In the beginning was the man. And everything that surrounded him was of his domain. With the same fury with which domesticaba nature, their animals and plants, and was submissive to women and children. The man was the meat and the honor of their religion. So in the heaven of God like that of Allah. In that hell he lived Filiz, first the girl and then the woman, protagonist of a recent book by the publisher Peripheral, Blue ornament, a text in which the beauty and vesania are fused to give the human being the skeleton of your natural existence. “We are sheep and shepherds at the same time”, is the description that makes the protagonist of his 11 siblings, raised in a Turkish village. “We take care of each other. We feed each other and each other we stick on the sides. Mother takes care of father, father’s care for us from the wolves…”.
Years ago, the author, Katharina Wlinker (Vienna, 1979), I was listening to the bible story of that young woman who a hundred times have you had the flesh bruised and the broken bones at base of beatings. The two men were in a hut in rural Austria, practically locked up there for a week, far away from the horror that Filiz imported from Turkey. The recorder turns. Filiz does not know with certainty how old it is. 12 brothers, one after the other, did not allow a site to regard. She was the seventh, which looked after the lambs. Bathed in the river, slept at the satin in times of harvest, when it fell the snow were already cold and if food was scarce, they ate less. Always had a daughter stripping the father of his overcoat when he reached home, and the other is kneeling at his feet, “lava you lava, borrándole the day of the” “plant” and calzándole with delicacy the flip-flops. When the man appeared in the kitchen, the silence was espesaba to see what mood is presented by the dinner. And was the honor, the whole of life was a matter of honor. A man should not mancillarlo a woman or a daughter. Before the death. That was the childhood of Filiz at the village in Turkish. Overcoming the severity brutal father ended up fleeing their home to fall into the arms of a husband torturer.
Complaint of the father doctor
The recorder continues to rotate. Everything that records what account now the book, where the word becomes poetry. A childhood in rural and primitive, seasoned with ignorance and superstitions to preserve female purity and deliver it to the man, for always and without question.
The father of Katharina Winkler was a country doctor in Austria who was forced to denounce the husband of Filiz for abuse, but it was not the doctor, but his wife, who discovered that under the niqab of the protagonist negreaban the cardinals. Might serve for that the niqab.
Katharina was 13 years old when the Turkish woman full of strokes sneaked into the life of the family, and in his first book, now translated into Spanish after the versions in other languages, and that has become poetry, the cruelty that pervaded the life of Filiz with her husband, Yunus. “The poetry was necessary for the reader to have a support in your journey through the netherworld. In life there are no depths to absolute are death and beauty on one side and the other and there is not one without the other. Poetry is a counterpoint to the aesthetic violence. The beauty does not deny or subjected to cruelty,” explains the author in a hotel of Madrid, on his first trip to Spain to present the book. With the poetic prose that does not cease, Winkler speaks of a past world that is common to many countries. Could well be the rural Spain of the end of the beginning of the TWENTIETH century in an obscure town, for example, the England chimney sweeps, alcoholism, violent of a cossack. Or our days. It is a violence timeless. “When one immerses himself in a story and in a subject just coming to the human, to what concerns us and gives us the ability to create empathy. A large part of our current problems are born of a deficit of empathy,” says Winkler.
Disconnect temporary
empathy does not distinguish time periods or cultures and there is in this book a deliberate misplacement temporary that barely breaks with some references to the conflict between the Turkish regime and the party of the kurds (PKK). Something similar happens when the protagonist dreams to emigrate to the paradise european and donning a pair of jeans. In Germany, where he now lives in Winkler, there are about one and a half million turks and almost three million germans have their origin in that country. In the sixties, Berlin signed agreements with Spain and with Turkey to attract labor. The agreement of “guest workers” who would return to their countries with a backpack full of development ended in 1973. Many did not return.
Winkler has not wished at any time to judge the migratory movements, or the customs of one and the other or the cultural clashes that have been able to produce, for example, the horror experienced by the protagonist when the austrian doctor informed him that you will report her husband for abuse, although the offer of shelter in a home for battered: “do they not know that Yunus assails any house? What kills children? What kills me? What with the knife on the kitchen table? What is that you do not know the world? Do you perhaps ignore that the world is Yunus?”, says a protagonist terrified with the honest help of the western world.
it is Not only a stark indictment against gender-based violence, which shows this book, but the age-old belief that life with blood enters. Reviews the general violence of a world order bible where heaven sends or steals the crops, sends beatings as expels children of a belly that never rests, where multiple forms of cruelty are happening day and night, as the sun or snow cover the seasons of the Turkish. Or any other place in the world.
Katharina Winkler listened to the tapes in that Filiz had recorded the story of his life. The heard to get into the skin of his protagonist, and once he was comfortable there she began to write from within. There were some details in the book that surprised to Filiz, because she herself had been told.
A new life, a new language, a terror of old
Filiz had three children with Yunus, Halil, Selin and Silk. The history of this family in Austria is not different from what the newspapers around the world told in these times of migration and hardship. Highly recommended reading for those who do hate the different of their flag, their reason of being, or an ideology to wield in an electoral process. There is a first phase in which the foreign dream of Europe as a child on the night of the three Kings. Then comes the clash of cultures, the disdain, the aid does not always solve the life, but the complicate. The family that is far away, the language is not understood. And soon, any year, spring loveece in the lives of children, that no longer show those difficulties with which it crashed the first generation of migrants.
Halil trained as a dental technician and studied Biology and Germanic. Selín he studied Spanish and History and was reading in a Spanish university for a period of time. Silk is head of negotiated in a court of vienna.
These children also suffered abuse from the father, but as time passed they stopped to see “the wolves who come flying over the hill, one after the other… fangs to the air.” These children may be today, thanks to this book, a plea against the xenophobia that is cracking Europe.
