I just came home from an extraordinary experience at an open air cinema in a park in “Friedrichshein”. Together with some new friends (awesome!), I had the pleasure to watch Almanya. It is a movie about a Turkish family and their story of how they came to Germany, connected to how they live today and where they come from.
The story telling has many interesting aspects, like the use of language. As the main language is German, they had to illustrate how it was for the Turkish family to arrive in a country where they did not understand a word. So the “German” in the story is a fictive language and as a linguist, this was extremely exciting for me.
Apart from being extremely well told, the story left a main thought in my head: How everything in the past and somehow also in the future is connected. I have parts of my mom and dad in me, I carry their history with me and that of many people in my family. I am a result of the culture that my family conveyed to me. Personally, I feel extremely close to my mother and my sister and I really feel that we have a deeper connection that grows stronger every day. My most influential teachers of life lessons are from my family. My mom taught me that love is blind, my step dad taught me the importance of honesty, my granny taught me the beauty of forgiveness (and backgammon) and somehow everyone took part in who I am today. This close web of lifelines makes us who we are today.
I met people who struggled on their own, people who had left their family and sought after their own truth and happiness. For some time I thought that there were two categories of people: family people and independent people. Today I realized that maybe their web of family needed those people to get disconnected and start something different and new. And who knows, even though they are not actively connected to their family, they live up to some dream buried deep inside the family history.
In the movie, the grandfather was the one who uprooted his family and took them to a foreign land. It did not make them a family with less heritage and culture, it made them more diverse and culturally enriched. My mother, who was the first one in the entire big family to get divorced and who raised my sister and me on her own, also disconnected from certain parts of her heritage and it made us richer as a family. I know that my family respects my mother for her independence and that maybe sometimes some of them wish to be as brave as her.
I have always felt a bit disconnected from time and always very aware of the history I carried with me, or should I say that carried me? I like the thought of being an evolvement of something that existed before I was there. And my family is the proof that this evolvement is necessary, exciting and great. Tonight I am simply grateful for the things I carry from them.
