Queer Encounters as Poetic Disruptions of the Nation in Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç’s Prinzenbad (2022)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Drawing on research highlighting the disruptive potential of migratory (e.g. Ahmed, S., 2000. Strange Encounters. Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London: Routledge, Heimböckel, D., and Weinberg, M., 2014. Interkulturalität als Projekt. Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik, 5 (2), 119–144) and urban encounters (e.g. Closs Stephens, A., 2013. The Persistence of Nationalism. From Imagined Communities to Urban Encounters. London: Taylor & Francis), this paper examines the everyday encounters in Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç’s debut poetry collection Prinzenbad (2022). More specifically, the analysis focuses on the question of how the depicted encounters unsettle a nationalist imaginary characterised by homogeneity, linearity and unity. The speaker of Keskinkılıç’s largely autobiographical poems navigates a distinctly transnational, intersectional identity – he is gay, Muslim, a third-generation immigrant from an Arab Turkish family and a German national. The poems detail casual discriminations at airport security checks and intimate encounters with men in urban cruising spots, like Berlin’s outdoor pool Prinzenbad. While the poems highlight the ubiquity of the nationalist imaginary, e.g. in personal relationships and language, they ultimately disrupt it by exploring alternative models of community and belonging in the speaker’s queer encounters.