Abstract
The concept of liminality, which is primarily an anthropological term, is not new, but in fact it is a neglected area in Turkish literary and cultural studies. The concept of liminality and its potential to open avenues for future studies remains under-researched. As one of the first steps to fill this gap, the anthropological term liminality is used to analyse a literary text as it pertains to the narration of migrant experience, living in between the rural and the urban, and the use of magical realism in Latife Tekin’s Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills (1984). Tekin’s novel is presented as a test case to show the applicability of liminality to the field of literary and cultural studies. Reading Tekin’s Berji Kristin through the lens of liminality reveals how it can be used to understand Tekin’s interest in the problems of liminal communities and her concern for the environment.
Highlights
The word liminality originates from the Latin limen, which means boundary or threshold, and is a condition of ambiguity, displacement and marginality
The concept of liminality was introduced by the anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep in his Rites des passages (1908), or The Rites of Passage (1960), which analyses the rites of passage in various societies
The magical realism of Berji Kristin is an aesthetic dimension of liminality which provides the reader with a substantial aspect of magic and a very detailed realistic depiction of real-world problems
Summary
When Latife Tekin wrote the novel in 1984, it was received with great surprise because it was not like any other novel written in Turkish. As Tekin herself cautions readers, it is misleading to read her novel as another example of magical realism and disregard real problems such as ecological insensitivity and discrimination against people living in-between Her works in general are a combination of Turkish and Kurdish legends, folk tales, songs, magic spells, elegies, jinn stories, epic tales, fables, tongue twisters and folk poetry written with a musical ear akin to Anatolian oral story-telling traditions. Characters in the novel have to emigrate from the rural parts of Turkey to the outskirt of a modern urban space, which is not explicitly named, and they are condemned to live in a shanty town, built overnight by squatters and demolished by each day by the city authorities. Living between the rich industrial modern city and the poor artisanal traditional village, the squatters lead a liminal life in a place composed of waste, garbage, refuse and remains
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