“Es war einmal ein Dorf, das hatte einen Brunnen und ein grünes Minarett”: Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Emine Sevgi Özdamar's Story Collection "Mutterzunge"

This article examines all four stories from Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s story collection Mutterzunge. Erzählungen (1990). The stories are linked through the unconventional storytelling created out of secular and religious themes and motifs present in Oriental and Occidental narrative traditions. The author fuses the East and West through the linguistic signs and cultural themes. In order to rewrite the established practices and customs and ultimately the common literary canon, the author recasts popular fairy tales from both traditions. By depicting female characters as sexually progressive and autonomous, she forges a new model of multicultural society. Özdamar makes her female protagonists the focus of her stories emphasizing the role of Muslim women in the process of globalization leading through hybridization to the development of global common cultural discourse resulting in the new "translocal" or World Literature; thus, signaling a possible union of both traditions in the newly fashioned society.