Root and Branch Essays on Inheritance

"That there is no easy translation for ‘awkward’ in other languages suggests that I’m only myself in English. This feels like a loss, because I’d like to think of myself as Turkish, too. There is a Turkish saying that one’s home is not where one is born, but where one grows full – dogdugun yer degil, doydugun yer." Mixing the personal and political, Eda Gunaydin’s bold and innovative writing explores race, class, gender and violence, and Turkish diaspora. Equal parts piercing, tender, and funny, this book takes us from an overworked and underpaid café job in Western Sydney, the mother-daughter tradition of sharing a meal in the local kebab shop, to the legacies of family migration, and intergenerational trauma. Root and Branch seeks to unsettle neat descriptions of belonging and place. What are the legacies of migration, apart from loss? And how do we find comfort in where we are?

Eda Gunaydin is a Turkish-Australian essayist and researcher whose writing explores class, capital, intergenerational trauma, and diaspora. You can find her work in the Sydney Review of Books, Meanjin, The Lifted Brow, and others. She has been a finalist for a Queensland Literary Award and the Scribe Nonfiction Prize. Root and Branch is her debut essay collection.

1. A rock is a hard place 2. Second city 3. Rahat 4. Only so much 5. Gothic body, in Two Parts 6. Shit-eating 7. Kalitsal 8. Western medicine 9. Literacy 10. Live on 11. Tell-all 12. Dogdugun yer, doydugun yer