Intimacy and affect in Turkish-German writing: Emine Sevgi Ozdamar's "The Courtyard in the Mirror"

This paper approaches the theme of emotions in the context of contemporary Turkish-German literature. It focuses on a short story which treats the experience of bereavement for a Turkish woman resident in Germany. When her parents in Turkey die, she compensates for the absence of close emotional ties in her immediate environment by minute observation of the habitual behaviour of her neighbours, including intense sensitivity to their experience of grief. My reading employs Deleuzian reading strategies to explore how the text generates intensities at a pre-subjective level, through close observation of objects, fragmented body parts and intertextual echoes, rather than depicting the psychological process of mourning in any conventional or sentimental way. The analysis highlights the importance of the virtual in the story's mirror motif, as an important way in which the narrative overcomes temporal and spatial distance, and allows us to imagine as yet unrealised possibilities of community.