7 Questions for Deniz Utlu on Father's Sea

What role does the sea play in the life of Yunus’s father?

Zeki grows up in Mardin, that mystical city at the gateway to the Mesopotamian plain. The five-thousand-year-old stone city is situated on the slope of a mountain – every window, every terrace faced the vastness of Mesopotamia. The Mardin sea knows no water. Zeki encounters the sea for the first time when he goes to Istanbul to study and steps off the train at Haydarpaşa station – that famous station that was a gift to the Ottoman Empire from Emperor Wilhelm, where the workers from Anatolia arrived and had to change trains on their way to Germany after the ratification of the recruitment agreement between Germany and Turkey in 1961. Zeki doesn’t know that he will be hired to work on a ship at this exact location and leave Turkey forever a few years later. To Zeki, the sea is an origin, the beginning of many journeys. He passes this relationship with the sea on to Yunus.

The novel’s working title was »Origin«. But not in the sense of provenance but origin as the beginning of everything. The sea in the title refers back to this origin. I am fascinated by the fact that the volume of water on Earth as hardly changed since its creation. Even the water in us used to be somewhere else on this planet, possibly inside another person. We are the sea. Yunus, Zeki’s son, who is telling these stories, says: I carry the sea in my name.

The sea may be a metaphor for storytelling. Every story a wave and together they form the vast sea of narration.

Istanbul, 2022.
 

 

Istanbul, Kızkalesi, Mardin – what connects the three Turkish cities in which your novel is set and how are they different?

Kızkalesi is a holiday spot by the Mediterranean. The word kızkalesi means »Maiden's Castle«. Because there is a Byzantine castle right out at sea. They say that a king once sent his daughter there to protect her from her prophesied death. In vain. Mardin is close to the border with Syria. It’s one of the oldest cities in human history. Many cultures have left their traces there, from the Sumerians to early Christians. Istanbul is a two-thousand-year-old city and would be the oldest capital in the world if it had stayed the capital.

The three places reveal unmistakable, downright intimidating traces of human history. Just like the characters in this novel, possibly, especially Zeki. Great historic events have inscribed themselves in his personality and on his body: the plague in 19th-century Bagdad that made his grandfather come to Mardin, the principles of Atatürk that he is taught after the Turkish Republic is founded, the heyday of cinema and the fashion of Hollywood, the coups in 1960 and 1980, post-war Germany, the oil crisis, labour migration – an entire cultural history, experienced through the movement and calmness, the efforts and the falling of a person, Zeki.

Zeki and Yunus didn’t know that they were walking over buried corpses when they visited the Maiden's Castle in Kızkalesi, but they did.

Incidentally, Mardin has kept its name while the surrounding villages and places were given new names time and again. That suits the city’s old stones, because all too often the old is destroyed in Turkey – think of the dam in Hasankeyf, where the only surviving relics of the Artuqid dynasty found outside of Mardin itself, were flooded without a second thought. At one point in the novel, Zeki thinks the following standing in front of the Hannover opera – another central place of the novel: »(…) every time he was impressed by the fact that this house had been rebuilt entirely, in his country they destroyed what was old, here they rebuilt it: Two ways of erasing memory, he thought, two ways to pretend like nothing had happened.

 

In Father’s Sea Yunus traces his father’s history of migration, before and after he came to Germany in the sixties. What is Zeki’s dream? And what leads him to Germany?

Yunus believes that he knows nothing about his father. His father lost the ability to speak when he was thirteen. And still he sets out to find him in his memories. One memory leads to the next, one image is followed by another. Soon Yunus realizes that he was wrong, that there are many memories of his father, that he knows much about this man, has learnt a lot from him. The more memories he evokes and the more he remembers his father’s stories, the stronger grows his feeling that it’s not the content of the stories that make him feel close to his father but the way of telling his stories. Without Yunus being aware of it, he, listening to his father’s stories as a child, had become witness to an oral tradition of storytelling that his father had brought to Hannover with him from his home city of Mardin. Yunus’s attempts at remembering increasingly turn into an appetite for inventing stories, only in fiction does he find his father’s truth, in storytelling. He invents his father and thus creates a Zeki who is different from his biological father but who makes him feel closer to him. Maybe that is precisely something that literature is capable of.


Hamburg, 2021.
 

After the strokes Zeki continues to suffer from locked-in syndrome: He is almost completely paralysed and can only communicate through eye movements. How and where did you research this condition?

I know the locked-in syndrome from my family, it was something that was present all throughout my life. I found the topic so gripping that I studied brain anatomy for two semesters, at the same time as I was studying for my actual degree. In terms of literature, I approached the subject through Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as well as Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo. There are few novels about the locked-in syndrome. In Dumas, it’s only present in a minor character. I would like to offer another novel on this subject with my book.
 

What is masculinity for Zeki, and how is his understanding of one‘s role different from his son’s?

Masculinity is an important theme in this novel. Yunus works off of his father’s masculinity, and of his own projections, because due to the strokes he suffered, his father wasn’t there for him physically when he began to discover his masculinity. This absence can’t be underestimated in terms of his own masculinity. Books, teachers, friends, lovers and fleeting encounters suddenly carry much more weight.

The father that Yunus invents suffered from loneliness, has paid a great price for migrating, but also for an unreasonably high sense of duty and responsibility that is expected from the oldest son of a family; his first marriage is behind him, one that almost broke him, and he yearns for a daughter he cannot see. He is someone who gained vigour from encounters with people, including affairs. But he is also tough, swears loudly and can seem uncouth. In searching for his own masculinity, Yunus realized that it’s not about categorising and delineating but about penetrating to the soft core. And finally, using this soft core as a starting point, to understand the influences of the environment on the self.

Slide, possibly late 1980s.
 

Father’s Sea is your third novel. How long did you work on it?

On my computer, there is a document from 2008 in which I tell a fairy tale about the great theft Zeki’s father suffered. I didn’t include that text in the novel but the subject matters are there. I can, I think, truly say that this novel has been on my mind for half my life. Sometimes that thought leaves me aghast.
 

Arabic, Turkish, Kurdish, German – over the course of his life Zeki keeps being confronted with new languages. What role does language play in Father’s Sea, for Zeki and for his son Yunus?

Zeki and Yunus share an approach to language that is polyglot. They both share the experience that they didn’t process the most incisive events in their lives in the language of their mothers. There is a language behind language, an universal language, the mother tongue of all poets, if you will, and there, in the resonance chamber and semantic space of that language is where Yunus meets his father. And talks. From there he overcomes a speechlessness and an inability to understand in dealing with his mother, two things that separated mother and son, so that a real human encounter between the generations, beyond roles, becomes possible.

Mardin, 2022.

All photos: © Deniz Utlu

What role does the sea play in the life of Yunus’s father?

Zeki grows up in Mardin, that mystical city at the gateway to the Mesopotamian plain. The five-thousand-year-old stone city is situated on the slope of a mountain – every window, every terrace faced the vastness of Mesopotamia. The Mardin sea knows no water. Zeki encounters the sea for the first time when he goes to Istanbul to study and steps off the train at Haydarpaşa station – that famous station that was a gift to the Ottoman Empire from Emperor Wilhelm, where the workers from Anatolia arrived and had to change trains on their way to Germany after the ratification of the recruitment agreement between Germany and Turkey in 1961. Zeki doesn’t know that he will be hired to work on a ship at this exact location and leave Turkey forever a few years later. To Zeki, the sea is an origin, the beginning of many journeys. He passes this relationship with the sea on to Yunus.

The novel’s working title was »Origin«. But not in the sense of provenance but origin as the beginning of everything. The sea in the title refers back to this origin. I am fascinated by the fact that the volume of water on Earth as hardly changed since its creation. Even the water in us used to be somewhere else on this planet, possibly inside another person. We are the sea. Yunus, Zeki’s son, who is telling these stories, says: I carry the sea in my name.

The sea may be a metaphor for storytelling. Every story a wave and together they form the vast sea of narration.

Istanbul, 2022.
 

 

Istanbul, Kızkalesi, Mardin – what connects the three Turkish cities in which your novel is set and how are they different?

Kızkalesi is a holiday spot by the Mediterranean. The word kızkalesi means »Maiden's Castle«. Because there is a Byzantine castle right out at sea. They say that a king once sent his daughter there to protect her from her prophesied death. In vain. Mardin is close to the border with Syria. It’s one of the oldest cities in human history. Many cultures have left their traces there, from the Sumerians to early Christians. Istanbul is a two-thousand-year-old city and would be the oldest capital in the world if it had stayed the capital.

The three places reveal unmistakable, downright intimidating traces of human history. Just like the characters in this novel, possibly, especially Zeki. Great historic events have inscribed themselves in his personality and on his body: the plague in 19th-century Bagdad that made his grandfather come to Mardin, the principles of Atatürk that he is taught after the Turkish Republic is founded, the heyday of cinema and the fashion of Hollywood, the coups in 1960 and 1980, post-war Germany, the oil crisis, labour migration – an entire cultural history, experienced through the movement and calmness, the efforts and the falling of a person, Zeki.

Zeki and Yunus didn’t know that they were walking over buried corpses when they visited the Maiden's Castle in Kızkalesi, but they did.

Incidentally, Mardin has kept its name while the surrounding villages and places were given new names time and again. That suits the city’s old stones, because all too often the old is destroyed in Turkey – think of the dam in Hasankeyf, where the only surviving relics of the Artuqid dynasty found outside of Mardin itself, were flooded without a second thought. At one point in the novel, Zeki thinks the following standing in front of the Hannover opera – another central place of the novel: »(…) every time he was impressed by the fact that this house had been rebuilt entirely, in his country they destroyed what was old, here they rebuilt it: Two ways of erasing memory, he thought, two ways to pretend like nothing had happened.

 

In Father’s Sea Yunus traces his father’s history of migration, before and after he came to Germany in the sixties. What is Zeki’s dream? And what leads him to Germany?

Yunus believes that he knows nothing about his father. His father lost the ability to speak when he was thirteen. And still he sets out to find him in his memories. One memory leads to the next, one image is followed by another. Soon Yunus realizes that he was wrong, that there are many memories of his father, that he knows much about this man, has learnt a lot from him. The more memories he evokes and the more he remembers his father’s stories, the stronger grows his feeling that it’s not the content of the stories that make him feel close to his father but the way of telling his stories. Without Yunus being aware of it, he, listening to his father’s stories as a child, had become witness to an oral tradition of storytelling that his father had brought to Hannover with him from his home city of Mardin. Yunus’s attempts at remembering increasingly turn into an appetite for inventing stories, only in fiction does he find his father’s truth, in storytelling. He invents his father and thus creates a Zeki who is different from his biological father but who makes him feel closer to him. Maybe that is precisely something that literature is capable of.


Hamburg, 2021.
 

After the strokes Zeki continues to suffer from locked-in syndrome: He is almost completely paralysed and can only communicate through eye movements. How and where did you research this condition?

I know the locked-in syndrome from my family, it was something that was present all throughout my life. I found the topic so gripping that I studied brain anatomy for two semesters, at the same time as I was studying for my actual degree. In terms of literature, I approached the subject through Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as well as Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo. There are few novels about the locked-in syndrome. In Dumas, it’s only present in a minor character. I would like to offer another novel on this subject with my book.
 

What is masculinity for Zeki, and how is his understanding of one‘s role different from his son’s?

Masculinity is an important theme in this novel. Yunus works off of his father’s masculinity, and of his own projections, because due to the strokes he suffered, his father wasn’t there for him physically when he began to discover his masculinity. This absence can’t be underestimated in terms of his own masculinity. Books, teachers, friends, lovers and fleeting encounters suddenly carry much more weight.

The father that Yunus invents suffered from loneliness, has paid a great price for migrating, but also for an unreasonably high sense of duty and responsibility that is expected from the oldest son of a family; his first marriage is behind him, one that almost broke him, and he yearns for a daughter he cannot see. He is someone who gained vigour from encounters with people, including affairs. But he is also tough, swears loudly and can seem uncouth. In searching for his own masculinity, Yunus realized that it’s not about categorising and delineating but about penetrating to the soft core. And finally, using this soft core as a starting point, to understand the influences of the environment on the self.

Slide, possibly late 1980s.
 

Father’s Sea is your third novel. How long did you work on it?

On my computer, there is a document from 2008 in which I tell a fairy tale about the great theft Zeki’s father suffered. I didn’t include that text in the novel but the subject matters are there. I can, I think, truly say that this novel has been on my mind for half my life. Sometimes that thought leaves me aghast.
 

Arabic, Turkish, Kurdish, German – over the course of his life Zeki keeps being confronted with new languages. What role does language play in Father’s Sea, for Zeki and for his son Yunus?

Zeki and Yunus share an approach to language that is polyglot. They both share the experience that they didn’t process the most incisive events in their lives in the language of their mothers. There is a language behind language, an universal language, the mother tongue of all poets, if you will, and there, in the resonance chamber and semantic space of that language is where Yunus meets his father. And talks. From there he overcomes a speechlessness and an inability to understand in dealing with his mother, two things that separated mother and son, so that a real human encounter between the generations, beyond roles, becomes possible.

Mardin, 2022.

All photos: © Deniz Utlu