Back to the Roots

19. June 2024

For the last 5 years I have been living in the US. It was a big shift to move away from Germany. Interesting enough for the first time in my life, I felt what my parents must have felt when they immigrated from Turkey to Germany. They always had a sense of not having arrived fully in Germany. It must have been so much harder for them, because they did not know the language nor the culture and how did they stomach the energy in the German environment after WWII? They always had a sense of ‘we want to go back to Turkey one day’. I have that too!! I could not compare my journey with theirs though, but I have a taste of it. I met a lot of people from different countries here in the US and they call it the ‘immigration blues’. Boy, is that true! I felt so understood when I heard their stories. Many of them say, you feel awful but you get used to it after 5 years. I did not believe it, because I was really feeling bad. And the ‘funny’ thing is, I didn’t just miss Germany and my family there - what I missed the most was my father’s village, where he was born Divrigi, Sivas in Turkey. I had such pain of never really having explored my roots and so my journey began to go back from a place that was so far away…

My creativity changed as well. I couldn’t do what I used to do (light-hearted streetphotography, working on story or film ideas). It was scary. I really thought I lost my creativity. I was changing as a person. I went deep inside and looked not just to where I was coming from as a human or culturally, but I looked at my roots as a creative. I saw why I started the creative path in the first place. To stay true to myself, but also as an artist you can loose track on the way and do things that don’t feel authentic to you. I’m still in the process of washing my inner canvas, so that it is clean and white. This writing is the first attempt to step out and explore what could come next.

To be continued…