Historical Migration and Contemporary Displacement: Space, Memory and Witnessing in Bir Göçmen Kuştu O and Huzursuzluk

Abstract

This article offers a comparative reading of Ayla Kutlu’s Bir Göçmen Kuştu O and Zülfü Livaneli’s Huzursuzluk, examining how the two novels represent historical migration and contemporary displacement. It argues that, in both texts, migration cannot be reduced to physical movement from one place to another. Rather, it functions as a cultural rupture that reorders space, identity, belonging, memory, witnessing and alienation. Bir Göçmen Kuştu O frames forced migration from the Caucasus to Türkiye through homeland loss, family memory, genealogical continuity and the search for settlement. Huzursuzluk, by contrast, locates the Syrian war, the persecution of Yazidis, refugeehood, trauma and witnessing within the wider violence of the contemporary Middle East, tracing their effects on individual and cultural memory. Its central argument is that the two novels stage witnessing in two distinct modes. Read through Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, Kutlu’s novel renders witnessing as the intergenerational inheritance of homeland loss, whereas Livaneli’s stages the synchronic implication of a contemporary listener in another’s suffering; on this reading, migration fiction holds these two configurations together as simultaneous ethical possibilities rather than as successive literary phases.

1. Introduction

Migration to Türkiye has not only produced economic, demographic and political consequences; it has also transformed cultural memory, spatial perception, modes of belonging and the practices of literary representation. In literary texts, migration is rarely narrated as a simple change of geographical location. More often, it appears as the loss of homeland, the unravelling of belonging, a fracture in memory, a disturbance of identity and a forced encounter with new spaces. Rather than claiming to encompass all representations of migration in the Turkish novel, this article examines the transformation in question through two novels situated at distinct historical thresholds: Ayla Kutlu’s Bir Göçmen Kuştu O, which constructs Caucasus-to-Türkiye forced migration around family memory and homeland loss, and Zülfü Livaneli’s Huzursuzluk, which centres Middle Eastern violence, Yazidi displacement after the Syrian war and the moral responsibility of witnessing. Reading the two texts together allows us to trace how migrations to Türkiye, or migrations intensified through Türkiye, are converted into cultural and ethical meanings at two different literary–historical moments. Kutlu’s novel first appeared in 1985, in the aftermath of the 1980 military coup, and Livaneli’s in 2017, amid the Syrian war and its refugee crisis, so that both write migration from a post-crisis vantage; this is part of what makes their juxtaposition a literary–historical one rather than a simply thematic pairing. Bir Göçmen Kuştu O unfolds against the late-Ottoman wars and the early-republican transition, registering the forced migrations from the Caucasus and other border regions that reshaped late-Ottoman and early twentieth-century Anatolia (Karpat 2002, pp. 690–91); this history forms part of the wider end-of-empire pattern in which imperial collapse, successor nationalisms and forced migration produced refugee formations throughout the twentieth century (Panayi and Virdee 2011, pp. vii–xii). These historical references place Kutlu’s literary memory of Caucasus-related displacement within a wider late-Ottoman and post-imperial refugee history, without tying the novel to a single documented migration episode. Huzursuzluk responds to a more recent cycle of displacement: the Syrian civil war that began in 2011 and the Yazidi catastrophe of 2014, both of which produced large refugee populations along Türkiye’s southern frontier.

A short outline of the two narratives will orient the discussion that follows. Bir Göçmen Kuştu O (1985) follows Emir, who as a child is forced to flee the Caucasus through the mountains with Cevahir, the woman who carries him to safety and entrusts him with the memory of a lost homeland; the narrative tracks his passage across Urfa, İstanbul and Ankara through the late-Ottoman wars and the founding of the republic. Huzursuzluk (Livaneli 2017) follows İbrahim, an İstanbul journalist who returns to his native Mardin after learning that his childhood friend Hüseyin has died in the United States; retracing Hüseyin’s steps, he uncovers his friend’s attempt to save Meleknaz, a Yazidi woman who survived ISIS captivity, and is gradually drawn from reporting into witnessing.

Set beside each other, and written a generation apart, the two narratives raise a shared question. What cultural meanings do migrations from the Caucasus and the Middle East to Türkiye, or migrations that become visible within Türkiye, acquire in literary representation? Studies of migration in the Turkish novel have often considered historical narratives of forced migration and contemporary narratives of war, refugeehood and violence separately, as suggested by existing work on Kutlu’s historical migration narrative and on Livaneli’s treatment of Syrian displacement, Yazidi persecution and political violence (Güneş 2008; Ceyhan Akça 2022; Özher and İlgen 2024; Çelebi 2022; Durukoğlu and Aydemir 2022). Reading these two lines together allows migration to be understood as a durable narrative form that transforms both space and subjectivity, rather than merely as a historical event or a current social crisis. The article thus places Caucasus-centred historical homeland loss alongside Middle East-centred contemporary displacement.

The decisive relation between migration and space in both novels opens a second line of inquiry. In Bir Göçmen Kuştu O, migration does not end with departure from the Caucasus; it becomes an extended struggle for settlement and endurance across Ankara, Urfa, İstanbul and domestic interiors. The novel’s depiction of Ankara as a “new city” in the making prevents migration from being confined to deprivation alone; it also brings into view the necessity of negotiating a new political and social centre (Kutlu 1986, p. 155). In Huzursuzluk, Mardin, the refugee camp, the cemetery, Deyrulzafaran Monastery and the Temple of the Sun become spaces in which contemporary Middle Eastern violence and cultural memory are closely entangled. İbrahim’s perception of Mardin in the statement “This city is no longer my city” (“Bu şehir benim şehrim değil artık”)1 shows that space has become a site of memory capable of producing alienation as well as remembrance (Livaneli 2017, p. 27).

The discussion is guided by three research questions:

How are Caucasus-related historical migration and Middle East-centred contemporary displacement represented in Bir Göçmen Kuştu O and Huzursuzluk in terms of their historical, social and ethical contexts?

How do Türkiye, the city, the border, the camp, sacred space and sites of memory shape the migrant or witnessing subject’s experience of identity and belonging?

What interpretative possibilities concerning the cultural representation of migration emerge from reading these two novels together within the limits of the selected corpus?

Existing scholarship on Kutlu’s novel has tended to focus on structure, theme, historical background, migration and exile. Zeliha Güneş analyses Bir Göçmen Kuştu O in terms of structure, theme, language and narrative technique, foregrounding the novel’s historical background and narrative organisation; the same study describes the novel as being built around the life story of Emir Bey, born in the Caucasus in the late-Ottoman period and compelled to migrate during wartime (Güneş 2008, p. 47). Ceyhan Akça reads the diptych Bir Göçmen Kuştu O and Emir Bey’in Kızları through migration and exile, arguing that Emir Bey’s forced exile in childhood shapes not only the plot but also the novel’s temporality, spatial design, point of view and character construction (Ceyhan Akça 2022, pp. 1181–82). Özher and İlgen similarly approach the novel through migration, war, placelessness and the loss of homeland and the existential and psychological pressures placed upon the human subject (Özher and İlgen 2024, pp. 11–13). In relation to Huzursuzluk, Çelebi reads the novel through the politics of migration, with particular attention to migration caused by the Syrian civil war, refugee camps in Mardin and political rupture in the Middle East (Çelebi 2022, pp. 59–60). Durukoğlu and Aydemir examine Huzursuzluk through the sources and forms of violence, concentrating on mass violence against Yazidis, the victimisation of women and children, patriarchal structures and the thematic function of the sentence “Ben bir insandım” (Durukoğlu and Aydemir 2022, pp. 625–26). The studies cited above have examined Kutlu’s and Livaneli’s novels within separate critical lines; none of them, however, brings these two texts into a sustained comparative frame organised around migration, space, cultural memory and witnessing.

Reading the two novels together is also a claim about genre. Recent work on migration writing has shifted from defining a “migrant literature” by the author’s biography towards a “migration literature” defined by theme and form, so that a text belongs to the field through what it represents and how, rather than through where its author was born (Frank 2008, pp. 2–3). From this view, Kutlu’s and Livaneli’s novels count as migration literature even though neither author writes from personal displacement, and the comparison becomes a question of narrative form rather than first-hand testimony. The two texts nonetheless belong to different generic moments. Bir Göçmen Kuştu O works as historical fiction in Lukács’s sense: it does not retell the late-Ottoman wars and the founding of the republic from the outside, but brings that past to life as the prehistory of the present, through the lived experience of figures such as Emir and Cevahir, so that the Caucasus expulsions are felt from within the characters’ own lives rather than recorded as background (Lukács 1981, pp. 44, 57). Huzursuzluk, by contrast, is a novel of contemporary witnessing written close to the violence it represents, where the Syrian war and the 2014 assault on the Yazidis of Sinjar reach the reader not as settled history but as an unfinished present that implicates the one who listens. Setting historical-migration fiction beside contemporary witness-fiction is, in this sense, the article’s generic intervention.

The article’s distinctive contribution lies in bringing historical homeland loss and contemporary Middle Eastern violence into the same conceptual field without effacing the historical and aesthetic specificity of either novel. When family memory and genealogical continuity in Bir Göçmen Kuştu O are set beside the line of trauma, witnessing and ethical unease in Huzursuzluk, migration appears more clearly as a narrative principle that transforms space, memory and the position of the subject. In this sense, the two novels stage two distinct literary temporalities of migration: inherited memory in historical homeland loss and ethical witnessing in contemporary displacement. Within this frame, the article reads Cevahir’s transmission of homeland and remembrance to Emir not as the background to character formation, but as a testimonial practice in its own right, distinct from the synchronic listener–witness model that has shaped trauma theory through Felman and Laub. Witnessing in Bir Göçmen Kuştu O takes the form of intergenerational transmission, while in Huzursuzluk it is staged through the contemporary listener’s ethical unease, a contrast that the comparison brings into a single analytical field.

2. Theoretical Framework

The reading is organised around a single axis, witnessing, with the other concepts it draws on treated as supports for that axis rather than as a survey of the field. Migration, space and cultural memory, and identity and alienation are introduced not for their own sake but for the specific work each performs: migration frames historical and contemporary displacement; space clarifies the production of belonging; cultural memory explains how loss is transmitted; and witnessing names the ethical relation to trauma along which the other three are drawn together. It is witnessing that carries the comparative weight of the analysis and the relation the reading tracks most closely. The comparison follows Ayla Kutlu’s Bir Göçmen Kuştu O in relation to historical Caucasus-related migration, family memory and homeland loss, and Zülfü Livaneli’s Huzursuzluk in relation to contemporary Middle Eastern violence, Yazidi refugeehood and the experience of witnessing.

Migration is approached here not as a discrete event but as a change of residence and border crossing woven into wider social transformation (de Haas et al. 2020, pp. 23–24, 43) and thus as a representational form that reorders characters, space and memory. Space, correspondingly, is read not as backdrop but as socially produced. Lefebvre’s account of the production of space, de Certeau’s attention to the everyday practices of walking, tracking and passage, and Güleç Solak’s emphasis on the space–identity relation together explain why the city, road, border, camp, cemetery and sacred site function as active planes rather than settings, remade through the characters’ movements (Lefebvre 1991, pp. 26–27; Güleç Solak 2017, pp. 21–22, 31, 34–35; de Certeau 1984, pp. 117–20). Tuan’s distinction between abstract space and lived place sharpens this further, clarifying how the lost homeland in Kutlu and Mardin in Livaneli operate as centres of attachment and memory rather than mere locations (Tuan 1979, pp. 387–88, 416–18).

Identity and alienation are framed through positioning rather than essence. For Hall, identity is continually reconstituted within history, culture and power, held in tension between being and becoming (Hall 1990, pp. 224–25), so that the displaced subject is repositioned through the place left behind and the encounters that follow rather than severed from the past. Said’s account of exile as a discontinuous existence sustained through distance, memory and provisionality frames this repositioning (Said 2000, pp. 176–77, 185–86), while Brah extends it by distinguishing the desire for home from the desire to return to a homeland and by treating the border as both a political and an analytical category, a distinction that clarifies Meleknaz’s position and the camp–city relation in Huzursuzluk (Brah 1996, pp. 176–77). Ahmed’s analysis of the estranged body completes the frame: certain bodies are recognised as strangers before any individual encounter, which illuminates the layered othering of Meleknaz as a Yazidi woman, refugee and victim of violence (Ahmed 2000, pp. 1–5).

Assmann’s concept of cultural memory is central to understanding how loss is transmitted in the two novels. In Bir Göçmen Kuştu O, cultural memory is embodied in the memory of homeland, lineage and vengeance that Cevahir transmits to Emir. In Huzursuzluk, Mardin’s layered historical texture, together with Syriac, Yazidi, Muslim and Mesopotamian inheritances, becomes a field of remembrance through laments, cemeteries, sacred spaces and narrated stories. In both novels, migration produces individual loss while also reorganising the pathways through which cultural memory is transmitted. Here, Assmann’s framework clarifies how Kutlu’s novel converts familial transmission into a narrative conduit through which homeland loss acquires collective and ethical significance, without treating family memory as identical with institutionalised cultural memory.

Felman and Laub, together with LaCapra, sharpen the reading of Huzursuzluk in relation to witnessing and trauma. Felman and Laub do not limit testimony to the recounting of a past event; witnessing is a discursive practice formed at the intersection of literature, memory, history, violence and ethics. Traumatic narrative creates a field of knowledge and responsibility in which the listener is also implicated (Felman and Laub 1992, pp. xiii–xv, 57–59). LaCapra’s emphasis on repetition, non-closure and confrontation after trauma, as well as on empathic unsettlement that neither appropriates another’s suffering nor remains indifferent to it, helps to explain İbrahim’s movement from reporter to witness (LaCapra 2014, pp. xxiii–xxiv).

These two senses of witnessing are easier to hold together once they are read through a more recent strand of memory studies. Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory describes the relation a later generation bears to events it did not itself live through, but which reach it so deeply through the stories, images and behaviour around which it grows up that they come to operate almost as its own memories (Hirsch 2012, p. 5). What sustains this relation, in Hirsch’s account, is not recollection but imaginative investment, and it is this that allows a loss to be passed on as an obligation rather than merely recorded. Seen in this light, Cevahir’s transmission of homeland, lineage and reckoning to Emir is not the backdrop to his formation but a postmemorial structure in its own right, through which he inherits a loss that precedes him. Postmemory also does integrative work that neither cultural-memory theory nor trauma theory performs on its own: it links Assmann’s account of transmission across generations to Felman and Laub’s account of the listener drawn into another’s trauma and so gives the article’s distinction between intergenerational and contemporary witnessing a single conceptual ground. In Kutlu, witnessing is postmemorial and diachronic, bound to inheritance; in Livaneli, it is synchronic, bound to the contemporary listener’s ethical implication.

The article therefore uses witnessing in two related but distinct senses: first, as a listener’s ethical implication in another’s traumatic narrative, as in Huzursuzluk, and second, as the intergenerational transmission of remembered loss, in which testimony is carried through family memory rather than through a single scene of narration, as in Bir Göçmen Kuştu O. By intergenerational witnessing, the article does not mean the direct transfer of eyewitness testimony, but the narrative process through which remembered loss becomes an ethical obligation for a later subject by means of familial address, injunction and affective inheritance. Assmann and de Certeau are therefore used selectively: the former to clarify how remembered loss is transmitted as cultural memory, and the latter to describe how routes, searches and movements turn space into narrative practice, rather than as comprehensive theoretical models imposed on the novels as a whole.

3. Comparative Analysis

3.1. The Representation of Migration

3.1.1. Migration in Bir Göçmen Kuştu O

Ayla Kutlu’s novel frames migration as a historical rupture produced by the necessity of survival. In the opening scenes, Cevahir and the young Emir move by mule through dangerous mountain passes in the Caucasus; migration is thus transformed from a journey into the experience of being torn from a land in which bodily security has collapsed. The narrator’s description of the route as one with “a precipice on the right and a mountain on the left” (“Sağ yanları uçurum, sol yanları dağ”), followed by the remark that what they have passed through can hardly be called a road, turns flight into a zone of rupture defined by mortal danger rather than safe passage (Kutlu 1986, p. 7). Precipice, mountain, gunfire, nameless stream and exhausted bodies give migration a material, external form; Cevahir’s inner monologue, charged with fear, bewilderment and protective instinct, makes clear that this movement is compelled rather than chosen (Kutlu 1986, pp. 7–8). The mountain passage, in this sense, is not merely traversed: it is reinscribed through walking, listening and remembering, exactly the practical reorganisation of space that de Certeau locates in the everyday uses of place (de Certeau 1984, pp. 117–20). Migration here is, before anything else, an effort to escape death.

The novel shows that migration is not exhausted by physical escape; it proceeds alongside family memory, anger and a sense of historical continuity. Even when Cevahir imagines the possibility of reaching a “homestead” (“yurtluk”; Kutlu 1986, p. 9), she does not merely intend to keep Emir alive; she also imagines transmitting to him the memory and reckoning of the past. The thought that Emir’s “hatred must also be made to grow” (“kinini de büyütmelidir”) turns migration into a domain of remembrance and historical account passed on to the next generation (Kutlu 1986, p. 9). Migration therefore binds the subject more intensely to the past rather than simply rendering the individual rootless. In Assmann’s terms, what is carried is not only bodies but also the continuity of collective memory (Assmann 2011, pp. 38–40).

This first compulsory flight does not remain a single event. Emir Bey’s passage from İstanbul to Ankara, followed by his relations with Urfa and other centres, signals the transformation of migration from a one-time rupture into a prolonged process of displacement. Emir Bey’s reliance on the thought that “flight is the only path before us” (“Kaçmak önümüzdeki tek yol”) shows that migration in the novel erodes both geography and the idea of settledness, for what has been lost is no longer merely a piece of land, but the stability attached to it (Kutlu 1986, p. 73). The novel thus refuses to reduce migration to a line of departure and arrival; it presents it as continuous movement, evasion and the search for renewed anchorage.

Kutlu’s representation of migration also folds political history into private life. The narrative of reaching Ankara through censorship, secret routes, dervish–lodge connections and nationalist networks links migration to the political conflicts of the period rather than confining it to individual loss (Kutlu 1986, pp. 138–39). Migration appears as the human face of the fracture between a collapsing empire and an emerging political order, as well as the experience of a single family. In Bir Göçmen Kuştu O, migration is therefore articulated through a language of rupture that is at once personal and collective.

3.1.2. Migration in Huzursuzluk

In Zülfü Livaneli’s Huzursuzluk, migration is shaped not through historical rupture, as in Kutlu’s novel, but through contemporary Middle Eastern violence, particularly the displacement caused by the Syrian war and the persecution of Yazidis. At the beginning of the novel, the news that Hüseyin has been killed in the United States sends the narrator İbrahim from İstanbul to Mardin; migration here encompasses both the movement of displaced people and the journey of a subject summoned into witnessing (Livaneli 2017, pp. 17–19). As Çelebi notes, one of the plot’s central determinants is the migration caused by the civil war that began in Syria and the human tragedies extending from refugee camps in Mardin to the wider world (Çelebi 2022, p. 59). In this line, the movement of Meleknaz and the Yazidis in the camp corresponds less to an ideology of return to the homeland than to a search for a liveable and safe place, as Brah’s distinction suggests: the desire for home is marked not by return to lost land, but by the desire to step outside the field of violence (Brah 1996, pp. 176–77; Livaneli 2017, pp. 35–38, 92–99). Huzursuzluk represents refugeehood while also narrating the ethical transformation of the subject who becomes witness to contemporary war.

Migration in Huzursuzluk is concentrated through Meleknaz and through vulnerabilities marked by ethnicity, religion and gender. Meleknaz’s introduction as a “Syrian refugee” and the fact that Hüseyin met her in a refugee camp indicate that the novel treats migration through the exposure of a particular body, faith and gendered experience to injury (Livaneli 2017, pp. 25, 35–38). Mehmet’s account of migrants arriving “in waves” from Syria (Livaneli 2017, pp. 33–35), of the hardships of life in tent cities and of Hüseyin’s efforts to help migrants presents migration as a process unfolding through direct human encounters rather than as statistical background.

The persecution of Yazidis forms a decisive background to the novel’s treatment of contemporary migration. The United Nations Human Rights Council report on ISIS crimes against Yazidis states that ISIS committed genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes against Yazidis, including killings, sexual slavery, forced displacement, the separation of children from their families and practices aimed at erasing Yazidi identity (United Nations Human Rights Council 2016, pp. 1–4, 21–29). The report is drawn on here not to verify the novel’s truth-value, but to clarify the historical violence against which Livaneli’s literary representation of Yazidi displacement becomes legible. In the narrative, ISIS attacks on Yazidi villages, the killing of men, the enslavement of women and girls and the militarisation of children first appear in Mehmet’s account as broad historical context (Livaneli 2017, pp. 35–36). Fuat Amca’s explanations of Yazidism and Melek Tavus connect this violence to a history of religious othering (Livaneli 2017, pp. 47–48), while Zilan’s testimony carries the captivity, sale, sexual violence and forced migration experienced by Meleknaz, Nergis and other Yazidi women directly into the terrain of traumatic narration (Livaneli 2017, pp. 92–99). In Huzursuzluk, migration extends beyond movement caused by war and appears as the consequence of systematic violence organised through religion, ethnicity and gender.

This violence reaches the reader only at a remove. Meleknaz does not narrate it herself; her captivity, and that of Nergis, is relayed through Zilan, so that the most direct testimony in the novel is already a second voice speaking for a silenced one. The narration is marked, too, by its own limits. At the hardest point, Zilan stops, her face draining of colour, and asks whether she might be spared the telling (“bunu anlatmasam olmaz mı”) before going on, and the unbearable centre of her account contracts into the dying Nergis’s last words (Livaneli 2017, p. 106). The scene gives narrative form to Felman and Laub’s claim that traumatic testimony is organised around what resists being said, and that the burden of hearing it falls on a listener who cannot stand outside it (Felman and Laub 1992, pp. 57–59).

Where migration in Kutlu’s novel gains continuity through Cevahir’s transmission of family memory and homeland consciousness to Emir, Livaneli’s novel foregrounds the moral transformation of the witnessing subject. For Felman and Laub, testimony is not simply the transmission of a traumatic event; it is a field of knowledge and responsibility in which the listener is also drawn into the process of narration. Traumatic narrative implicates the listener in the formation of testimony (Felman and Laub 1992, pp. 57–59). İbrahim’s investigation of Hüseyin’s death and his approach to Meleknaz’s silence go beyond the professional curiosity expected of a journalist in pursuit of a story; they become part of a process through which he assumes the responsibility of witnessing. Read through LaCapra’s notions of “working through” and “empathic unsettlement”, İbrahim’s journey to Mardin does not close trauma but establishes an uneasy relation to it (LaCapra 2014, pp. xxiii–xxiv).

The two novels thus weight migration differently. In Kutlu, family memory, genealogical continuity and the long afterlife of homeland loss are decisive; in Livaneli, war, refugeehood and the responsibility of listening to trauma come to the fore. The comparison does not force the two texts into the same scheme. It shows how migration acquires different meanings between historical homeland loss and contemporary witnessing.

3.2. The Constitutive Function of Space

3.2.1. The City in Bir Göçmen Kuştu O

Kutlu’s urban and metropolitan spaces are shaped through the fragile relation displaced subjects establish with major centres, rather than through any conventional exhilaration of the modern city. İstanbul and Ankara are more than geographical stopping points: both are spaces of historical dissolution and of the attempt to attach oneself to a new political and social centre. Under the conditions of occupation and armistice in particular, İstanbul is associated less with safety and openness than with contraction, exclusion and fear. The narrator’s brief, emphatic statement “They were captives” (“Esirdiler”), followed by the insistence that “the surroundings had narrowed” (“Çevre daralmıştı”), constructs İstanbul as a space compressed by occupation and stripped of security (Kutlu 1986, p. 152). The darkening and isolation of Muslim houses “from neglect” likewise reflect the sense of historical defeat inscribed in the urban fabric (Kutlu 1986, p. 152).

İstanbul appears as a tense centre rather than as a field of cosmopolitan openness. Nevnihal’s relation to the crowd and the street is not grounded in secure urban citizenship; it is formed in an atmosphere in which visibility is risky and the domestic interior constricting. Although the crowd that fills the street after the news of victory briefly produces a shared affect, the scene does not generate lasting urban peace. It remains a momentary collective emotion in the midst of war and dissolution. The crowd’s growth, shouting, weeping and sudden occupation of street space transform city life from orderly everyday flow into a sociality intensified by the pressure of historical events (Kutlu 1986, pp. 97–98).

Ankara is constructed differently, without being idealised. Emir Bey’s journey to Ankara is narrated less as arrival in a capital than through censorship, secret routes, dervish–lodge connections, help from the gendarmerie and dangerous passages; Ankara appears as a refuge reached through networks of political struggle rather than as an easily accessible and settled centre (Kutlu 1986, pp. 138–39). Even after arrival, the city is described through a constrained everyday life rather than in terms of metropolitan comfort: the letter’s references to “two coffeehouses” and an improvised soup kitchen reveal the provisional, deprived condition of the new centre (Kutlu 1986, p. 139). Later, the statement that “the New Assembly and Ankara Palas have opened. A new city is being created” (“Yeni Meclis ile Ankara Palas açıldı. Yeni bir şehir yaratılıyor”) makes clear Ankara’s emergent status as an institutional centre (Kutlu 1986, p. 155). Ankara thus represents the possibility of political centralisation while remaining an incomplete centre in which the displaced subject can take root only partially.

Central spaces in Kutlu’s novel are never fully internalised by the characters. During Nevnihal’s labour, the thought that “this anxiety did not begin here, now; it was like this in Ankara years ago” (“Bu tedirginlik şimdi, burada başlamadı. Kaç yıl öncesinde Ankara’da da böyleydi”) suggests that Ankara never produced lasting inward peace (Kutlu 1986, p. 161). The city here reawakens earlier fears and bodily anxieties in memory instead of restoring a sense of homeland. The expression “Ankara is flying, İstanbul too” (“Ankara uçuyor, İstanbul da”) suggests that metropolitan spaces unsettle the female character’s sense of self (Kutlu 1986, p. 161). In Kutlu, then, the city is at once a hopeful centre of modernisation and an interim space difficult for the migrant’s memory to inhabit.

The city in the novel is neither wholly redemptive nor wholly destructive. İstanbul is the space of exclusion and dissolution; Ankara is the space of attempted anchorage and incomplete centralisation. Moving between the two produces a relation to the city that remains partial, tense and historically burdened. Read alongside Lefebvre, the city in Kutlu’s novel is not the neutral container of historical events but the social product of occupation, displacement and political reordering: İstanbul is produced as a contracted, captive space, while Ankara is produced as an emergent and incomplete one (Lefebvre 1991, pp. 26–27).

3.2.2. Space in Huzursuzluk

Livaneli’s spatial imagination also turns on the displaced subject’s search for anchorage, but it is shaped more strongly by Mardin’s layered historical and cultural memory. In Huzursuzluk, Mardin is not simply the city in which events unfold. It is a site of memory in which childhood recollection, religious plurality, border violence and witnessing overlap. The novel’s early description of the city as “this ancient city lost in time on the Syrian border” (“Suriye sınırında zamanın içinde kaybolmuş bu antik kent”) juxtaposes historical depth with proximity to a contemporary geography of war (Livaneli 2017, p. 18). Read alongside Brah’s account of the border as both a political construction and an analytical category, Mardin becomes not merely a city near a geographical line, but a threshold where childhood memory meets war, the local meets the displaced and the witness meets the victim (Brah 1996, pp. 176–77). Mardin carries the relation among experience, meaning and attachment foregrounded in Tuan’s notion of place; yet this attachment is no longer secure, but fragile and tense (Tuan 1979, pp. 387–88, 416–18).

İbrahim’s return to Mardin reveals space shifting from a field of belonging into one of alienation. His loneliness as he looks at the city and the Mesopotamian plain from Kasımiye Madrasa evokes not the warmth of the past, but the burden of a past that has been lost (Livaneli 2017, p. 27). Mardin ceases to be a nostalgic repository of childhood memory and becomes a site of memory whose meaning has been damaged in an age of war and refugeehood. Çelebi similarly notes that the novel recalls the multicultural structure of Mardin as a “feast”, while showing that recent political events have transformed this structure towards hardness, inwardness and intolerance (Çelebi 2022, p. 64). Mardin thus becomes a narrative space caught between the plurality of the past and the violence of the present.

Deyrulzafaran Monastery and the Temple of the Sun are pivotal to the spatial organisation of the novel. The Temple of the Sun, as the space where Meleknaz has taken refuge and where İbrahim searches for traces of her, acquires both religious and narrative density. İbrahim’s search for traces of Meleknaz in this “cold, cellar-like dark” temple prevents the space from remaining a historical remnant of the past; it becomes a site of witnessing and encounter (Livaneli 2017, pp. 52–55). De Certeau’s account of spatial practice helps describe this production of space through tracking, searching, remembering and narration (de Certeau 1984, pp. 117–20).

Augé’s concept of the “non-place” (Augé 1995) provides only a narrow interpretative ground in Huzursuzluk. Mardin, Deyrulzafaran, the Temple of the Sun and the cemetery are dense with identity, history and relational meaning; they are therefore not non-places, but sites of memory. Refugee camps, tent cities and temporary shelters, by contrast, may be read as intermediate spaces in which refugees wait, remain suspended and cannot generate durable belonging. The novel’s reference to the difficult lives of Syrian migrants in “tent cities” concretises the social and bodily dimensions of this provisionality (Livaneli 2017, pp. 34–35). The tension between Mardin and the camp may also be read through Brah’s understanding of diaspora space as a contact zone in which both the displaced and the local or witnessing subjects who encounter them are repositioned (Brah 1996, pp. 204–5). Space in Huzursuzluk thus operates on two levels: Mardin is a site of memory and witnessing, while the camp is the provisional space in which the refugee subject is held in suspension.

The spatial designs of the two novels register the historical and narrative transformation of migration. In Bir Göçmen Kuştu O, the city is the centre in which the subject caught in historical dissolution seeks refuge and attachment: İstanbul is an occupied city that has lost its sense of security, while Ankara is an incomplete but desired new centre. In Huzursuzluk, space is more fragmented: Mardin, the border, the camp, the cemetery, the monastery and the temple come together to form the plural geography of witnessing.

3.3. Identity and Alienation

3.3.1. Identity and Alienation in Bir Göçmen Kuştu O

Identity in Ayla Kutlu’s novel emerges less from individual introspection than from lineage, family memory and the bond with the lost homeland. The subject in the novel is not simply a modern individual who says “I”, but a historical being who bears the weight of the past and understands the self within a chain of continuity. Cevahir’s early determination not only to keep Emir alive but also to raise him as a subject who will one day avenge the past indicates that identity is conceived less as a personal choice than as an inherited historical task. Hall’s view of cultural identity not as a fixed essence but as a process constituted through narratives of the past and modes of positioning helps to explain how Emir’s identity is shaped throughout the novel (Hall 1990, pp. 224–25). Cevahir’s telling Emir that “this is your homeland” (“Burası senin yurdun”) and her injunction to “forget nothing” (“Hiçbir yeri, hiçbir şeyi unutma”) reveal that identity is organised around space, memory and the affective charge of vengeance (Kutlu 1986, p. 36).

Cevahir is not merely the bearer of this transmission; within the migration narrative, she occupies the position of a subject who makes decisions, experiences fear in her body and constructs a politics of memory directed towards the child’s future. The statement “his heart must become pasture for hatred, his arm a source of strength” (“Yüreği kine yaylak, bileği güce kaynak olmalıdır”) articulates the historical mission imposed on Emir’s childhood and indicates that migration is at once flight and an inherited reckoning (Kutlu 1986, p. 9). Cevahir ceases to be a passive figure mourning the lost homeland and becomes a constitutive character who directs memory and transmits it into the future. In this sense, her agency gives intergenerational witnessing its narrative form: remembered loss is not merely preserved but actively addressed to Emir as an obligation to remember, belong and reckon with the past.

Belonging in the novel is organised around the lost homeland. This homeland is more than physical geography; it is a field of remembrance that gives meaning to the self. Cevahir’s response as she thinks of the house, land and losses left behind shows that homeland loss is at once a spatial deprivation and a dissolution of the very ground on which identity stands (Kutlu 1986, pp. 24–25). Belonging in the novel is not easily established by adapting to a new place; as long as the loss of the old place continues, identity too remains incomplete. This incompletion is one of the chief reasons why the characters cannot fully settle in new spaces.

In Kutlu’s novel, witnessing does not operate, as it does in Livaneli, through a narrator who later listens to another’s trauma. It appears instead as the intergenerational transmission of memory. Cevahir’s address to Emir, with the injunctions “this is your homeland” and “forget nothing,” is an act of witnessing that inscribes homeland loss into the memory of the child-subject (Kutlu 1986, p. 36). The insistence that his “hatred must also be made to grow” adds to traumatic memory the burden not only of remembrance, but also of historical reckoning and belonging (Kutlu 1986, p. 9). Witnessing in Kutlu’s novel is therefore formed not through juridical or journalistic language, but through familial transmission and the cultivation of memory.

This shaken belonging becomes concentrated, especially in female characters, as anxiety, shame and bodily estrangement. In the childbirth scene, past and present are interwoven: with the sentence “this anxiety did not begin here, now”, the memory of Ankara returns to the body; while those in the room appear as people who are not “dirty”, the character experiences an intense sense of contamination directed towards herself (Kutlu 1986, pp. 161–62). Alienation does not remain limited to the external environment; it enters the body, memory and affect. The feeling that “Ankara is flying, İstanbul too” in particular discloses the character’s simultaneous inability to hold on to places and to the supports of the self. In Kutlu, identity advances as a fractured but continuing line; alienation deepens but does not entirely uproot.

Alienation in Kutlu’s novel is therefore not a wholly dissolving process. The subject’s sense of self is shaken and made anxious, but family memory, attachment to the past and historical consciousness prevent its erasure. In Bir Göçmen Kuştu O, identity is fragmented yet continuous; alienation deepens, but it does not place the characters in a condition of absolute non-belonging. To be uprooted from a place is not yet to be uprooted from one’s own story.

3.3.2. Identity and Alienation in Huzursuzluk

In Zülfü Livaneli’s Huzursuzluk, identity is formed not primarily through lineage and historical continuity, as in Kutlu, but through vulnerability, othering, witnessing and moral disquiet. Meleknaz is one of the novel’s principal nodes of identity. She is a refugee displaced by war; at the same time, she is Yazidi, a woman, a survivor of rape and captivity, the mother of a blind child and a body marked by the social gaze as “inauspicious” or “foreign” (Livaneli 2017, pp. 25, 35–38, 57–58, 92–99). Ahmed’s concept of “stranger fetishism” sharpens Meleknaz’s position here: when the figure of the stranger is severed from the historical and social relations that produce it, it appears as though it were in itself a source of threat or difference (Ahmed 2000, pp. 3–6). Huzursuzluk does not confine Meleknaz to such a reduction. In her body, war, religious othering, gendered violence and refugeehood are tightly interwoven. The article therefore treats gender not as a separate thematic category, but as one of the axes through which refugee vulnerability, bodily exposure and narrative mediation become legible.

Hüseyin’s identity is shaped by compassion, love and witnessing. In the recollections of his childhood friends, Hüseyin is a figure who visits migrant camps, helps Syrian refugees and draws near to the wounded and the abandoned (Livaneli 2017, pp. 34–35). His relation with Meleknaz does not remain within the limits of romantic love; it becomes an ethical posture that assumes the risk of touching another’s pain amid violence and exclusion. Despite Fuat Amca’s warnings, Hüseyin’s insistence on “saving” Meleknaz shows that this orientation has become a form of responsibility undertaken in the face of social danger (Livaneli 2017, pp. 49–50). LaCapra’s notion of “working through” after trauma refers not to the complete overcoming of trauma, but to the possibility of encountering its effects critically and responsibly (LaCapra 2014, pp. xxiii–xxiv). Hüseyin’s movement towards Meleknaz may therefore be read not as redemptive heroism that abolishes trauma but as a distinct ethical orientation willing to confront traumatic reality.

İbrahim’s identity changes throughout the novel through the process of witnessing. His detached, news-driven stance as an İstanbul journalist becomes visible when he learns of Hüseyin’s death during an editorial meeting (Livaneli 2017, pp. 19–20). His return to Mardin unsettles this distance by bringing together childhood memory, the rupture of family ties and the feeling that “This city is no longer my city” (Livaneli 2017, pp. 21–23, 27). Hüseyin’s death, Fuat Amca’s narratives, Meleknaz’s silence and the transformed face of Mardin force İbrahim to reconsider his past, his city and the idea of humanity itself (Livaneli 2017, pp. 44–50, 57–58). As Felman and Laub emphasise, the listener to trauma is not the passive recipient of testimony; through listening, the listener participates in the production of traumatic knowledge and must also hear the witness’s silence (Felman and Laub 1992, pp. 57–59). The disquiet İbrahim experiences throughout the novel results from this movement into the position of listener–witness.

What İbrahim listens to, and in the end repeats, is condensed into a single recurring sentence. Hüseyin’s last words, spoken in a Jacksonville emergency room and recorded by a doctor who cannot understand them, are “Ben bir insandım” (Livaneli 2017, p. 19). The grammar carries the meaning. The verb stands in the past tense, and when the doctor asks whether the dying man means “I am a human being”, the family insists that he does not, that he speaks as though a dead man were talking (“ölmüş biri konuşuyor gibi”). To have been human is already to have lost it. The same formula returns at the centre of Zilan’s testimony, where the dying Nergis opens her eyes only to say, “Ben bir insandım abla”, before falling silent for good (Livaneli 2017, p. 106). The sentence circulates between the murdered Yazidi girl and the friend who tried to save her, binding victim and witness in the same past-tense admission, and İbrahim takes it up in turn when he tells Meleknaz that he wants to become human again (“tekrar insan olduğumu hatırlamak istiyorum”) and names the unrest that is slowly killing him (Livaneli 2017, pp. 151–52). The novel’s title gathers in this admission: huzursuzluk (‘disquiet’) is the name for what passes to the one who listens.

Meleknaz’s silence and gaze are also significant for the relation between identity and alienation. Father Gabriel’s description of Meleknaz as “thin, dark-skinned” (“zayıf, esmer bir kız”) yet possessing “a very strong spirit” (“çok güçlü bir ruh”) locates her between vulnerability and resistance (Livaneli 2017, p. 58). Her frequent silence is not a simple sign that trauma cannot be narrated; it marks a tense position between protection and confinement. Felman and Laub argue that the listener to traumatic narrative must also hear silence, since silence may be both shelter and imprisonment (Felman and Laub 1992, pp. 57–59). From this angle, Meleknaz’s silence does not erase her identity; it keeps it at the threshold of representation.

Yet Meleknaz’s silence cannot be read only as the limit of trauma’s representation; it is also produced by the novel’s narrative arrangement. These two readings do not exclude one another. Her silence points both to the excess of trauma that cannot be fully represented and to the ethical distance of a narrative that refuses to consume the victimised body. The reader usually encounters Meleknaz through the mediating accounts of Hüseyin, Fuat Amca, Father Gabriel, Zilan and İbrahim (Livaneli 2017, pp. 47–50, 57–58, 92–99). These narrative layers strengthen the sense that traumatic experience cannot be directly articulated, while also showing that Meleknaz’s own discourse is restricted. Already in the patisserie scene, when İbrahim ventures that he might be able to help her, Meleknaz turns the offer back on him with questions that cannot be answered, asking whether he can bring Hüseyin or Nergis back or revive the bodies decaying underground (Livaneli 2017, p. 141). In the final encounter, Meleknaz’s brief but redirecting questions reverse the narrator’s desire to help; İbrahim’s recognition that he wants “to help myself more than you” (“senden çok kendime yardım etmek istiyorum”) shows that he constructs Meleknaz not only as a victimised figure but also as the mirror of his own ethical unease (Livaneli 2017, pp. 141, 148, 151–52). Silence, therefore, must be understood both as an ethical problem of representation and as a narrative choice. Ahmed’s approach to the estranged body becomes more illuminating here: Meleknaz’s body is at once the target of violence and a representational field continually repositioned by the gaze and narration of others.

The two novels distribute identity and alienation across different temporal and ethical pressures. In Bir Göçmen Kuştu O, identity is shaken by migration and homeland loss, yet sustained by memory, lineage and historical consciousness. The subject is clearly unsettled, but this unsettlement does not become a dissolution that renders the self meaningless. In Huzursuzluk, identity is fragmented by war, refugeehood, religious othering and witnessing; alienation is not confined to Meleknaz’s displaced experience but also encompasses İbrahim, who returns to his own city. Kutlu’s characters are disturbed because they carry the past; Livaneli’s characters become uneasy because they recognise how the pain to which they bear witness unsettles the value of humanity. In the first text, the self bears a shaken continuity; in the second, witnessing makes ethical rupture visible.

4. Discussion

The comparison’s most consequential result is a contrast between two distinct modes of witnessing. Trauma theory, particularly in the wake of Felman and Laub, has tended to model witnessing as a synchronic encounter between a traumatised speaker and an implicated listener (Felman and Laub 1992, pp. 57–59). Huzursuzluk stages this model with considerable precision: İbrahim’s movement from journalistic distance to ethical disquiet enacts the listener–witness whose silence and incompletion LaCapra describes as “empathic unsettlement” (LaCapra 2014, pp. xxiii–xxiv). Bir Göçmen Kuştu O, however, makes visible a second mode that this synchronic frame does not directly address. Cevahir’s injunctions to Emir (“this is your homeland”, “forget nothing”, his “hatred must also be made to grow”) constitute witnessing as the diachronic transmission of homeland loss into a child’s memory and bodily disposition (Kutlu 1986, pp. 9, 36). Read alongside Assmann’s account of cultural memory, this is testimony reorganised across generations rather than across a single conversation: the witness is not the listener implicated in the speaker’s present, but the inheritor compelled to carry a loss that precedes the self (Assmann 2011, pp. 38–40). The two novels therefore do not represent two variants of one witnessing concept; they hold open two ethically distinct configurations of it.

This double configuration of witnessing also reorganises the comparison’s relation to the existing literature on diaspora and migration. Brah’s distinction between the desire for home and the desire to return to a homeland clarifies but does not exhaust the contrast staged by the two novels (Brah 1996, pp. 176–77). In Kutlu, “homeland” names a remembered origin transmitted intergenerationally; in Livaneli, “home” is no longer recoverable as an origin and becomes instead an ethical horizon produced, however precariously, through acts of listening, sheltering and witnessing. Hall’s account of identity as positioning rather than essence (Hall 1990, pp. 224–25) gains a temporal extension here: Cevahir and Emir are positioned through what is inherited, while İbrahim and Meleknaz are positioned through what cannot be returned. The asymmetrical reciprocity between Cevahir and Meleknaz is not a victimhood comparison; it indexes two distinct economies of memory (one organised around lineage and continuity, the other around bodily exposure and the limits of representation) that the novel form holds together within a single literary tradition.

The two modes of witnessing also produce different spatial logics. In Kutlu, the spaces of migration (mountain pass, occupied İstanbul, emergent Ankara, domestic interior) are organised around a centre that the displaced subject cannot fully reach but cannot abandon either; what Lefebvre calls the social production of space here takes the form of an incomplete anchorage in which lineage and historical consciousness substitute for settled belonging (Lefebvre 1991, pp. 26–27). In Livaneli, the spatial field is plural rather than centralised: Mardin, the border, the camp, the cemetery, the monastery and the temple constitute a constellation in which the witness moves between sites of memory and sites of provisional shelter. Brah’s notion of diaspora space as a contact zone in which both the displaced and the local subjects who encounter them are repositioned (Brah 1996, pp. 204–5) describes this constellation more accurately than any framework built on a single homeland–host axis. The contrast is not that one novel is “about space” and the other “about time”; both novels organise migration through space, but they distribute belonging across that space differently, and the difference tracks the difference between intergenerational transmission and contemporary witnessing.

Huzursuzluk bears most directly on the modern urban subject’s professional distance from traumatic events. In İstanbul, İbrahim receives the news as part of the professional circulation of journalism; on returning to Mardin, the same news of death obliges him to confront its personal, historical and ethical consequences. The novel gradually dissolves the reporter’s external vantage point, but it does not bring him to ethical resolution: he can listen, follow traces and acknowledge his own disquiet, yet he cannot redeem or close the trauma to which he bears witness. Read against Cevahir’s injunctions in Kutlu, this incompletion is structurally significant. Where intergenerational witnessing in Bir Göçmen Kuştu O closes by binding the inheritor to a task (remembering, reckoning, sustaining lineage), the contemporary listener–witness in Huzursuzluk is offered no comparable closure. The novel withholds the consolation that a transmissible memory might at least make the loss legible to the future.

Existing studies have generally read Kutlu’s novel through historical background, plot, character construction, migration and exile, while Huzursuzluk has been examined through the Syrian civil war, refugeehood, violence and the politics of migration (Güneş 2008; Ceyhan Akça 2022, pp. 1181–82; Özher and İlgen 2024, pp. 11–13; Çelebi 2022, pp. 59–60, 64; Durukoğlu and Aydemir 2022, pp. 625–26). The reading proposed here intersects this literature at two specific points. It accepts Ceyhan Akça’s argument that exile in Kutlu’s diptych is a determining structural element and not a thematic surface but reframes that exile as a testimonial practice rather than as a developmental backdrop. It accepts Çelebi’s and Durukoğlu and Aydemir’s diagnoses of contemporary violence and refugeehood in Livaneli’s novel, but reads the novel’s narrative arrangement, particularly its mediating figures and Meleknaz’s structured silence, as an additional ethical layer that the violence-and-politics frame leaves under-articulated. The article’s contribution to this literature lies in joining the two reading lines through a comparative axis of witnessing, rather than through a thematic pairing of two migration narratives.

The reading is limited in several respects. A two-novel corpus cannot adequately periodise migration writing in Turkish literature, and the article does not claim to do so; the thirty-year gap between the two publications is treated as a pair of representational thresholds rather than as evidence of a literary–historical evolution. The argument that Kutlu’s novel stages witnessing as intergenerational transmission is generated from a single text and would be strengthened by being tested against Emir Bey’in Kızları and against other Caucasus-related migration narratives in the Turkish novel. The reading of Meleknaz’s silence walks a deliberate line between two interpretations, namely the unrepresentability of trauma and a narrative ethics that refuses to consume the victimised body and does not finally choose between them; further work might do so by setting Livaneli’s novel against contemporary Yazidi survivor memoirs and oral testimonies, where the question of representational mediation can be posed under different generic constraints. Finally, the article’s use of Brah, Hall, Felman and Laub, LaCapra, and Assmann is selective rather than exhaustive: each is mobilised for a specific analytical task within the comparative axis, and other framings (postcolonial, biopolitical, gendered) remain available for reading either novel on its own terms.

From these limits the reading also opens forward. The two-mode account of witnessing developed here (intergenerational transmission alongside contemporary listener-implication) offers a comparative axis that could be tested across other pairings in the Turkish novel: late-Ottoman Balkan migration narratives read alongside post-2011 Syrian-refugee fictions; Kurdish forced-displacement narratives read alongside Yazidi survivor representations; women’s memory novels read alongside contemporary witness–journalist novels. The framework also has wider applicability beyond the Turkish corpus: literature shaped by both deep histories of forced migration and recent waves of war-induced displacement (for instance, contemporary Greek, Bosnian, Lebanese or Palestinian fiction) would offer comparative grounds on which the diachronic and synchronic configurations of witnessing might be tested without collapsing them into a single model. What this article finally suggests is that the question of how the novel form holds these two configurations together, rather than the question of which is the “true” form of witnessing, is among the more productive routes through which migration literature can be read in the present.

5. Methodology

This study adopts a qualitative, text-centred comparative method organised around a parallel-thematic reading rather than a search for direct influence or source relations between the texts. Its concern is the narrative, spatial and identity-related planes through which migration and displacement take shape in Ayla Kutlu’s Bir Göçmen Kuştu O and Zülfü Livaneli’s Huzursuzluk. The novels are read here as literary structures that reconfigure these experiences through fictional form, character construction, narrative position and spatial organisation.

The corpus comprises Ayla Kutlu’s Bir Göçmen Kuştu O and Zülfü Livaneli’s Huzursuzluk. The choice follows from the way these novels register two different thresholds of migration directed to Türkiye, or rendered visible through Türkiye, within the Turkish novel. The selection is not intended to represent the full range of migration fiction in Turkish literature; the two novels are chosen because they stage migration at two markedly different historical thresholds and allow the article to test how memory, space and witnessing change when the object of displacement shifts from inherited homeland loss to contemporary refugee trauma. The thirty-year gap between the two publications marks two distinct representational thresholds rather than a linear evolution in Turkish migration writing. Throughout the article, the term “Türkiye” is used as a literary–geographical shorthand for the late-Ottoman and republican Turkish space through which the corpus stages displacement, while the historical transition from empire to republic is kept analytically visible.

Quotations from the novels provide the textual grounds for the readings that follow, which are anchored in narrative arrangement, plot, character relations and spatial practice rather than in speculative claims about authorial intention.

The comparative analysis is symmetrical in its order of reading: under each main heading, Kutlu’s novel is considered first, followed by Livaneli’s, with convergences and divergences evaluated at the end of the relevant section. Symmetry, however, does not imply equivalence. Kutlu’s text carries greater conceptual weight around family memory and historical homeland loss, while Livaneli’s is weighted towards witnessing, trauma and contemporary violence.

Because the study is concerned with literary representation, biographical and documentary frames remain subordinate to textual analysis. The authors’ lives are not aligned directly with fictional characters, and migration is approached as a field reshaped by narrative form, not as transparent historical reflection. The United Nations report and other historical–legal materials supply context for the conditions of migration, trauma and witnessing without turning the novels into documents whose value rests on factual verification. This allows their historical resonance to remain visible while preserving their aesthetic and narrative specificity.

6. Conclusions

The two novels brought into comparison here do not resolve into a single narrative of migration. Together, they present migration as differently distributed across two literary–historical moments, each with its own ethical stakes, spatial logic and account of what is lost, carried or witnessed. Bir Göçmen Kuştu O treats Caucasus-related forced migration through survival, homeland loss and family memory. Huzursuzluk recasts the displacement produced after the Syrian war and the persecution of Yazidis in terms of refugeehood, witnessing and ethical responsibility. In both texts, migration is less a completed story of arrival than a tense mode of living between what has been left behind and what is encountered.

Space, identity and belonging both separate and connect the two novels. In Kutlu’s text, mountain passes, İstanbul, Ankara and domestic spaces appear as fragile thresholds where the migrant subject seeks refuge but cannot fully settle. In Livaneli’s novel, Mardin, Deyrulzafaran, the Temple of the Sun, the cemetery and the refugee camp bring the multicultural memory of the past together with the present reality of war and refugeehood. Space thus becomes a constitutive element that concretises, in Kutlu, the search for anchorage and, in Livaneli, the ethical burden of witnessing another’s suffering.

Migration should therefore be read as a multilayered narrative experience organised through memory, spatial belonging, the narrator’s ethical distance and the representation of the othered body, rather than simply as a narrative of victimhood. In Bir Göçmen Kuştu O, identity is sustained by memory and genealogical continuity despite the disruption caused by migration. In Huzursuzluk, war, refugeehood, religious othering and witnessing render identity fragmentary. Meleknaz’s position makes visible the representational limits of the othered body, while İbrahim’s unease foregrounds the belated responsibility of the witness. His movement from reporter to witness remains deliberately incomplete: the novel gives him neither mastery over another’s trauma nor the comfort of moral closure.

The two novels open two distinct literary temporalities of migration. In Kutlu, a family and lineage are forced to carry the past. In Livaneli, what comes to the fore is the ethical responsibility of the witness who encounters bodies displaced by war. This responsibility is condensed in the phrase “Ben bir insandım”, which passes from the murdered Nergis to Hüseyin and then to İbrahim, so that the listener inherits the victim’s forfeited claim to being human; in Kutlu the comparable work of inheritance is postmemorial, binding Emir to a homeland loss he never lived through. The difference between them shows that migration can become a narrative possibility through which the modern subject’s memory, relation to space and distance from another’s pain are tested. Rather than offering a typology of migration in the Turkish novel as a whole, this comparison demonstrates how two historically distant narratives transform migration into a literary form through which space, memory and ethical witnessing are reconfigured.

What the comparison ultimately demonstrates is that the ethical address of migration literature is distributed across time as well as space: witnessing can be an act of intergenerational inheritance as much as a moment of contemporary implication. The two configurations identified here are not sequential phases in a literary history but simultaneous ethical possibilities held open by the novel form, a form capacious enough to convert both an anterior and an immediate displacement into a demand on memory, space and narrative conscience. This double capacity, rather than any unified typology, marks one distinctive contribution that these Turkish migration narratives make to broader literary thinking on displacement.