La migrazione urbana in "Sevgili Arsız Ölüm" di Latife Tekin: luoghi, forme e strategie narrative di un “esilio domestico”

Abstract

This article investigates the topic of urban migration in the works of Latife Tekin, one of the most original Turkish novelist in the 1980s. I will consider in particular her first novel Sevgili Arsız Olum (1983; Dear Shameless Death, 2001) focusing on two interrelated notions: language and the city. The main aim is to highlight how Tekin depicts the city, where peasants from Anatolia migrated, as a locus of displacement and alienation from national physical and cultural space. In doing so she uses the phenomenon of internal migration as a key to critically re-interpreter cultural patterns of Turkish unaccomplished modernization and nation-building projects. I will also take into account the notion of language as a central one in Tekin’s poetics, leading the writer to develop new forms and strategies to represent both migration and urban space.