On the possibility of multiculturalism: birds without wings by Louis de Berniéres

Abstract

At the beginning of the twentieth century a great number of non-Muslim population were driven out of the newly defined borders of the Turkish Republic. In Birds Without Wings, Louis de Berniéres questions the validity of the concepts like race, religion and language as the criteria for nation-building, and laments the loss of an Edenic life-style in an Anatolian town, when its Greek and Armenian inhabitants left. What made life there so good was the long-established multicultural relations, which the writer recreates for us. Hence, this article claims that at the heart of Birds Without Wings lies the concept of “multiculturalism” and points out to the way the dynamic relations connoted by the term are reflected through the novel’s formal and narrative aspects, such as chapter design, changing point of view, mixing genres and languages, and the symbolic use of names.