In the debut novel “Hawaii” by Cihan Acar, things are getting hectic
By Frank Riedel
If one were to believe the general public (and probably also a part of literary criticism) with regard to the question of belonging of immigrants and their descendants, we would have to assume a life between two worlds, languages and cultures, of feelings of loss and identification disorders. A transcultural self-positioning that corresponds to the existential experiences of the majority of people, regardless of their origin in a globalized world, is repeatedly defamed as too cerebral, too scientific or fictional, instead of a deeper insight into the interaction of social and individual circumstances To grant and discuss decisions and activities of the individual in the process of subject formation.
All the more gratifying for readers are novels that address social coexistence in a more differentiated way: they don’t culturalize problems, instead they describe individual and group-specific peculiarities and – if and where necessary – also problematize the diverse animosities between individuals and community(s). This is also what happens in the novel by Cihan Acar, whose young protagonist calls Heilbronn his home, where he grew up in a district struggling with image problems – affectionately and ironically called Hawaii by its residents.
From Thursday evening to Sunday morning, Kemal Arslan experiences and reflects on one of the hottest weekends in the Swabian-Franconian city on the Neckar, not only in terms of weather. The promising career of the Turkish-German professional soccer player ended at the age of 21 and he returned empty-handed from the Turkish first division club Gaziantepspor to Heilbronn, from where he once set out to conquer the (Turkish) soccer world. In search of his place in life, he stumbles rapidly through the past and present, meets family, friends and world affairs. He feels uncomfortable among the German-Turks, but the Swabian racists in a run-down pub annoy him just as much. After his dissolute professional football life, he has now arrived back in the “minority” where he – like (almost) everyone else – is fighting for survival. His broken Jaguar in the parking garage alone is reminiscent of golden times. Despite all the romance of the Kiez, everything in Hawaii is stripped of its polish: Kemal visits a depressing erotic bar, breathes Knorr’s soupy air, gets upset regarding the HWA Nazis (“Heilbronn, wake up!”), who demand pork for daycare centers, and applies at a Turkish building cleaning company and otherwise only sees Audi cars, vineyards and TürkSat reception dishes on the high-rise buildings.
The cliché of patriarchal macho society and its status symbols is also omnipresent in this coming-of-age novel. Turks always sell doner kebabs, vegetables, mobile phones or cars, anyone who uses public transport is a failure and everyone has to dance at weddings. Tayfun, Kemal’s potential new boss, gives him a €10,000 Rolex to start with, which later turns out to be a fake. It’s regarding heroic stories, Turkish pride, life in betting shops, the neighborhood’s clubs and bars or rounds of poker with the chattering buddies Emre, Hakan, Mehmet, Serdar and Osman.
On the other side he meets Rainer, Paul, Robert, Thomas and his rich ex-girlfriend, Sina, who got a bungalow on her parents’ property for her 18th birthday. He would like to seamlessly continue the shared experiences and win back Sina, whom he dumped during his bombastic time as a footballer. But he never really belonged to this clique and is now all the more the loser there.
Kemal is in search of a place to live as well as himself, and as one who has briefly fallen from the safety of the nest, he suddenly sees everything more clearly. The emotional distance allows him to see that behind the facade of a few successful, nice and well-liked personalities in Sina’s environment are malicious, small-minded and insecure people. In hindsight, he also learns to classify his time in Gaziantep as what it really was: the team, in which there were locals, Almancı (ie German Turks) and foreigners, stands for a (cultural) multi-class society with which he lives Form – regardless of whether it is counted among those who set the tone or not – can no longer do anything. It is logical to say regarding a possible life in Turkey: “We grew up here (note: in Heilbronn), we think and live very differently from the people there…”.
The conflicts between rich and poor, the foreign kankas (“blood brothers”) and the nationalist HWA people become increasingly heated as the hot summer weekend progresses. Although Kemal, who has always known how to differentiate himself, was considered an “aggro-Turk” for the rich rascals around his ex and as one of them for the blood brothers because he has (literally) gone to secret meetings, but as between them Kankas and their racist opponents, some of whom had traveled from other regions of Germany, escalated when the situation escalated when a 16-year-old Turk died, and he stayed out of the street fighting.
Cihan Acar succeeds in his novel with a balanced mixture of fact and fiction. In addition to quick changes of location, insightful insights into milieus and excellent character drawings in many cases, he weaves specialist knowledge of top German-Turkish football and the NSU assassination attempt on a policewoman into his text, thus staging a very realistic-looking adventure. Violence only takes place in the actions, the distance to what is observed is created by subtle humor and slight irony, his simple style feeds on more or less cool sayings and calendar wisdom typical of young adult novels and reaches the language power regarding one Kanak Sprak (1995) by Feridun Zaimoğlu. Nevertheless, as a reviewer, one can assume that this young author – to use the title of the non-fiction books he has published so far – will give you 111 reasons to read and love his second novel.
