EAST MEETS WEST
by Louisa Ermelino
Publishers Weekly
December 4, 2006
Istanbul, January 2006. I’m at dinner with Turkish novelist Elif Shafak
in Sultanhamet, the old part of the city that figures so prominently
in her fiction. The table is covered with meze, and Shafak and her
husband, journalist Eyup Can, have chosen this restaurant, Giritli,
for its a mix of the cuisines of Istanbul: Turkish, Ottoman, Jewish,
Kurdish.
Soft spoken, thoughtful and intellectual, beautiful enough to have
her face on billboards, Shafak, 35, contrasts her delicate blonde
looks with exotic jewelry, a small gold nose ring, a bracelet that
fans out across her hand to end in rings on every finger. Patrons
come to the table to hold her hand in theirs and compliment her
writing. Shafak’s husband says to me, "Everyone loves Elif, but wait
until her new novel is published."
Indeed, when The Bastard of Istanbul, Shafak’s sixth novel, her
second written in English, is published in Turkey two months later,
the reaction is more extreme than even he and Shafak anticipated.
Because an Armenian character in the novel claims, "I am the
grandchild of genocide survivors who lost all their relatives at
the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915," Shafak faced up to three
years in prison. For invoking the "g-word," and therefore "insulting
Turkishness," she was prosecuted under Article 301 of the Turkish
penal code. Although no one has yet served any jail time, Article
301 has been used to prosecute more than 60 journalists, writers,
publishers, cartoonists and scholars, including Nobel prize winner
Orhan Pamuk. The Armenian question is a loaded one, especially now,
with Turkey’s application to join the European Union compromised
by the Turkish government’s refusal to acknowledge that there ever
was a genocide. In Shafak’s case, it was the first time Article 301
involved a fictional character. It was, she says, "surreal."
The reception to the book’s publication in Turkey, Shafak says, was
more positive than she expected. "Many people from all different
walks of life embraced the novel and it immediately became a
bestseller. Then, three months later, my Turkish publisher and I were
told we would be interrogated. But the bigger shock was that after
the case was dropped, it was appealed to a higher court and actually
went to trial." To complicate the situation, throughout all this,
Shafak was pregnant with her first child.
Shafak wanted to attend the trial on September 21, but had
delivered the baby only three days before-a girl, named Sehrazat
(for Scheherazade of the 1001 nights) and Zelda (for Zelda Fitzgerald).
>>From her hospital bed, with her daughter in her arms, Shafak watched
the scene outside the courtroom unfold on television. The nationalists
held up a huge poster with the word baba (father in Turkish) next to
a flag of the European Union and The Bastard, the name of the novel
in Turkish, over her picture.
"They were saying I was a bastard of the Europeans and not a true
Turk, not a child of my own country, and I watched the poster go up
in flames," she recalls.
Shafak is the daughter of many cultures and languages, "a nomad" as she
puts it. Born in France, raised by a single mother who was a diplomat,
she was a child in Ankara and a teenager in Spain before settling in
Istanbul where she received degrees in women’s studies and political
science. She’s lived and taught in the U.S., in Boston, Michigan and
Arizona, where she’s an assistant professor in the department of Near
Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
But for all her European and American sojourns, Elif Shafak is very
much a Turkish writer, and a bold one. The Bastard of Istanbul-about
four generations of women in two families, one Turkish in Istanbul
and the other Armenian in San Francisco-while high spirited, tackles
serious issues. In Istanbul, Asya, the teenaged illegitimate daughter
of a clairvoyant, headstrong mother, becomes fast friends with
Armanoush, the Armenian-American stepchild of the Turkish family’s
only living male relation. When Armanoush comes from San Francisco
to trace her heritage, the question of the Armenian genocide of 1915
becomes a focal point of the relationship.
Shafak did not set out with "grandiose claims" to write The Bastard
of Istanbul. Her starting point was simple: "If the past is gloomy,
if it’s sad, is it worth knowing more? Probing it further? Or is it
better to let bygones be bygones and be more future oriented? My
country has a collective amnesia and that was the basic thought:
memory and amnesia."
With the uproar The Bastard of Istanbul precipitated in Turkey, and
the coverage in the international press thrusting Shafak into the
limelight, Penguin has moved up publication here from March 2007 to
January. The Bastard of Istanbul has sold more than 70,000 copies
in Turkey, and rights have sold to France, Italy, the Netherlands
and Germany.
Shafak, however, has been a literary force in Turkey since, at 27,
she published her first novel, Pinhan, about a hermaphrodite mystic.
And she’s used to arousing controversy with her work because of her use
of Arabic and Persian words that were part of the Ottoman lexicon but
purged from Turkish when the country became a republic in the 1920s.
Clearly, Shafak loves language, and says she enjoys writing equally
in both languages. "I love the immensity of English’s vocabulary, its
precision. For me, Turkish is more emotional. If I’m writing humor,
I prefer to do that in English; if it’s sorrow, I would rather do
that in Turkish."
While there will be a next novel, she compares her writing life to the
movement of a pendulum. "I’m not an author who writes with the same
pace every day. When I’m done with a book, I become a more normal,
more social person. And then the pendulum goes to the other side and
I begin a very intense period of writing once again."
She’s scheduled to tour in the U.S. in February and she hopes to
continue to spend time here. But ultimately, Shafak says, "I can
never be completely detached from Istanbul. The city is a character
to me, almost always a female character. I am very much in love with
this city but she also has an amazing potential to suffocate you, so
every now and then, I need to take a break. I have always traveled,
a free spirit, but always, I will always come back."