Lyric: Şafak Sarichiçek: “Gelungene Lyric ist Zen-Lyric”

Mr. Sarıçiçek, nice that you have time for a conversation. You are currently completing a legal traineeship and writing – at the same time.

I’m currently in the administrative station at the regional council, where it’s about immigration law, including deportations. For me, this is a completely new area where legal questions suddenly take on a violent, very drastic reality. It is instructive to see how the different parties involved think and argue, authorities and lawyers. Migration law is extremely explosive these days. The legal profession is exciting, but I do wonder, especially when you read certain judgments and reasons for decisions, whether some things in law are really that sensible. Marx’s position was that law was ultimately an instrument of power for the ruling classes.

Haben Ambitions to change something?

I believe that something can definitely be done within the legal system. On another, symbolic level, poetry can be transformative, pointing to the dark places in society where people look at each other but don’t see each other. I explore this, for example, in my poem “Levinas deprives them of their ability to see.” I’m exploring a real incident: a wedding in Germany that I attended as a child – I spent some of my childhood years in the Ruhr area. At this wedding there were bald guys in bomber jackets outside the entrance who just stood there and stared at us the whole time. I found it very threatening as a child and it stuck with me. At the Aldi in Dahlhausen there was this bold graffiti: “Turks out,” which I always walked past on the way to kindergarten. I want to make a difference, at least in my small environment, with my poetry. But of course, who reads poetry? Mostly people from the educated middle class.

Are you currently writing something?

I’m reading a lot at the moment, that’s part of writing. That’s actually what writing is: writing in your head. You collect and later the urge comes to write everything down. I’m currently reading “Lost Illusions” by Balzac, a bit of Hegel and Elif Batuman. I’m also working on a prose project on intergenerational trauma, but that’s still in its early stages.

Translingual poetry is quite trendy, but you consistently write almost exclusively in German.

I grew up with both languages, Turkish and German, as my mother tongue. My mother grew up here in Germany; her parents were guest workers. My grandmothers spoke Zazaki to me, I understand it, but I can only swear in this language myself. I associate English more with spaces of freedom, with cosmopolitanism. This variety of languages ​​does a lot for your thinking; it makes you more open, more curious and you get a playful approach to language.

In my book “Jamsid’s Mirror Chalice” (2019) I have inserts in Persian and Kurdish. But in general I write less translingually. You shouldn’t do that just because you’re giving in to a trend, as is the case in postmodern poetry. Translinguality should always have a function. I had experiments in Turkish when I was 13 or 14. I always feel a little foreign in German, which is why I try to break the sentence structure or find my own way of dealing with it. Precisely because of the dominant status of the German language, as a member of two minorities in Turkey, Alevite and Zaza, I don’t want to just leave the rigidity in it alone. Rather, multilingualism opens up a new, freer way of thinking about language. My poem “Peripheral” deals with a connection through a shared experience of homelessness. I always make sure not to fall into a lane of confessional and sensitive poetry, but rather to create something that is unique – something that, if possible, does not drift into generalities.

In my opinion, you can avoid this very well by using rather unusual images and word combinations in your poems.

That’s what I find so exciting about the French Surrealists and Paul Celan: the hermetic nature of language. I try to avoid getting too much into the autobiographical sphere and revealing details. I like to stick with TS Eliot, who basically says in his essays: Successful poetry is Zen poetry. The more impersonal it is, the better. That doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t have anything to do with you, it’s more about avoiding the therapeutic aspect that is often cultivated.

anti-heartbreakPoetry?

Yes, you need abstraction.

Findn it frustrating that the Is being a poet so poorly paid?

Absolutely. How little poetry is valued. Or in general: that culture is quickly saved as if it were a luxury. Writers are so important because they store social wealth beyond the logic of profit. Everyone has the potential to receive poetry, but you are too rushed. That’s why an academic bubble in this country mainly deals with it. It doesn’t have to be that way: In Turkey, poetry is valued more; a farmer can recite poems by Ahmed Arif or Nazim Hikmet; poetry really still has a collective function – even supposedly difficult poetry. The fact that poetry is given such little importance in Germany indicates that our society is slipping into consumerism. The poetry, which is at least received more widely, is often so trivial. This has to do with the production conditions and the attention economy of our society. And when poetry is valued, it is done in a technocratic way: poem analyzes with clear interpretations. This causes so many generations of children to hate this beautiful form – and it trivializes it.

I particularly like the fish-eater cycle poems in your new volume of poetry “Wasserstätten”. It’s about mass production of fish on the one hand, exploitation and alienation of the workers who handle the fish, and on the other – how people in catering jobs become fish themselves, so to speak. But why are water and fish so present in your poetry?

The water theme runs through all of my poetry. Fish can symbolize different things: the feminine, the child, vulnerability, innocence, naivety. Water has this connecting and fluid quality, it bypasses obstacles and finds its way. At the same time, it is what connects us in a geographical context, moving between countries, like me. And there is this mystical dimension: we cannot properly grasp water, but at the same time we ourselves are largely made up of it. The cycle arose because I worked in the catering industry myself. By the way, there is still a burn scar from it on my arm.

She processn also Her Gastro experience with fish?

I had a catering job for a few months while taking the state exam, parallel to a job in the library. I found the transition between the product and the person producing it exciting: you lose your humanity and become a kind of fish. At the same time, fish embody something so primal. I don’t fully understand what’s going on with them. In Alevi mysticism, for example, the patron saint Hizir is depicted riding a fish. Water and fish in this completely technological capitalist world – that’s a remnant that evades rationality.