International Herald Tribune, France
Jan 19 2007
‘The Bastard of Istanbul’: Turks, Armenians and a troubled past
By Lorraine Adams
Published: January 19, 2007
The Bastard of Istanbul. By Elif Shafak. 360 pages. $24.95. Viking.
There is a moral putrescence peculiar to the denial of genocide. Yet
denial’s practitioners are all around us. The Sudanese government
calls the butchers of Darfur "self-defense militias." The Iranian
president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, dismisses the Holocaust as "myth." In
an official government report, the Turkish Historical Society
describes the slaughter of more than a million Armenians between 1914
and 1918 as "relocations" with "some untoward incidents."
It seems obvious that the Turkish novelist Elif Shafak smells the rot
in her homeland. Indeed, "The Bastard of Istanbul," her sixth novel
and the second written in English, recently led to a suit by the
right- wing attorney Kemal Kerincsiz, who declared that Shafak’s
Armenian characters were "insulting Turkishness" by referring to the
"millions" of Armenians "massacred" by "Turkish butchers" who "then
contentedly denied it all." Earlier, Kerincsiz sued Turkey’s
best-known novelist, the Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk, for telling
a Swiss journalist that "30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians were
killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it."
Pamuk’s isolation is less than complete and his stance not entirely
daring. Kerincsiz and others have brought about 60 similar cases, a
majority concerning the Armenian genocide, and not one has resulted
in prison time. Kerincsiz opposes Turkey’s bid for membership in the
European Union, and he acknowledges that these circus displays of his
country’s censorship laws aid his cause.
Although the international literary community has rallied behind
Pamuk and Shafak, both of whose cases were dismissed, there has been
decidedly less clamor about the suits brought against
Turkish-Armenian journalists, translators and political activists. At
the same time, Turkish nationalists have charged that Pamuk’s Nobel
and Shafak’s place in the spotlight have had more to do with their
persecution than with the merits of their work.
The critical consensus on Pamuk is undeniably strong, that on Shafak
far less substantial. Most of her novels have not been reviewed in
the West, and with the recent uproar she has become more discussed
than read. Here, she has taken on a subject of deep moral
consequence. But is the work worthy of its subject?
"The Bastard of Istanbul," set in the United States and Turkey,
concerns two families – one Turkish, living in Istanbul, and the
other Armenian, divided between Tucson, Arizona, and San Francisco.
(Shafak is currently an assistant professor of Near Eastern studies
at the University of Arizona.) An ardent feminist, Shafak populates
her novel with women. It’s no surprise, then, that Mustafa, the
Turkish man at the center of the plot, is more of an enigma than a
character. First seen in a Tucson supermarket as a college student,
he falls for and soon marries a young American who has recently
divorced her Armenian husband. Not only does his new wife enjoy
offending her Armenian in- laws with a Turkish spouse, she also
relishes the idea that her baby daughter will have a Turkish
stepfather.
That child, Armanoush, endures shuttle parenting, moving between her
mother in Arizona and her father and his relatives in San Francisco.
Shafak sketches these Armenians flatly and superficially, as
uniformly and fiercely anti-Turk – and as overprotectively fretful
about beautiful and bookish Armanoush. Instead of exploring her roots
with her own family, she makes contact with Armenian-Americans
online, joining a chat group dedicated to intellectual issues,
including combating Turkish denial of the massacres. At 21, Armanoush
somewhat illogically travels to Istanbul, where none of her Armenian
relatives remain. She stays with her stepfather’s Turkish family.
The family this young woman encounters is a confusing swirl of four
generations of women that includes a great-grandmother suffering from
Alzheimer’s disease; a disapproving, distant and angry grandmother;
her four daughters; and one great-granddaughter. The eldest daughter
is a self- styled Muslim mystic; another is a high school teacher,
and yet another a schizophrenic. The youngest runs a tattoo parlor
and has an illegitimate daughter, the bastard of the novel’s title.
Keeping all these women straight isn’t crucial since they function
chiefly as adornments of Shafak’s magic realism. We learn, for
example, that the men of the family for "generations after
generations … had died young and unexpectedly," a contrivance that
explains why Mustafa is living in Arizona and has never returned to
Istanbul to see his sisters.
Armanoush’s visit, which begins as an impulsive spurt of tourism,
unexpectedly leads to a far darker explanation of her stepfather’s
exile. (Those who wish to read the novel and not have the ending
spoiled should stop here.)
Armanoush inadvertently helps reveal Mustafa’s secret – that he raped
his youngest sister, that this sister covered up for him and that her
child is a product of incest. It takes the mystic sister, with the
help of an evil djinni, to bring about both her brother’s death and
his daughter’s discovery of her origins.
Mustafa’s crime is meant, presumably, to symbolize Turkey’s
long-denied history of genocide. But the fate of the Armenians is by
no means obscure: Scholars around the world have documented it with
precision. Unlike the members of the Armenian diaspora, Mustafa’s
sister willfully hides the circumstances of her rape – although it’s
difficult to believe that this miniskirted, high-heeled, radically
irreverent woman would have engaged in such subterfuge.
When the novel’s skeleton finally dances out of its flimsy closet,
it’s clear that although Shafak may be a writer of moral compunction
she has yet to become – in English, at any rate – a good novelist.
But Shafak, still in her 30s, has more than enough time to grow into
a writer whose artistry matches her ambition.
Lorraine Adams is a writer in residence at the New School in New York
and author of the novel, "Harbor."
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress