused on telling the story than on building up a complex narrative of any kind, which is also fine, because it allows the narrative to expand. Some stories shall be told and there is no need to keep in mind complicated structures.
Terafik raises a lot of questions about identity and connection with homelands, creating an identity content through relationship with real people and while observing real life situations - for instance, when visiting a country that her mother avoided, also influenced by bestsellers like Not Without My Daughter, which at a certain extent influenced a lot the position towards visiting Iran within families with an Iranian relative, particularly when separating and fighting for custody rights.
Personally, I am very curious to read the next book by Karkhiran Khozani and hopefully I will not wait for too long.
Rating: 3.5 stars
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