oa Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s “A Charwoman’s Career Memories of Germany”: Prosthetic Imagination and Masquerade

This paper explores Turkish-German diasporic memory formations performed within the intersections of a politics of remembrance, issues of ethnicised migration and a sexual politics. Situated within a performance studies context, it analyses Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s short story “A Charwoman’s Career Memories of Germany” which follows the perspective of a Turkish woman who migrates into Germany as a guest worker. The narrator’s engagement with a German history is read as the workings of a “prosthetic imagination,” which she uses as a creative tool to implicate her experience of migration in culturally mediated forms of remembrance and world- making. Özdamar’s narrator masquerades as the corpse of Ophelia to gain access to a cultural and historical field of representations and uses this insider position to question from within the very discourses that perpetuate objectifying and alienating views of Gastarbeiter (guest worker) women.