DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0022 Faces along the Mirror: Last Objects of Orientalism Zafer Şenocak in Conversation with Kristin Dickinson This interview was first conducted in German and translated into English by Kristin Dickinson. KD: First of all, thank you so much for sharing some of your unpublished work with us for this special issue of Colloquia Germanica. While the poems and sketches presented here were not necessarily created in conjunction, they complement each other in interesting ways. Your poems often have a fragmentary and imagistic quality, for example, and your images depict entangled figures and versions of fractured selves, which are often themes of your poetry. Do you ever create poems in relation to specific images or vice versa? Or does your work as a visual artist ever influence your use of language? ZŞ: The connection between my poems and sketches is very strong. Not only because I’ve been drawing for a good fifteen years now, but also because I created many of my sketches almost in parallel to poems. I draw much more in the phases when I’m writing poetry than when I’m working on prose. That isn’t intentional, it just happens automatically. And when I think back to the early 80s when I first began writing poetry, it really was like painting in language. My texts are very much based on memories, and the language of memory is the image. While we might recall certain words or situations from our early childhood, our memory is first and foremost visual. And that memory is often deceptive. Just like the poem, it’s not necessarily based on reality. So, for me, it’s not about reality at all, but about the fact that there is something other than reality. Even though we can’t name this other realm directly, we are exposed to it, and we work with it. This is essentially the function of the writer for me, to work on and with this other reality. KD: Do writing and drawing ever open up different creative processes or modes of expression for you? ZŞ: It’s easier for me to play with gender identity in images. My male figures are often very feminine, or lacking any attributes that might be characterized as masculine. I also find it easier to depict violations of border lines in images than in language. Why? Because I don’t write in a broken language. I write in a more elevated, poetic language in both German and Turkish. And that’s a risk. Some people might read my poems and say there’s nothing postmodern about them. But that doesn’t mean that the poems are old-fashioned. Rather, they offer a different, complementary perspective to my drawings. My poems are often cynical, for example, and I think I am able to find a language that doesn’t fall into stereotypes, which saves me from the romanticizing tropes of Orientalism. KD: At times, you also use very classic forms, such as the ghazal. The ghazal is an amatory poem with a strict rhyme scheme that originated in Arabic poetry of the seventh century. It later made its way into the Persian-speaking world, the Indian subcontinent, the Ottoman Empire, and even European countries such as Germany via Orientalist poets like August von Platen und Friedrich Rückert. What does it mean for you to use this poetic form in German? Do you see yourself as participating in or speaking back to a German Orientalist tradition? At its core, the ghazal is of course a poetic expression of both love and separation, beauty and pain. Do these juxtapositions also hold the potential to challenge systematizing tendencies of Orientalist scholarship? ZŞ: The form of the ghazal is indeed very well suited for thematizing a certain dissolution of boundaries. It foregrounds self-abandonment and then a redrawing of boundaries. There is no farewell or arrival in this form, but a sense of continuation and connection. In my own poem, “Ghazal eines Unbekümmerten,” there is a disintegration of the self, which is also a form of love. But writing a ghazal is never a conscious decision for me. I don’t set out to use this form. Rather, the poem first comes into being and then I realize that I have captured the tone of a ghazal. I don’t use the strict rhyme scheme of a ghazal either, and in that way, I differ from earlier poets like Platen and Rückert. It’s the sound of the ghazal that I transport back into German. I must confess I really like these poems when they arise, because they seem to be connected to my innermost self, in a way that I don’t otherwise usually recognize myself. I would generally consider myself to be a “Western” and “secular” person in terms of my way of life. But I seem to have a lot of rhythms, ideas, and dream-like images from my childhood that point elsewhere. Where does that all start to become Orientalist? That’s a very difficult question. Such writing can easily become overly romanticized as an expression of lust for the beautiful world before your eyes or a glimpse of paradise. It’s tricky, because the ghazal does trigger a kind of longing in me and longing is always difficult to write about without becoming sentimental. In my own writing, such longing is always interrupted by the present. This is one way I avoid the tropes and traps of Orientalism. KD: Do your drawings also play with established forms or norms? What influences have shaped your sketches? 464 Faces along the Mirror: Last Objects of Orientalism DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0022 DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0022 ZŞ: Whereas color is an essential component of Orientalist artwork, I always work with black pastel crayons. My black and white images thus present a kind of counter approach to romanticizing images of the Orient that utilize very vibrant colors. In terms of influence, black and white films and especially film noir are one important source of inspiration for my sketches. Lyric poetry is another. And the German Jewish tradition to which Else Lasker-Schüler and Paul Celan belong has also had a lasting influence on my work. Lasker-Schüler is a great example of someone for whom text and image belong together. She wasn’t an Orientalist, but she developed an image of the Orient that was connected to her soul, to her own identity. This is also what I was trying to describe with my own work and my use of forms like the ghazal. KD: That’s an interesting distinction you make between being “Orientalist” and developing your own image of and connection to the so-called “Orient.” How would you describe your personal connection to Orientalism as someone who migrated to Germany from Turkey as child? ZŞ: For me, the question of Orientalism is more a kind of practice or experience than a theory. When I first came to Germany as a child in 1970, I suddenly saw an incredible amount of romanticized images of the Orient. These images were much more present in Germany than in Turkey. So, I was exposed to and became a subject of Orientalism at a very young age. On the other hand, Turkey experienced massive societal ruptures in the twentieth century. The history of Westernization practices there led to a situation in which part of society really valued the West and secularism whereas another part of society led a more traditional way of life. At the same time, everyone wanted to draw something different from a shared cultural heritage. The negotiation between these different positions is of course a central theme of my literature. Later, when Edward Said’s book came out in 1978, I read his understanding of Orientalism against my childhood and my own position on the borderline between Turkey and Germany. That disjuncture is an important site of emergence for many of my poems. For me, it’s also important to put Said’s concept of Orientalism in historical context with the Sandinista uprising during the Nicaraguan Revolution (1978- 79), the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1979), and the foundation of the Greens in Germany (1980). All of these events brought about an anti-system discourse, through which everything that was considered Western was challenged. And in its early stages, this was a very positive kind of stimulus for me. Even though this movement collapsed within a few years, at its inception it provided a way out of the standard postcolonial institutions that were still exercising power all around us. Faces along the Mirror: Last Objects of Orientalism 465 DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0022 466 Faces along the Mirror: Last Objects of Orientalism Overall, I find Orientalism to be a very difficult, even contradictory topic, because I think different cultural patterns do exist across the world. Whether you’re writing a history of Cologne, for example, or of Kayseri or Damascus, these cities present very different social and cultural constellations. But in the end, we are all heirs. We inherit everything that previous generations have done. And this inheritance is of course heavily burdened from the nineteenth century onwards through the ever-increasing speed of cultural encounters. Which means that this word Orientalism now evokes a completely different set of images and ideas for our present than it does for the nineteenth century.