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Writer Kiyak: "No vacation, no child, no house."
Photo: Jacqueline Illemann / Hanser
Obviously where she got it from: this desire to attack, to fight with sabers with words, after which the opponent is then, for example, without a mouth, nose or eggs.
Mely Kiyak, columnist, playwright and author learned it from her grandmother: "She was able to dishonor entire clans through the power of her language," writes Kiyak in her new book "Frauein".
Her "tongue was a fighter-bomber", with her mouth she could "destroy whole streets".
When she finished her rapid-fire abuse, "ears fell on the floor, her audience in shock. That wasn't just scolding. It was a work of art."
Her granddaughter, who is best known for her political column "Deutschstunde" on "Zeit.de", has now written a book about herself in this tradition.
An autobiographical novel, short protocols of a political and poetic I-becoming.
In an always surprising mixture of tenderness, self-revelation and political clarity.
Your long journey to yourself.
Kiyak tells of her father, a Kurdish immigrant from Turkey, belonging to the generation of "guest workers" who were practically invisible here.
This was only made visible by a friendly German who had stuck a mustache on his face and called himself Ali: by Günter Wallraff in his report book "Ganz unten".
But he was only in disguise.
Kiyak writes: "We were told".
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Mely Kiyak
Womanhood
Published by Carl Hanser Verlag
Number of pages: 128
Published by Carl Hanser Verlag
Number of pages: 128
Buy for € 18.00
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Kiyak's book is also a declaration of love to her father, who only lived for her, the daughter.
That she would fulfill his dreams, live, make them come true - that was his goal in life.
Kiyak had to get rid of that too.
Your book tells of many liberations from the ascriptions of others.
After the Mölln arson attack, she saw herself - reflected in the pictures of the victims.
And thought: this is how you see us.
Dissatisfaction and excessive demands
After the attacks of September 11th, she saw how suddenly, even among ultra-enlightened students, people like her - foreigners, others - were being talked about.
She wasn't one of them anymore.
How she was once beaten up in a phone booth in Leipzig and no one helped her for a long time.
Her book is the story of "being told" to the radical "first-person story" after many escapes.
Because of her experiences of being ostracized and not belonging, she does not want to draw the conclusion to become an "Ali poet".
It does not want to be buried under the stone piles of attributions that minorities normally experience.
She wants to talk freely and completely about herself.
About their struggle for autonomy.
Because she also rejects this seemingly normal German woman's life.
When she looks at the life of average German women, she sees only dissatisfaction, excessive demands, wrong lives.
Nothing for her: "No thanks, I don't want a vacation, no child, no house. I just want to write."
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As a five- or six-year-old girl, she had built herself up in front of her family in a Kurdish village and solemnly declared: "I will never get married and never have children."
Back then, the little girl's announcement was followed by laughter and applause.
But Mely Kiyak made it come true.
She just wants to write, to write freely from all expectations and demands of the world.
On the trail, for example, of grandmother with the fighter-bomber.
She writes: "To have such a radical grandma was of course heaven on earth."
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