ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the experiences of three kinds of “New Europeans” as described in three novels by and about women. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) concentrates on second-generation immigrants from the British colonies, with particular attention to a girl of Caribbean descent. Emine Sevgi Özdamar details the life of a young Turkish woman migrating to Germany in the 1960s in Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (‘The Bridge of the Golden Horn’, 1998). Chika Unigwe’s Fata Morgana, originally published in Dutch in 2007 and republished in the author’s own translation as On Black Sisters Street in London in 2009, follows the lives of four African women working as prostitutes in present-day Antwerp. The three works show the difficulties of bringing into being a “New Europe” of integration instead of segregation, of inclusion rather than exclusion.
