A friend recommended and lent me her copy of Fatma Aydemir’s Djinns . Once I started, I was struck by how powerfully the novel was capturing the inner struggles of Kurdish-Turkish immigrant who was at the end of his migration journey in Germany towards permanent return to his home country in Turkey. Djinns presents multi-generational family novel that pulls readers into the intimate lives of an immigrant family in Germany, weaving together themes of displacement, identity, belonging, and generational memory.
The story begins with Hüseyin, the father, whose sudden death in their adopted home city forces his family to reckon not only with loss but also with buried histories and unspoken tensions. Each chapter shifts perspective to a different family member—first Hüseyin and Emine, the mother, and then their four children: Ümit, Sevda, Peri, and Hakan—before circling back to Emine, where a long-suppressed family secret is revealed. The structure allows Aydemir to paint a layered picture of how immigration, cultural hybridity, and personal trauma ripple through lives in distinct yet interconnected ways.
Characterisation and Voice
Aydemir’s narrative strength lies in her richly textured characterisation. Hüseyin embodies the older migrant generation, torn between the sacrifices of factory labor in Germany and nostalgia for a homeland that, politically and socially, never truly welcomed him. Emine, resilient yet weary, is the silent anchor of the family, balancing tradition with survival. Each of the children embodies a facet of the immigrant experience: Sevda clings to the conventional expectations of respectability, Hakan resents and mismanages his marginalization, Peri grapples with intellectual independence and estrangement from family, while Ümit explores his homosexuality in a community where such identity carries both danger and shame. By giving each child their distinct inner voice, Aydemir underscores how a single migratory journey splinters into diverging individual paths across a new cultural landscape.
Pop Culture and Everyday Life
German and Turkish pop culture weave in continuously across narratives, grounding the characters’ inner struggles with markers of their social setting. The recurrent references to music, television, fashion, and youth culture show how second-generation immigrants carve out identity by choosing—or resisting—the dominant cultural codes around them. These details enrich the story, situating questions of belonging not only at the level of language or religion but also in the banalities of what one watches, wears, or listens to. They provide an atmospheric counterpoint to the weightier reflections, revealing how cultural hybridity is lived day by day.
Themes of Freedom, Identity, and Belonging
At its heart, Djinns examines the negotiation between tradition and personal freedom. The novel humanizes dilemmas immigrants and their children often face—torn between collectivist family expectations and the promise of individualism offered by Western culture. Issues of gendered expectations, sexual identity, and generational misunderstanding recur, highlighting the invisible but palpable presence of “djinns,” or unspoken burdens, in the family’s shared life. The revelation of the lost child—invisible yet always shaping family dynamics—mirrors the suppressed traumas of displacement itself, suggesting that every migrant family carries similar hidden wounds.
Through elegant prose and shifting perspectives, Aydemir avoids reducing her characters to stereotypes of assimilation or alienation. Instead, she presents them as complex, flawed, and painfully real individuals negotiating survival and selfhood in a Germany that offers both opportunity and exclusion.
Djinns is both intimate family drama and sharp social commentary. It is a novel about silence and secrets, about pop music and political trauma, about the private costs of migration and the resilience of those who live it. For readers interested in immigrant narratives, intergenerational struggles, and the intersections of culture and identity, Aydemir’s work offers a poignant, intelligent portrait that lingers long after its final page.
Keywords: Fatma Aydemir, Djinns, book review, Kurdish-Turkish immigrants, Germany, immigrant family, intergenerational trauma, pop culture, identity, homosexuality, belonging, personal freedom, cultural hybridity, migrant literature.
