E-Book, Englisch, 216 Seiten
Taha / Gabelmann In the Belly of the Queen
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-3-86391-365-6
Verlag: Verlag Voland & Quist
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 216 Seiten
ISBN: 978-3-86391-365-6
Verlag: Verlag Voland & Quist
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Amal shocks the whole neighbourhood by beating up her classmate Younes. Her father defends her behaviour and encourages her to assert herself. From then on everyone avoids Amal - and then her father leaves. Searching in vain for an explanation, Amal finds unexpected refuge with Younes and his mother Shahira, both outsiders like her. Years later, when the situation comes to a head and the conflict with Raffiq's gang escalates, Amal flees to Kurdistan to look for her father.
Raffiq's friend Younes is the reluctant centre of attention in their neighbourhood - thanks to his free-spirited mother Shahira, who breaks all the rules. Raffiq thinks about Shahira all the time, at once fascinated and repulsed by her. Unable to bear the situation any longer, Younes plans to leave. When Raffiq's girlfriend Amal also wants to move away, Raffiq's world begins to break apart. He attempts to sabotage their plans. The question is: what does Raffiq actually want to do with his life?
In her kaleidoscopic novel, Karosh Taha expands our ideas of class, race and gender as she loops two stories around an invisible lynchpin: a woman who defies all expectations, a blank canvas for projections from all those around her. Deftly translated by Grashina Gabelmann, the book can be explored from either end, creating two very different narratives.
Karosh Taha, born in 1987 in Zaxo, Iraq, has lived in Germany since 1997. Her essays have appeared in various literary magazines. In the Belly of the Queen is her second novel and won her the Alfred Döblin Prize. Karosh Taha lives in Cologne.
Weitere Infos & Material
And they were always asking me how I’d managed to beat up the new boy who was significantly bigger and stronger than me, and I told them because everyone was listening to me and everyone made me think I’d achieved something of importance; and I told them because it made the men happy and annoyed the women; and because my father took me on his lap and urged me to tell the story to his friends as if it were his anecdote, as if I were his puppet. But it’s my story, I’d almost said. I’d almost turned around to face my father and said, it’s my story. I was still too young to get a group of men to laugh, yet too old to sit on someone’s lap, even if that someone was my father, and even if he’d asked me to sit on his lap because they kept asking to hear how I’d managed to beat up the new boy who was significantly bigger and stronger than me. So I kept telling the story, sometimes remembering a new detail, and I made up more details because I wanted them to listen to me, but at some point, even the men said: You have to take care of her, and that’s when my father stopped propping me up on his lap like a puppet, and also because my mother scolded him for it in the evenings. Every night they screamed at each other, and mother closed all the windows and the balcony door, and the heat fogged up the windows – the heat trickled down the window panes like tears; they cried because no one else did. My father opened the windows after their fight so the flat could breathe again and I could sleep, which meant I could tell the older boys in the neighbourhood the next day about how I’d beaten up the new kid, because it was something they asked about. One of them was still holding his football under his arm; they interrupted their game just to hear me talk about beating up the new boy. And one of the boys asked me if I could show him my biceps, and I didn’t know what that meant, so he rolled up the short sleeves of his shirt a little bit, bent his arm, and flexed to create a bulge, and I imitated him and made everyone laugh. And another boy asked me if I could show him my dick, and that made everyone laugh again before they went back to their game. I also told the teachers, the ones who asked, and because they looked distraught, I shortened the story, leaving out details, especially the ones I’d made up, and then they said I shouldn’t feel pleased about what I’d done. And I didn’t feel pleased; I only felt I’d accomplished something of significance. My mother forbade me to tell the story, but I couldn’t stop, because everyone asked me about it. She was only angry because the boy’s mother turned up at our door one afternoon and told us off, accused my mother of not having me under control: a girl who beat up boys couldn’t be normal; I must be spoilt, and it was my mother’s fault. She said all that. Like animals, she said, and repeated the sentence until I believed it and I wanted to pounce on her son again, who was standing next to her with his head bowed. And then his mother bent down towards me as if she’d heard my thought, threatening to rip out my eyes if I ever touched her son again. Mother protected me from the other mother with her arm and tried to drown her out with a threat of her own; I’d heard her anyway, but I wasn’t afraid and wanted to kick her in the shin. That’s when my mother slammed the door shut – as she’d sensed me flinch, and she threatened me with the same consequences as the other mother and concluded the scene with a slap in the face, telling me to feel ashamed of myself. In the evening she shouted at my father. He yelled back and told her if she didn’t shut her mouth, he’d take us back to Kurdistan. My mother wasn’t intimidated and suggested packing his suitcase for him, but father ignored her and finished smoking his cigarette while the windows cried. My parents were called in to see the head teacher, and because father was working, mother came to school on her own. The head teacher said measures would be taken. You’ve got to be strict with kids from a young age, Mrs Zaynal. You need to be consistent, she said, trying out many sentences to break open mother’s tough facial expression. And then the head teacher said, you and your husband need to work together, and that’s when mother covered her face, which exposed her to us, which shamed us, protecting her bare face with both hands. She cried and took small, quick breaths, crying like schoolgirls cry; and my mother just apologised, said she hadn’t raised me this way, I constantly played rough with the boys, I’d taken on their behaviour, it must’ve rubbed off somehow; and my mother was like the other girls who ratted me out to the teachers, with their fingers pointing in my direction and their eyes pleading. Seeing mother cry relieved the head teacher; her face relaxed and she absolutely agreed with mother – absolutely, she said. And mother didn’t stop crying, and the head made sure she didn’t stop, saying, Amal’s like a boy, totally out of control, and nodding enthusiastically and saying she’d been watching me for a while and was glad my mother had also noticed my behaviour. And then she leaned in towards my mother, the table’s edge cutting into her stomach, but the head didn’t care, and she said I was like Mowgli who grew up with the wolves, and mother cried even more, calling me Mowgli-girl while sobbing into the tissue the teacher had offered her to make clear it was not she herself but the daughter, the Mowgli-girl, who would be punished. It’d be good for her to have more friends who are girls, said the head. A social rehabilitation so to speak, she said, and was unsure if my mother understood her, and for the first time, the head teacher looked at me and asked, Amal, do you actually have any female friends and if so how many? I stayed quiet. Amal, you don’t have to be embarrassed, she said, wanting to make me cry like she’d made my mother cry. None of the girls wanted to be friends with me; she knew that because I’d bugged each of them at least once in their life, like the boys did, and they’d told everyone at school – they loved telling each other how I’d annoyed them, how they’d suffered, how they’d been hurt. If I’d pushed one girl, then I’d pushed them all, because they immediately told each other and listened to each other and retold the story as if each had been individually affected. And that evening, my parents yelled at each other again because my mother passed on the humiliation she’d suffered at the head teacher’s office – that’s how she phrased it – to my father. She said she was ashamed of his absence, it indicated he wasn’t interested in his daughter. And she underlined how much I was his daughter – your daughter did this, your daughter didn’t do that – as if I’d crawled out of my father’s navel. He had no choice in the end but to tell her to shut up, which aggravated mother even more, and she stopped talking to my father for weeks, and because I was the reason for their fight, she also stopped talking to me. My father and I enjoyed the first few days of her silence, because we could eat in peace, play cards, laze around in silence, do everything in peace. Then it got harder because father couldn’t find his lighter, and mother said nothing, and I couldn’t find the glue stick and mother said nothing, and soon her silence became so mighty that we too fell silent and the windows stopped crying. But my father, who loved telling stories, who loved to laugh, eventually apologised to my mother, and he must’ve done it well, because my mother is stubborn, because she’s got a block of cement in her head. The neighbour asked her how he’d managed it, because the neighbour also knew how stubborn my mother could be, and my mother smiled and slurped her chai, slurped and wouldn’t stop slurping, as if her chai glass were bottomless. After she’d finished her chai in one go, she wiped beads of sweat from her upper lip, because that’s where mother sweats when she’s hot, and then she told the neighbour that father had turned on his sweetest tongue. The neighbour laughed loudly and said, I bet he did more than talk with it, and that’s when mother got up restlessly and poured herself another chai. I couldn’t appease mother with words. Father always spoke for both of us, and this time he’d only spoken for himself, and I started making my bed, putting my clothes in the washing basket, or clearing away my plate without being asked to, and mother continued her silence, and eventually I offered to let her comb my hair – without words because I was a Mowgli-girl after all. I went to mother and handed her a hair tie and a comb so she could tame my hair, which had always bothered her. I sat at her feet so she could start working from the couch. My hair was neat after that; even the head teacher noticed, and my PE teacher told me I shouldn’t plait my hair too tightly or I’d get a headache, but even then, mother only spoke to me when it was absolutely necessary. And when the boys played football and wouldn’t let me join in and called me Rapunzel because of my long plait, all I thought about was how badly my temples hurt, and the pain reminded me of mother, and so I did nothing; I didn’t push boys who came too close, I didn’t insult girls who sneakily called me names, and I...
