Mind The Gap When Taking A Step

When taking a step to your next conclusion, there’s always an Interval that you’re overgoing. A gap small enough to be noticed by some, big enough not to be ignored. By bridging the gap between theory and practice, this is a platform to initiate dialogues and reveal reflections to the topics discussed in our In Focus articles. 

Uncivilised – Fictional narration and the transitional nature of the migratory experience

Edited by Cem Çataklı

It is the morning of my departure, and I am trying to get an insight into how I feel about leaving. I’m also getting a haircut by a barber who breaks the silence by telling me about his friend who is in prison and about to be deported.

As he cuts my hair, he mentions that he used to have a life in Iraq which he left behind to come to Germany, and how once, in the middle of the night, the police raided his home to attempt to deport him too. He says they came to pick up his wife and kid to deport them as well. He tells me that when he asked them why, all they said to him was because. Because they could.

His name is Mustafa.

He puts the scissors away, brings in a second mirror, then asks me if I like it. My haircut seems rushed while he explains with care how much he is frustrated about the news of his friend’s impending
deportation, and I realize that my slight frustration weighs nothing against his own, so I smile, thank him, and leave.

Realizing I’m about to miss my bus to the train station, I wonder if stories like these will be what the TV show I am going to start working at will be about. If it is going to be not only a portrayal of
these realities but also a discussion about what these events seem to revolve around, about getting into the depth of these experiences.

I arrive at the central station and am waiting for my train. A man approaches and asks me whether the one that’s waiting on the platform will stop at Mannheim. It is the train before mine that’s waiting there. I tell him yes, confirm that this would be his ride, but for some reason he isn’t trying to get in yet, and after a while, we start getting into a conversation. He asks for my Figure 1: Press Photo Uncivilised – ZDF Mediathek November 2024 name, then about me, where I’m from; I assume because we are speaking in English. “I am Turkish but I was born in Germany,” I say. He replies, “Oh, German?” He nods, I nod as well..

…German.

It is my turn to ask. He tells me that he is from Guinea. I don’t quite hear him. The messy train station noises are distracting and blending with his voice. I also don’t really know the country. While his train is about to depart, he tells me about the other Guineas, Papua and Bissau, if I remember correctly. He asks again if this train stops at Mannheim. I try to reassure him, yes it does. I also tell him that he should hurry up if he would like to catch it still. Eventually, he starts walking to the train but he is too slow; the wheels start to turn, and now he’s running. As the
wagon is picking up pace, a train worker is standing between an open door and the platform. As my newly made companion approaches him, the worker only looks, smiles as he shuts the door. Policy, I think. Don’t let people into moving trains. Maybe it is about insurance…

…Germany

I wonder how people get into trains in Guinea and West Guinea and Papua New Guinea. From where he ran to, he turns his head around and looks at me. I anticipate him. He asks me if the next train stops at Mannheim too. This would be mine, the one I have to take. I am headed for Cologne, you see. I tell him yes as it already arrives on the platform. I don’t want to miss it. Together, we walk towards the white ICE as he shows me his ticket, asking if it is valid. I take a close look and I don’t think that it is. I tell him I don’t want him to get in trouble. He stops and I step between the doors. They are about to close. He stands outside, looking at me. “The red trains,” I shout as heavy whistles blow, “You can take the red trains.” I press the button, trying to keep the door open, hoping that he can hear me – but they close.

Through the window he looks at me, gives me a thumbs up, and I try to smile. “Good luck,” I think as I get into the train. “Good luck” I think as I sit down in my seat. And my seat is where I realize I forgot to ask his name. I think about the irony that is presenting itself to me. I got into this train for the same reason I got this haircut. Because I am about to start working as an intern in the directing department for a TV series on everyday racism.

The world suggested itself to me this morning in the way I was conditioned to see it. Before I applied, I found out that the scripts were being written from interviews with real people who shared their lived experiences. Meaning that they trusted the filmmakers with fictionalizing their real and non-fictional realities. And I have found myself in the middle of both. Transitioning. Witnessing realities while moving into fiction. I asked myself whether the fiction was less real because it had been dramatized, adapted, turned into less than what I had seen around me. Had it been made digestible? And I realized that in order to better understand, I would have to understand and ask the question: What does the fictional narration do to the transitional nature of the migratory experience?

But in order to properly answer this question, I think it is necessary to first try to understand the nuances of the migratory experience. Drawing information from the experiences of many members of my family, I will try to encapsulate their anecdotal points of view.

Migrating has been described as an experience of estrangement, leaving behind what is familiar to be surrounded by everything strange. Navigating this change of surroundings and social relations can be a deeply lonely experience since building a new life and new connections takes time, chance, and effort. Privilege can shorten, and the lack thereof can prolong these processes of finding space within a new place and new people, but mostly it is finding a life where there was none before.

Figure 2: “Babaanne” – Cem Çataklı – (Heidelberg, Germany 2024)

And throughout this process, there remains a longing. A longing for this struggle to end, a
longing to arrive, to rediscover a lost feeling of familiarity. Instead of its fulfillment, it is not
uncommon that this desire will rather be met with further conflict and confrontation on both a
practical and an existential level.

This is where the fictional narration can have a great effect; it is the very creation of a possible
narrative of the migratory experience by the people most proximally shaped by the immediacy of
this lived experience; it is representation; it is the transitional nature of the migratory experience
represented.

Representation, ideally, submits the conditions of the possibilities of experience to its mirroring
to the extent that there is no difference between the initial presentation and its reformulation.
Through that, it can help process the impalpable reality into something more tangible and
concrete, providing a steady point of orientation in the contextual vagueness. Further, it
kickstarts recognition in an interplay with accessibility. Because it is through this accessibility
that representation manifests itself and allows for the possibility of confrontation and that
through this confrontation an understanding of a perspective separate from our own can arise.
This is a process of recognition.

Therefore, in viewing content on the screen, our experiences become concentrated in and
centered around a mutual experience. A once individual reality, although it might be a shared
one, can now inform a collective experience in a different way than just words and the shared
experience itself. We start to see the same thing. Presentation fades into the background as its
representation becomes the new point of reference and perhaps even kickstarts a process of
identification and empathy.

Figure 3: Press Photo Episode 1 – “Hanau” – ZDF Pressemappe 21.November
2024

Now representation becomes a powerful tool against efforts of turning the subjects of presentation into invisible nothing, as representation makes people be seen. In the context of everyday racism, this means that cheap shots and systematic endeavors towards hiding whole groups of people and the attempts of pushing them into the shadow edges of society can be exposed for what they are: transgressions and violence. They no longer can be hidden.

Similar to the fables of Aesop (or the myth of him) who exposed the immoral sentiments and actions of kings and priests within the adventures of anthropomorphized characters, the representation allows for the same, if not even more directly focused, criticism of such ill agents.

Visibility can give rise to debates, which in turn can lead to acknowledgment and further recognition, two vital steps for the dismantlement of racial violence.

“Over there I am something, here I’ll always remain the son of a guest worker.” I am on the set and we are having lunch. I managed to sit next to an absolute legend who played in one of my favorite films, and this is what he tells me in between sips of black tea. That was his answer to a question I asked him about how he likes his role in this episode. “It is good that I get to play someone that breaks with the silly stereotypes we get exposed to all the time in usual TV.” He is playing the role of a father, who after his sons have put themselves through an unnecessary and dangerous struggle, decides to closely listen instead of judging and imposing himself onto the situation. Similar to the boys in the episode, I am drawn into the immediacy of words and am listening in admiration, at the same time I can’t believe that an actor of his standing and experience is still being defined by and reduced to his cultural identity and has to justify himself because of it.

The shooting is done and everybody is busy with the edits now. I get a message with a link; it’s the first raw cut of the first episode, and my chest is pumping with excitement. It took us 3 months to shoot everything, and things weren’t always going smoothly, but in the end, we managed, and I was about to see the results for the first time, hoping our efforts had not been in vain.

I went home to my parents. They represent the second generation immigrants, the first ones to be born abroad and obviously so much more than that, and as we are watching the first few minutes, it is not the screen but their faces I am most focused on; because it is in their reactions that I seek some sort of proof of the quality of the content we produced. And ultimately, the stories we tried to tell were their stories too.

The episode is over and I ask them what they thought of it. I really want them to have liked it, and I am afraid of having wasted their time. My dad begins to laugh. I grow more nervous. “That’s insane,” he says. “What do you mean?” I ask him. “ZDF paid for this?” He seems surprised. I am relieved to see he seems impressed. “Yeah,” I answer, “Ordered, financed, paid for, the whole deal.” He seems to be in disbelief. “If they end up airing this… a lot of Germans will be pissed.”

Figure 4: “Baba” – Cem Çataklı – (Heidelberg, Germany 2024)

I have to laugh. Because he gets it and also because he is right. The resonance they felt makes me think of how it could have gone wrong. How we could have failed and falsified the experience, creating a reference point that had nothing to do with the initial presentation, one that neglects or negates the experience.

Yet I catch myself thinking, why? Why would he think like that? And what could potentially piss
people off about exposing racist behaviours and tendencies on national TV? I guess, in a way, the
question answers itself. Those who perpatuate racism, will find themselves confronted with the
suffering they cause. They will see the pain that upholding their world view brings onto those on
the receiving end, will see people where there only was projection because a face was far away
enough to hate. Now it is up close, breathing a testemony.

That might be a possible way of answering the latter question, but what about my father? What would drive him to have this expectation? He could have said that Germans might be happy about the realities exposed in these series and I am certain there will be people who will. At the same time these existing voices of support are not what the content of the series revolves around. Their absence is.

I try to imagine my dad’s life and all the instances in which there was a dissonance – despite his thick German Kurpfälzer dialect that he can turn on and off as he needs to – a dissonance between how he felt about being treated wrongly and how a German counterpart entirely dismissed his point of view only to create a new one for him. The narrative of the migratory experience was rarely in the hands of those having the actual experience. In a form of testimonial injustice, in a clash of identities oscillating between the lived reality and the created fiction, the cultural identity of those who have to create their own is being dismissed in everyday racism. So maybe he got used to it. It has been normalised.

This is why this series is so important, especially considering the current political climate; it is laying the narrative back into those hands that ache from having to protect themselves from it. And most importantly, it can make us understand that migratory experience, while it is not experienced by all of us, does in fact involve all of us. It affects all of us. And this reconstruction of the narrative will allow for a dialogue with and not a debate against all who are affected – a dialogue which is based in the reality of the situation.

My worry was that incentive and corporate interest could get in the way of an honest and authentic retelling of the migratory experience. And that this migratory experience itself could get exploited and changed into a branding tool for seemingly liberal broadcasters.

I realized how great the responsibility for the filmmakers is to remain truthful and accurate in the fictionalization process, and yet how at the same time it is impossible to maintain the original experience itself due to the nature of the process of fictionalization and perception. You can only get as close to it as possible. Simulation of reality is hardly a re-creation.

The next day, I get a call from the director. He asks me how I liked it when I watched it. I told him about my dad and what he said and that I loved it a lot. He continues to ask me about the music, whether I thought it was too much, too dramatic. I said I felt it fit very well. “I am asking because of the strings, you know? Anytime you put strings into the score of a German production, people will crucify you for being overly dramatic and your overpouring pathos.” But it fits, I think. And very nicely so. “I decided to keep it. I don’t think this is the time for me to cater to their expectations. These are our stories. We decide how we tell them.”

My worries were once more laid to rest. I felt like I was able to trust the people who were under the final stages of this responsibility of representation. It reminds me of my initial question and gives me a possibility for a new answer to it. What is it that the fictional narration does to the transitional nature of the migratory experience? I think it gives it value. It elevates seemingly useless suffering from made-believe worthlessness into confidence and empowerment. Into the ability of facing the world, of being able to say: This is me, this is I, uncivilized…

ABOUT Cem Çataklı

Cem Çataklı was born in 2000 in Heidelberg as the son of Turkish parents and grandchild of guest workers. He works with film, text, poetry, photography, and music to explore questions of identity, memory, and belonging. After discovering poetry and music in his school years, he began writing in English while living in London. He now studies Philosophy and English in Heidelberg, focusing on phenomenology, migration ethics, and the emotional textures of experience. For him, creative and philosophical work are ways of making sense of the world — and of staying in touch with what moves us.

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