http://www.perlentaucher.de/buch/30705.html
Although most of the tale is based on Balci's own friends, acquaintances and contacts in the poverty-stricken multicultural Neukoelln neighborhood, it is written in novel-form, and Balci candidly admits that the main character, Rashid A., is based on a composite number of actual characters. Several of the supporting characters in ARABBOY are also composites. The title, ARABBOY plays on the SMS-, YouTube-, and internet "handle" that Rashid chose for himself early on. Rashid sees himself as "Arabboy 44", which means that in his neighborhood, there are certainly many Arab boys about. Likewise, most of Balci's tale takes place in the midst of Arab gangs and Arab families in Berlin.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCner_Yasemin_Balc%C4%B1
Balci, herself, is not Arab. As a child in Neukoelln, she saw herself as "Turkish". Berlin, itself, is claimed to be the largest Turkish city outside of Asia--with approximately 200,000 Turkish or Turkish-German residents living in and around the German capital city. At home, however, Balci's parents spoke in German to her and to her older siblings. She has written that until she was much older she didn't really understand much Turkish and definitely did not know the language of her parents, known as Zaza.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turks_in_Germany
Balci detailed the following in her self-introduction for ARABBOY, "My first years in primary school, I had also thought that we [my family] were Turkish. My parents spoke in a mysterious tongue that we children could not comprehend. Only later was I bold enough to enquire about the language. As I began to ask questions I learned that the language was known as Zaza [spoken by Dimili peoples of Persian ancestry]." That is, in Turkey, during her parents and most of Balci's own childhood, "Zaza" like Kurdish had been a banned language in militarily-controlled Turkey.
Balci added, "Zaza was one of numerous minority languages that Turkey were banned from speaking through the 1980s. To the Zaza language belongs an entire culture--all of its very own [i.e. separate from the Turkish culture that many Germans have come a bit to know during the recent post-WWII decades]. The Ataturks had sought to destroy these cultures [and the memories of these cultures]. In order to protect us children [from abuse], my parents had decided not to teach us Zaza." Incidentally, it is claimed by some linguists that the Dimilis migrated first to the Caspian Sea from the TigrisRiver, i.e. the cradle of civilization, and then later on to Western Turkey over the millennia.
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