My Father’s Eyes, My Mother’s Tongue – Images and Language Beyond Belonging

Writer Deniz Utlu explores the subtle lines that connect identity, memory, and language. Drawing on personal and collective experiences, Utlu reflects on the forces that shape belonging—and on the images and words that accompany us across borders, generations, and emotional landscapes.

The “father’s eyes” and the “mother’s tongue” serve as metaphors for two intertwined inheritances: the visual, affective memories passed on through family histories, and the linguistic worlds through which we learn to name and navigate reality. Utlu shows how individuals shaped by migration move between these realms, creating new forms of expression and opening spaces that resist fixed notions of origin or identity.

The evening offers insight into Utlu’s literary work at the intersections of essay, fiction, and poetic reflection. Central questions include visibility, rootedness, and the creative potential of inhabiting the “in‑between”—a space where multiple cultural and linguistic registers coexist, challenge one another, and give rise to new narrative possibilities.

In conversation with Meryem Deniz, the event invites audiences to consider literature as a site of encounter: a place where images and language can bridge divides, expand perspectives, and illuminate the complexities of belonging in a transnational world.

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Host or Publisher Goethe-Institut Boston