AN INTERVIEW WITH ELIF SHAFAK
Boyd Tonkin
BIA
March 20 2008
Turkey
Boyd Tonkin called her "A writer who weds the modern and the mystic,"
when he interviewed her for the Independent newspaper in July 2007.
On the occasion of her nomination for the Orange Prize, bianet
publishes the interview.
Elif Shafak was born in France to a Turkish diplomatic family in 1971,
and as a child lived in Spain, Jordan and Germany before studying
in Ankara.
She has taught Ottoman history and culture at Istanbul Bilgi University
and, from 2002, at American universities in Boston, Michigan and
Tucson, Arizona.
A prolific columnist and fiction writer, she has published six novels:
The Flea Palace (shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize)
and The Gaze are available in the UK from Marion Boyars.
Her novel The Bastard of Istanbul (published by Viking) provoked a
court case in 2006 that led to her acquittal on a charge of "insulting
Turkishness". Shafak, whose daughter Shehrazad Zelda was born at the
time of her trial, now lives in Istanbul.
After years of interviewing ego-driven writers, one truth looms larger
all the time for me. Authors who have precious little to say or to
fear always make the biggest fuss about their precious work and their
sacred little selves. Then there is the modest minority in whom talent,
courage and self-knowledge converge; who fight high-stakes battles
against dangerous enemies, but never succumb to vanity, bitterness
or dogmatism.
Influenced by Sufi Islam Quietly eloquent at breakfast-time in her
Bloomsbury hotel, the Turkish novelist, journalist and academic Elif
Shafak explains how the Sufi strand of Islam that she loves helps
to ground her in internal as well as external realities. "It’s an
endless chain," she explains. "I’m both observing the outside world,
and observing myself. And this is something that perhaps I derive
from Sufism.
Because I think the human being is a microcosm: all the conflicts
present outside are also present inside him."
Compared to the trivial spats that occupy so many writers in the
West, Shafak has had to endure enough external conflict over the
past year to extinguish many lesser lights. In September 2006, she
joined the scores of Turkish authors and intellectuals (notably,
Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk) who have faced trial for the crime of
"insulting Turkishness" under Article 301 of the republic’s penal code.
Secular chauvinists brought trial against Shafak Inevitably, the
charges – pushed through by a cabal of hard-line nationalist lawyers
– stemmed from a fictional discussion of the mass deportations and
deaths of Armenians in 1915, as the Ottoman empire crumbled, at one
point in her new novel The Bastard of Istanbul (Viking, £16.99).
The hearing took place just as her first child, a daughter named
Shehrazad Zelda, was born. Shafak was rapidly acquitted; a verdict
welcomed at the time by Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
(re-elected last Sunday).
In court in Istanbul, she faced a Satanic Verses-style charade,
with the words of one (Armenian) character in a novel of cultural
and emotional polyphony plucked from their context and treated as a
manifesto. With one, crucial difference from Salman Rushdie’s plight:
the judicial harassment of authors in Turkey comes not from Islamist
forces but secular chauvinists.
A focus on multiple meanings Although she has had to walk through
fire, Shafak carries herself with an uncanny air of calm ("cool"
would be misleading; she has warmth as well as poise). Much of
her mischievous fiction plays with the treachery of appearances,
the mutability of identities. What you see is, consistently, not
what you get. Take the headscarf, now worn by around 60 per cent of
Turkish women. Shafak explores its multiple meanings, with only some
of them linked in any way to political Islam.
The Bastard of Istanbul, with the matriarchal clan of the Kazancis
at his heart, dramatises the kind of Turkish family where "Sometimes
the mother’s covered and the daughter isn’t; one elder sister is a
leftist; another is very superstitious. We are very much mixed, and
I think there’s nothing bad about it." As she puts it, "Islam is not
a monolith. It’s not a static thing at all. And neither is the issue
of the headscarf."
Defying stereotypes Shafak herself could baffle stereotypes as
gleefully as her characters often do. Born in Strasbourg, to a family
of diplomats, she had a father who left home early on and a feminist
mother (a foreign-ministry official in her own right) who brought
her up in Spain, Jordan and Germany. She has taught in three American
states and travelled all over the world.
The author of six exuberantly digressive novels packed to bursting
with jokes, tales and ideas ("carnivalesque", she calls them),
she first wrote The Bastard of Istanbul and its predecessor not in
Turkish but in English. "If it’s sadness I’m dealing with," she says,
"I prefer Turkish; for humour, I prefer English."
A passion for folk culture Now here she sits in a Bloomsbury hotel
lounge, peppering her conversation with references to Johnny Cash
or Walter Benjamin. An archetype of the secular, Westernised Turkish
woman? Not at all: her involvement with the path of Sufism began as
an intellectual quest, but deepened. "Only years later did I realise
that perhaps this was more than intellectual curiosity, that it was
also an emotional bond.
Sufism has always been more open to women, and it’s always been
more feminine."
Along with Sufism comes the passion for Turkish popular traditions –
in demotic language, folk-tales, customs and, above all, cuisine – that
enlivens her books, especially when women wield them. Her grandmother
read fortunes, warded off the evil eye and believed in the occult power
of djinns. "I realised that women who have been denied any power in
other spheres of life can find a means of existence in this little
world of superstitions, of folk-tales, of storytelling… They are
the queen in that sphere, especially as they get older".
Then, of course, there’s the boundary-busting lore of food. In The
Bastard of Istanbul, a Turkish and an Armenian family tragi-comically
discover their kinship in part via the recipes each thought peculiar
to their tribe. "When I was writing this book I wasn’t interested in
the masculinist political debates," Shafak explains, but "in the small
things that mean so much in the lives of women. And when you do that,
you start to notice the similarities."
It always amazes her "how food can transcend national boundaries". As
in the Middle East’s "baklava wars": "The Lebanese say, ‘it’s our
baklava’, the Turks say, ‘it’s ours’, the Arabs say, ‘it’s ours’…
It doesn’t belong to any group. It’s multi-cultural."
The need to remember and forget If the new novel celebrates the
potential togertherness of Turks and Armenians, it also shows how
divergent approaches to the past can keep obstacles in place. Her
rupture-happy Turks love to forget; her history-haunted Armenians
to remember.
For Armanoush, the Armenian-American from San Francisco who unearths
her connection with the feuding, eccentric Kacanzis, her own people
think of time as "a cycle in which the past incarnated the present
and the present birthed the future". Whereas for the Turks she grows
to know (and even love), "time was a multi-hyphenated line, where
the past ended at some definite point… and there was nothing but
rupture in between".
"If the past is sad, if it’s gloomy," Shafak asks, "is it better to
know more about it, to think more about it, or would you rather let
bygones be bygones and prefer to start from scratch? I don’t think
that’s an easy question, and I don’t think it has a single answer."
In general, Shafak suggests that the Turks would benefit from a lot
more past, the Armenians from a little more present. "I think human
beings need a combination of memory and forgetfulness."
Court case wilfully misunderstood multiplicity of voices She stresses
that the unending dialogues that fill her fiction leave its readers
free to enter it by "multiple doors and multiple windows". It’s a
liberty that seems entirely wasted on some single-minded jurists. "When
I look at the whole year in hindsight, that’s one of the things that
hurt me most," she says. "Here we are talking about multiplicity,
and a plurality of voices, and for completely political reasons one
of these voices is being singled out and seen as representative of
the book. That’s something that hurt me as a fiction writer."
The Bastard of Istanbul had circulated without impediment and sold
around 150,000 copies prior to the case. Shafak underlines that
"My experience with readers in Turkey has always been very, very
positive…I get amazing feedback from them."
Art needs conflict So she’s happy to be back amid the inspirational
hubbub of Istanbul after a couple of years of teaching in the
"sterile, quiet and tidy" liberal enclave of Tucson, Arizona. "This
can be good if you want to write a book," she reflects. "But if
you want to establish a lifestyle, I don’t think it’s good for art,
for literature. Art needs conflict, and other forces… Cities like
Istanbul, or New York, or London: they might have more problems,
they might make life more difficult, but I think these are the right
places for writers and artists."
For Shafak, art must struggle to safeguard its space of free enquiry
from the dead hand of doctrine: "Because the world we live in is so
polarised and politicised, many people are not willing to understand
that art and literature has an autonomous zone of existence… I’m
not saying there is no dialectic between art and politics – there is,
indeed – but art cannot be under the shadow of politics. Art has the
capacity constantly to deconstruct its own truths… That’s again why
I think there’s a link between Sufism and literature. For me, both of
them are about transcending the self, the boundaries given by birth."
Resisting pressure to have one identity "I think it’s perfectly OK to
be multi-lingual, multi-cultural, even multi-faith," she adds when we
talk of her current fascination with the "labyrinth" of the English
language. "In a world that’s always asking us to make a choice once
and for all, we should say, ‘No: I’m not going to make that choice. I’m
going to stay plural’."
Staying plural in Istanbul can still exact a steeper cost than doing
so in Islington. Yet she has no shortage of allies. The people who
applaud Shafak and her freedom to break out of religious and ethnic
cocoons poured onto the streets in their hundreds of thousands
in January after her friend, the Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant
Dink, was murdered by extreme nationalists. In the wake of Dink’s
funeral-cum-demonstration, she wrote that his killing "united people
of all ideological backgrounds" in "a common faith in democracy".
But the September trial, despite its successful outcome, did plunge
her into "a period of mourning". "I was very demoralised for some
time." Fiction has taken a back seat lately to Shafak’s typically
fearless journalism, and she has been developing a TV screenplay about
"honour killings". "At the moment, fiction waits in the background,"
she concludes, "but it’s the main thing for me, it’s the way I feel
connected to life. So I cannot keep her in the background for too
long." (BT/AG)
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