(A small warning before we begin: the reflections below contain spoilers for Gazelle.)
Some people leave their countries, but their countries do not leave them.
The body is usually the first thing to move. It crosses a border, learns another transport system, figures out where to buy bread, signs forms it does not fully understand, begins constructing a life in another language. From the outside, this may eventually look like adaptation.
Memory has its own timetable.
A sound in a restaurant, a sentence on television, a political slogan, the rhythm of a familiar language: any of these can collapse years of distance within seconds.
You are in Frankfurt, New York, London. And suddenly you are somewhere else entirely.
This is the terrain Nadir Sarıbacak’s Gazelle inhabits. On the surface, it follows a Turkish man trying to make a life in the United States. But reducing it to a film about migration misses what makes it unsettling.
Its real subject is what happens when you have left a place geographically but remain, in some deeper sense, inside it.
I watched Gazelle in Frankfurt this week. After the screening, during a short Q&A with Sarıbacak and Fröhlich, I kept returning to one question:
Can we loosen the grip of the past without cutting ourselves off from the places that formed us?
I am not sure there is a clean answer. And that may be precisely why the film stayed with me. Because exile is not simply about where a person lives. Nor is belonging simply about where someone was born. There is a more difficult territory in between.
The body does not read the calendar
One of the central difficulties of trauma is almost embarrassingly simple to describe: an event can end while the body continues reacting as though it has not.
Gabor Maté has written about trauma not merely as the event itself, but as what the event reorganises within us: our relation to danger, trust, the body, other people and eventually ourselves.
The geography changes. The nervous system is slower. The mind can say, It is over. The body can remain unconvinced.
Gazelle captures this particularly well through sound. The noise of work. Machinery. Hammering. Conversations. The dull accumulation of ordinary sounds that most of us would filter out within seconds. For Yakup, they do not remain ordinary.
And that distinction matters.
Traumatic memory does not necessarily ask whether something is objectively dangerous. It works associatively. A sound resembles another sound. A tone carries another moment inside it. Something harmless in the present acquires the emotional meaning of something that was not harmless at all.
There is a moment when Yakup can no longer tolerate the noise around him and insists that it stop.
What struck me in the cinema was the reaction in the room. When the noise stopped, I felt the audience exhale with him.
It is one of the film’s strongest decisions because nothing needs to be explained. We are not given a psychological lecture about hyperarousal. We experience, for a few seconds, something closer to its logic.
The danger is no longer there. But some part of him is still waiting for it.
Sometimes remembering is not really remembering
The flashback in the prayer room goes further.
Yakup is physically in America, but something in him is elsewhere. The past is not presented as an image he chooses to revisit. It enters the present and begins to occupy it.
This is where the film’s emotional structure becomes more interesting to me than its plot. Yakup is suspended. He has left one life, but has not fully entered another.
Anthropology has a useful term for this: liminality.
Traditionally, it describes the threshold stage in a rite of passage: the old identity has been left behind, while the new one has not yet become secure.
Exile can become an extended version of precisely that condition. You are no longer who you were. You do not yet know who you will be.
You belong to a country you can no longer inhabit in the same way. You live somewhere else, but “living somewhere” and “being at home” are not identical experiences.
And the longer this threshold lasts, the more existential the questions become.
Not simply: Where do I belong?
But: Who am I while belonging remains unresolved?
Maybe we do not always miss the country
Migration is usually discussed through geography.
Do you miss home? Do you miss the food? Your city? Your family? Of course people do.
But I think there is another form of homesickness that receives far less attention. Sometimes what we miss is the person we were before leaving.
The person who did not need to explain herself. The person whose qualifications made immediate sense. The person who could be funny without translating the joke in her head first. The person who entered a room carrying a history others already knew.
A teacher who crosses a border can abruptly stop being read as a teacher. An academic begins proving degrees that were never previously in question. A journalist, doctor, lawyer or engineer may discover that professional identity is much less portable than expertise.
There is an anthropological and sociological loss here that is difficult to quantify.
Pierre Bourdieu gave us the language of cultural and social capital: the forms of recognition, knowledge and relationships that allow us to move through a social world.
But that capital is geographically fragile. Much of it does not cross the border with you.
The abilities may remain intact. The surrounding world simply no longer knows what they mean. And so you lose more than a country.
You lose a social world that already knew how to read you. There is a particular loneliness in having to narrate yourself from the beginning.
Belonging to a country is not the same as identifying with those who govern it.
You can miss Istanbul and want nothing to do with Ankara’s political language.
You can love Turkish and flinch when the language arrives wrapped in certain slogans.
You can carry the food, humour, gestures, music and memories of a culture while rejecting the people who claim the authority to define it.
Sometimes even hearing your mother tongue unexpectedly can produce anxiety rather than comfort.
For people who have never experienced political exile, that can sound contradictory. It is not. It is what happens when homeland and state split apart inside a person.
Belonging has very little respect for passports
States like categories. Citizen. Foreigner. Refugee. Turkish. German. American. Temporary. Permanent.
Human beings are less cooperative. Belonging is often made from things that would look ridiculous on an official form. A smell. Your mother’s voice. A particular way of making tea. A sentence you cannot translate without losing what matters in it. A childhood song. The rhythm of a holiday morning.
A joke that becomes painfully unfunny once you have to explain why it is funny. Knowing instinctively how tenderness sounds in one language and anger in another.
Feeling that one version of yourself lives in Turkish, another in German, another in English; and none is entirely false.
This is why I am increasingly sceptical of the question “Where do you belong?” It assumes there should be one answer. For many people there simply is not.
The more interesting question may be: How do I remain connected to something from which I have also become estranged? Because the place changes. You change.
And eventually the country in your memory and the country that continued without you are no longer quite the same place.
The guilt of having a good day
There is a small scene in Gazelle that says more about recovery than many larger dramatic moments.
Yakup finally goes to a soccer game with friends. He enjoys himself. He laughs. For once, pleasure appears on his face without much complication. Then his wife calls. And he lies. He tells her he has been walking alone.
What interests me is the speed with which pleasure turns into guilt. Trauma is often discussed in terms of fear, anxiety, flashbacks, insomnia. Less attention is paid to the moral discomfort that sometimes accompanies feeling better.
If others are still suffering, what does it mean that I laughed today? If I begin to enjoy this new life, what does that say about the one I lost? If I heal, am I somehow declaring that what happened to me no longer matters? There is a strange loyalty that can form around pain.
Not because people want to suffer. But because suffering can become entangled with memory, justice and fidelity to those who did not get out.
That is why “moving on” is such an inadequate phrase. Healing is not an erasure.
Nor is it a pardon. It is not forgetting what happened, forgiving everyone involved or forcing a neat ending onto an experience that never had one.
It is something more modest and more difficult: changing the amount of authority the past exercises over the present.
Healing is not a motivational slogan
This is also where I become uncomfortable with the language of contemporary self-help. Choose healing. Let go. Move forward.
The verbs are clean. Life is not. People do not recover simply because they have finally found the right mindset. Healing needs conditions. Safety matters. Money matters. Legal status matters. Community matters. Being reunited with family matters.
And recognition matters enormously.
Sometimes the first step is not “letting go” at all. Sometimes it is hearing someone else say:
Yes. What happened to you really happened.
To ignore the social and political conditions of trauma and place the entire burden on the individual is a peculiar cruelty of our therapeutic age. But there is an uncomfortable truth in the other direction too.
We are not only what happened to us. At some point - not necessarily quickly, not heroically, and certainly not on command - another question has to become possible.
Alongside: What happened to me? there is eventually: What do I want to do with the life that remains?
I find that question much harder. And perhaps more important.
How a place becomes home
There is rarely one dramatic moment when a foreign city suddenly turns into home.
It happens almost stupidly slowly. You return to the same café. A face at the bakery becomes familiar. You stop checking which tram goes where. You know what closes early. You watch the same trees lose their leaves more than once. You learn your child’s route to school.
You become irritated by something local: which is perhaps one of the more reliable signs that you actually live there now.
You make a friend. You have an argument. You celebrate something. You grieve something.
Eventually there are memories attached to streets that once meant nothing. This, to me, is one of the most beautiful aspects of belonging. Geography slowly becomes biography.
The old place does not disappear. The new one acquires weight. And maybe this is one of the most overlooked parts of healing in exile: not merely processing old memories, but producing new ones.
The past does not shrink only because we confront it. Sometimes it shrinks because life begins growing around it.
The gazelle’s third possibility
The title Gazelle stayed with me too. A gazelle trapped between threats cannot simply choose the obvious road to safety. Exile often contains the same structure: You cannot return. You are not entirely at home where you are. The life behind you has ended. The life ahead has not yet become emotionally real.
For a while, you live between two absences. But there may be a third possibility. Not return. Not forgetting. Not endless suspension either. Creation.
To mourn what cannot be recovered and still begin constructing what has never existed before.
Maybe that is what healing finally asks of us: Not to erase the past, but to alter our relationship to it. Not to cut our roots, but to learn that roots and chains are not the same thing.
To love a country without allowing it to own our identity. To remember an injustice without allowing that injustice to dictate every chapter that follows. And perhaps, one day, to look back without looking away and say:
I do not deny you. I have not forgotten you.
But I am no longer made only of you.