Abstract

This article offers a comparative reading of Ayla Kutlu’s Bir Göçmen Kuştu O and Zülfü Livaneli’s Huzursuzluk, examining how the two novels represent historical migration and contemporary displacement. It argues that, in both texts, migration cannot be reduced to physical movement from one place to another. Rather, it functions as a cultural rupture that reorders space, identity, belonging, memory, witnessing and alienation. Bir Göçmen Kuştu O frames forced migration from the Caucasus to Türkiye through homeland loss, family memory, genealogical continuity and the search for settlement. Huzursuzluk, by contrast, locates the Syrian war, the persecution of Yazidis, refugeehood, trauma and witnessing within the wider violence of the contemporary Middle East, tracing their effects on individual and cultural memory. Its central argument is that the two novels stage witnessing in two distinct modes. Read through Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, Kutlu’s novel renders witnessing as the intergenerational inheritance of homeland loss, whereas Livaneli’s stages the synchronic implication of a contemporary listener in another’s suffering; on this reading, migration fiction holds these two configurations together as simultaneous ethical possibilities rather than as successive literary phases.

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