“As Natural as Eating and Drinking”: Garbage Collection and Perpetual Recovery in Latife Tekin's Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills

Latife Tekin’s novel, Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills (1984), tells the story of a migrant community, struggling to build squatter houses in the peripheries of an industrialized city. Although the name of the city is not explicitly mentioned in the novel, in an interview Tekin refers to Istanbul as the setting of her narrative. The community described by Tekin builds a unique relationship with garbage in this urban space, which has already been discussed in various contexts extending from urbanization to magical realism. This article aims to contibute to these discussions by foregrounding Tekin’s avoidance to name poverty and by exploring her way of narrating the community’s perpetual recovery. Not only does the article analyze how Tekin writes against sterilized life styles by presenting garbage as resource, but it also suggests that this narrative approach turns out to be even more conspicuous and relevant with the recent rise of street waste pickers in Turkey. The article pursues this discussion by drawing on influential scholars of waste and literature, namely Mary Douglas, Susan Signe Morrison, and William Viney, by performing close readings of the novel, and by engaging in the secondary literature on Tekin’s work. Therefore, the article examines the squatters’ fight against all destructive forces including nature, state-run demolitions, and various communities which try to settle on the same garbage hills. Then it illustrates how Istanbul as an unnamed setting, poverty as an unnamed condition, and folk medicine as a miraculous solution to health problems caused by harsh urban conditions contribute to Tekin’s emphasis on the community’s endless recoveries from all kinds of destructions and illnesses.