Elif Shafak: ‘I don’t have the luxury of being apolitical’
The Turkish author, now living in London, on life in the west and
facing controversy at home
‘I experienced love and hate as an writer in Turkey – you get used to
that’ … author Elif Shafak. Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi for the
Guardian
Interview by Susanna Rustin
Saturday 6 December 2014 08.00 GMT
It is tempting to read Elif Shafak’s latest novel, The Architect’s
Apprentice, as a love letter to Istanbul and its Ottoman past, or even
a kind of apology to the city she left behind when she moved to London
with her two children four years ago. The book, which Shafak wrote in
English before revising its translation into Turkish, spans the era
from 1546 to 1632 and tells the story of the great imperial architect
Mimar Sinan, through the eyes of an invented apprentice and
elephant-keeper, Jinan, who stows away from Goa as a 12-year-old to
escape an evil stepfather.
The novel evokes the glory and cruelty of the Sultanate at its peak,
under Suleiman the Magnificent and his successors. But to see it as
anything as simple as a celebration of the city in which Shafak has
spent much of her life would be a mistake.
“This book is very critical,” she says. “The main historical narrative
in Turkey does not talk about human beings and the very few
individuals we mention are sultans. How did so-called ordinary men and
women feel through the centuries, when Turkey was going through these
changes? I’m interested in sexual minorities, ethnic minorities, and
I’m interested in silences. Animals of course we never mention, women
we rarely mention. For me there is always a desire to bring back
stories and subjects that have been forgotten or pushed to the sides.”
The novel, Shafak points out, foregrounds many injustices and
illustrates the close connection between architecture and war – with
the most spectacular mosques funded by plunder. Alongside Jinan,
Sinan, the elephant Chota and cross-dressed apprentice Yusuf (a girl
in disguise), it makes a hero of the Gypsy Balaban. And it highlights
the practice of fratricide, whereby sultans on ascending the throne
had their brothers strangled. Warmly welcomed in Britain, where one
reviewer called it her best book yet,The Architect’s Apprentice, has
had a chilly reception in Turkey – though as the country’s most
popular female author, with 1.65 million followers on Twitter, Shafak
says she is used to taking the rough with the smooth.
“I get a lot of criticism from the cultural elite and a lot of love
from readers,” she says. “The more you are read in the western world,
the more you are hated in your motherland. Being a writer in Turkey
has a very humbling and moving side because if readers like a story
then they share it and pass it round.”
Shafak was born in Strasbourg in 1971. Her mother had fallen in love
and dropped out of university to get married; her father was studying
in France for a philosophy PhD. But the relationship fell apart and
Shafak’s mother returned to Ankara with her baby and the prospect of
being remarried, quickly, to a much older man.
“That’s the tradition, it’s a very male-dominated society”, she says,
and when you’ve already been married, “you’re not in a top place in
the marital market any more. You have fallen down and you’re not a
virgin, but you have to be married off so that you’re not a threat.”
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But Shafak’s maternal grandmother decided her daughter should complete
her education before attaching herself to another man. Shafak’s mother
became a diplomat, and Elif spent a lonely childhood, first with her
grandmother and later in embassy postings in Madrid (where Spanish
became her second language), Jordan and Germany.
“Part of me always felt like the other, the outsider, the observer,”
she says. “My father had two sons with his second wife, who I didn’t
meet until my late 20s. I was always on the periphery. In Madrid I was
the only Turk in a very international school, so I had to start
thinking about identity. All these things affected me. I had no centre
in my life, no sense of continuity, and I do sincerely believe books
saved me from insanity.”
At the Middle East Technical University in Istanbul, Shafak – who gave
up her father’s surname when she was 18 and renamed herself Shafak
(which means “dawn”) after her mother – studied international
relations and took Turkey’s first course in women’s studies before
signing up for a PhD on masculinity. But though she cherished her
interdisciplinary training, the priority was always fiction. An
eclectic reader of philosophy, religion and stories of all sorts, who
was “almost addicted” to Russian novels at one point, her first book
told the story of a heterodox hermaphrodite dervish and employed a
deliberately esoteric vocabulary in protest at the Turkification of
her mother tongue from the 1920s onwards.
People were surprised, she says. “They didn’t expect that kind of
language from a 24-year-old feminist, leftist person. We have taken
out hundreds of words because they came from Arabic or Persian and
were not Turkish enough, and I am very much against that kind of
linguistic purification.”
She published more novels and her readership grew, but life as a
public figure in Turkey was suffocating. Having relocated to Boston
with a fellowship at Mount Holyoke women’s college, in 2004 she
published her first novel written in English,The Saint of Incipient
Insanities. From there she moved to Michigan and then Arizona, where
she was a full-time scholar.
But personal and professional life were drawing her back to Turkey,
where she met her future husband Eyup (they married in Berlin, she
wearing black as usual) and was prosecuted, following publication of
her bestselling novel The Bastard of Istanbul, for insulting
Turkishness (it tackled the Armenian genocide of 1915).
“I was surprised,” she says coolly. “When you write about Armenians
you know there will be a reaction, but I didn’t expect this. There was
a huge reaction, and demonstrations at which people were burning my
picture, spitting on my picture.”
The case lasted a year before the charge was dismissed, during which
she was protected by bodyguards. “It was demoralising and upsetting
but I don’t want to paint a very dark picture,” she says, “because I
also had so much support. I have experienced both love and hatred and
as a writer in Turkey you get used to that. We move very easily from
one to the other, we are very emotional people, so you learn not to
take it too seriously. The hullabaloo is temporary.”
The trial ended the day after the birth of her first child, which
precipitated another crisis in the form of postnatal depression. In
her memoir Black Milk, she puts this down to an unresolved conflict
between warring aspects of herself (and barely alludes to the fact
that hanging over her pregnancy was the possibility of three years in
prison).
The book intersperses brief essays on famous women writers including
Zelda Fitzgerald, after whom Shafak named her daughter, with chapters
describing the quarrel that raged between Shafak’s six “finger women”
– each representing an aspect of herself and “no taller than
Thumbelina”, with names such as Mama Rice Pudding and Miss Ambitious
Chekhovian – over what direction the rest of her life should take.
The effect is comic, and she doesn’t say much about the form her
depression took, but Shafak says it “was a very important phase in my
life. I had taken it for granted that all I needed was a pencil and
paper, because I had my imagination, which was so vivid. When I lost
my connection with words I had to rethink many things and remodel
myself. It wasn’t only motherhood that challenged me. I had lived out
of a suitcase all my life and the basic assumption was that I could go
where I liked. I was a free spirit and it terrified me that I had to
settle down.”
Today Shafak and her husband live in different cities – she in London,
he in Istanbul. But they are not separated and the family gets
together around twice a month. “It’s a different marriage,” she says,
“and I find it very difficult to explain particularly to people in
Turkey because it’s not like anything they have seen before.” Their
two children, she believes, manage the arrangement well.
Shafak chose London because she loves the English language, because
it’s nearer than the US and because it is one of the few truly
cosmopolitan cities in the world. “I know it sounds like a cliche but
to me the fact it’s so multicultural is a treasure. It’s not something
you see everywhere, even in major European cities that are supposedly
multicultural there isn’t much interaction and there are more ghettos.
London is unique. It can be challenging as well because it doesn’t
open up very easily so it takes a while to find your feet, but it’s
worth the effort.”
The city’s literary scene, though, she says, is less cosmopolitan than
you might expect and “can be surprisingly insular”. She knows the
proportion of translated books published in the UK by heart: 4%, while
in Turkey it is around 47%. “It’s a one-way street, isn’t it? We read
western literature more than western readers read Turkish literature.
There has to be more balance.”
Shafak doesn’t believe in categories of low- and highbrow. Her
bestselling novel to date, 2010’s The Forty Rules of Love, sets the
contemporary story of a New England housewife embarking on a new
romance against an account of the 13th-century friendship between the
Sufi poet Rumi and wandering mystic Shams. She may have given up
writing novels in Turkish for now, but Shafak has made herself a
literary ambassador for Sufism, which she is not alone in regarding as
a crucial and too-often ignored strand in Islam. “Maybe I am able to
notice things some of my British friends don’t,” she says. “I like to
question cultural biases wherever I go and I question Islamophobia as
much as I question anti-western sentiment because I think all
extremist ideologies are very similar.”
Uninterested in organised religion, she is strongly drawn to Islamic
mysticism and the idea of an “inner-oriented journey. With that inner
space you come across Jewish mystics, Christian mystics, Islamic
mystics, Daoists. And you’re surprised at how similar are the things
they say.” In the Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan in her latest novel,
she believes she has found a hero after her own heart: “he was the
kind of person who saw the dome as an all-embracing concept – not a
symbol of Christianity or Islam but a symbol that united human
beings.”
Shafak has tackled controversial and current topics in her fiction
(the Armenian genocide; “honour killings” in her novel Honour), and
has also written as a journalist and commentator: last month she
declared her opposition to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s
comments that men and women are not equal.
But she is strongly critical too of a view of Muslim countries that
concentrates on women’s rights at the expense of everything else: “I
don’t think we can talk about women’s rights if there are no human
rights,” she says. “We as women in the Middle East have supported some
very authoritarian rulers who on the surface seem to have introduced
progressive reforms for women, but who are clearly not pro-freedom of
speech, not pro-media diversity. I would love to have a women’s
movement that goes beyond this paradox. I want us to believe in
democracy.”
Her own experience of cooperation, between her old-fashioned
grandmother and highly educated, westernised mother, makes her believe
in the possibility of a greater degree of solidarity between different
kinds of Turkish and Muslim women. She is a champion of gay rights.
“If you are a writer from Turkey, Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt, you don’t
have the luxury of being apolitical. You can’t say ‘that’s politics,
I’m just doing my work’. For me, coming from the women’s movement,
politics is not just about parties and parliament. There is politics
in our private space and in gender relations as well. Wherever there’s
power, there’s politics.”
* The Architect’s Apprentice is published by Viking.
From: A. Papazian
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/06/the-books-interview-elif-shafak-dont-have-luxury-of-being-apolitical