Yade Yasemin Önder wins the exile Drama Award 2024
The exile playwright award 2024, an initiative to promote contemporary drama by WIENER WORTSTAETTEN and Schauspiel Leipzig in cooperation with Verein exil – zentrum für interkulturelle kunst und antirassismusarbeit, goes to Yade Yasemin Önder with her play„Bu sözler bizim – Die Worte gehören uns“ (The words belong to us).
Photo credit: Carolin Saage
Jury’s statement
„wenn die dinge nicht mehr stimmen
müssen sie sich neu verbinden“
when things don’t fit anymore
they have to reconnect
This wise assessment comes from a special character in Yade Yasemin Önder’s “Bu sözler bizim – Die Worte gehören uns” (The words belong to us). About halfway through the play, the person creates a big surprise by simply taking the floor. The character is called Mr. Couch and is actually a couch that not only speaks but also flies. In the list of characters, Mr. Couch does not appear at all in. There, however, we are introduced to the family that belongs to his living room: “Lale is ten, Lilo is twelve, Dad is a hairdresser, Mom used to be a journalist.” We are also told that the passages marked in green on the stage are to be spoken in Turkish.
And so the secondary text already hints at what runs through the characters’ dialogue and even the typeface with loving playfulness and great care: the search for one’s own language, the search for one’s own identity. While the couch in this constellation of characters babbles away completely unexpectedly, Lale and Lilo’s mother is strangely absent and silent. The fact that she was a journalist and no longer is gradually opens up a political dimension in which she herself does not have a say. “We live somewhere in Germany” is Lale’s first sentence. The fact that the family does not live in Turkey has to do with restrictions on freedom of expression and freedom of the press. This assumption is obvious, but we are hardly given any details, as we share the childlike, but by no means naïve perspective of ten-year-old Lale as the narrator. Lale’s narration overlaps with the dialogue. While her mother has presumably lost her (political) language due to censorship and flight, Lale’s language is Turkish, which seems to be lost due to her own family history. But she and her brother Lilo go very far in their search for words and their own roots. They jump into the sea of words and fly over countries and memories on Mr. Couch. With the words they find on their journey, they tinker with a shared longing, collecting memories of a past that no longer seems to exist for their family, of a country and a life that perhaps never existed. It is a dream journey that we experience with Lale and Lilo, but at the same time it is also the reality of our lives, that language flows, that we don’t understand everything and that we are always on the move in search of our own inner words.
“Bu sözler bizim – Die Worte gehören uns “(The words belong to us) is a sophisticated and empathetic play for young audiences of all ages. It is a play for a multilingual ensemble that gives wings to a couch and definitely gives its characters and their concerns a strong voice.
Written as representative for the jury by Matthias Döpke
About the author
Yade Yasemin Önder was born in Wiesbaden in 1985, where she grew up there as well as in Kaiserslautern. After graduating from high school, she studied Literature and Education at the HU Berlin, Literary Writing at the German Literature Institute Leipzig and Scenic Writing at the Berlin University of the Arts as second-chance education.
She was shortlisted for the Fontane Literature Prize and received a work grant from the German Literature Fund. In spring 2024, the collective novel “Wir kommen” was published by DuMont, of which she is a co-author. She lives in Berlin and is working on her second novel.
About the exile playwright award
The WIENER WORTSTAETTEN have been supporting the exile drama award since 2007, an initiative of the of the edition exile.
This year at the internationally call for plays 87 submissions were sent from authors all over Europe. The jury was formed by Jahr Christine Wahl (Journalist and critic), Matthias Döpke (playwright/Schauspiel Leipzig) and Bernhard Studlar (Autor/Wiener Wortstaetten).
The exile playwright award comprises of €3,000 prize money and a world premiere of the winning play at Schauspiel Leipzig.
Previous winners:
Semir Plivac (2007), Ana Bilic (2008), Marianna Salzmann (2009), Olga Grjasnowa (2010), Azar Mortazavi (2011), Valerie Melichar (2012), Susanne Ayoub (2013), Barbara K. Anderlič (2014), Christian Maly-Motta (2015), Mehdi Moradpour (2016), Amirabbas Gudarzi (2017), Alexandra Pâzgu (2018), Emre Akal (2020), Giorgio Ferretti (2022), Yade Yasemin Önder (2024)
