PASSAGES OF ECONOMIC MIGRANTS IN CARYL PHILLIPS’ THE FINAL PASSAGE AND TÜRKLER ALMANYA’DA BY BEKIR YILDIZ

Abstract

Caryl Phillips’ The Final Passage (1985) is about the Caribbean characters from St.Kitts who immigrated to Britain in 1958 and Bekir Yıldız’s Türkler Almanya’da (1966) depicts the characters who went to Germany in the early 1960s in the first wave of the move of the Turkish guest workers. Although Phillips’ and Yıldız’s novels reflect the lives of individuals from two different cultures and two different countries who had totally different life styles, cuisine, traditions, rituals, flora, fauna, climate and history, there are many parallelisms between the novels. Because the patterns, dynamics, push and pull factors of immigration of people from all the Caribbean countries including St.Kitts and Nevis to Britain which began in the late 1940s and recruitment of guest workers from Turkey to (Federal) Germany which started in the early 1960s were based on economic reasons which turned these passages into a chain migration soon despite the hardships suffered in the host countries. So, the aim of this study is to make a textual and comparative analysis of the flow of the Caribbean people and Turkish people from the standpoint of the ‘economic immigration’ and show that the migration from developing to developed countries was physically, emotionally and mentally demanding, excruciating and challenging whether there was a colonial bond or not. The study concludes that in spite of the differences between the sending countries, living and working in another country for all the ‘economic migrants’ from different parts of the world required perseverance, endurance, flexibility and adaptive skills on the part of the guest workers and immigrants in addition to basic needs of work, shelter, food and respect.