‘BASTARD OF ISTANBUL’ EXPLORES MULTI-CULTURAL, MULTI-GENERATION RELATIONSHIPS
By Christina Clare, Washington Square News; SOURCE: NYU
Washington Square News via U-Wire
University Wire
March 8, 2007 Thursday
Book Review
New York
In 2006, Turkish author Elif Shafak was accused of and tried for
violating Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, which makes it a
crime to engage in "public denigration of Turkishness." One of the
gravest ways to do this is to acknowledge and identify the Armenian
genocide that took place under Ottoman rule between 1915 and 1917.
Shafak does this artfully in her recent novel, "The Bastard of
Istanbul," in which she explores the interaction of two families,
one Turkish and the other Armenian, joined together by marriage.
The characters’ use of the word "genocide" is what landed Shafak in
court. According to the Turkish government, the mass deportation
and killing of an estimated 1.5 million Turkish Armenians was a
consequence of World War I, rather than the result of a concentrated
effort by those in power to eliminate a whole population. Despite the
censure of the denial of this event by the international community,
the Turkish government still adheres to this position and persecutes
those within its country who contradict them.
The "Bastard of Istanbul" is Shafak’s vehicle to draw the world’s
attention to the Armenian genocide so vigorously denied by her country.
Shafak has a sharp and colorful knack for description. There is a
character with "the most blatantly aquiline nose, of which there were
only two others in world history — Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror’s
and Auntie Zeliha’s." Then there is the Dipsomatic Cartoonist, a
painfully jaded man in a lackluster marriage, experiencing so much
emotional turmoil that "even his wife" could sympathize. And then
there is Rose, an American who, while dealing with her divorce from
an Armenian man, meets the Turkish Mustafa and pursues him simply to
spite her staunchly anti-Turk in-laws.
Rose’s daughter, Armanoush, grows up in Arizona with her mother and
Turkish stepfather. She frequently visits her biological father in
San Francisco, where his psychologically scarred family educates her
about her Armenian heritage and the genocide her people suffered at
the hands of the Turks. Armanoush is very affected by what she is
told, so at age 21, unbeknownst to her family, she travels to Turkey
to try to understand her Turkish-Armenian identities. She meets and
stays with her stepfather’s family, the Kazancis.
The story centers around the women of the multi-generational Kazanci
family in Istanbul. This Turkish family represents the old and the
new of the country’s politics.
There is the clairvoyant Auntie Banu, who wears a headscarf that
her mother and sisters find offensive because it speaks of the past
suppression of women, abolished decades earlier by Ataturk. In stark
contrast is her sister, Zeliha, a provocatively dressed, rebellious
tattoo artist, who swears habitually and gives birth to the "the
bastard of Istanbul" at age 19. The mentally ill Aunt Ferida is
described as changing her hair color so much, "at each stage of her
journey to insanity," that her doctors even kept a hair chart "to
follow the changes in her psychology." Cevriye is "a humorless history
teacher with a Spartan sense of discipline and self-control" who
"crusaded against impulsiveness, disruption and spontaneity at home."
These women form the crucible within which the action in Istanbul
occurs.
The Turkey that Armanoush finds in her search for identity is
described by the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist at a weekly meeting with
his cynical intellectual friends at the Kundera cafe. This man,
undergoing prosecution by the government for the content of his work,
laments the sociopolitical climate of Turkey.
"We are stuck between the East and the West," he says. "On the one
hand, there are the secular modernists, so proud of the regime they
constructed, you cannot breathe a critical word. They’ve got the army
and half the state on their side. On the other hand there are the
conventional traditionalists, so infatuated with the Ottoman past,
you cannot breathe a critical word. They’ve got the general public and
the remaining half of the state on their side. What is left for us?"
The title character, 19-year-old Asya, notes, "My family is a bunch
of clean freaks. … They always talk about the past, but it is a
cleansed version of the past. … Every day we swallow yet another
capsule of mendacity." These kinds of politically charged statements
prompted the Turkish government to prosecute Shafak.
Asya family, as a microcosm of Turkey, exemplifies the country’s stance
on the Armenian genocide. Through her travels, Armanoush pushes her
Turkish step-family to address what her country really did to her
people, in this highly enjoyable, elucidative novel.