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On Bruises, Beauties, and Makeup: An Interview with Elif Shafak
By Khatchig Mouradian
Says Elif Shafak in this interview, “‘The bruises and the make-up’
is a metaphor I use in order to better depict Turkish modernists’
obsession with ‘our image in the eyes of the Western world.’ The
elite likes to prove to the Westerners how Westernized, modernized
we Turks are. Yet when it comes to critically reading the past,
the same elite is indifferent, if not ignorant.”
It is this indifference and ignorance that Shafak, whom “The Economist”
considers to be “well set to challenge Mr. (Orhan) Pamuk as Turkey’s
foremost contemporary novelist,” tries to confront. She does not
believe in deceitful “outward appearances” and suggests that Turkey
wash away the makeup “to see both the beauties and the bruises
underneath.”
Elif Shafak was born in Strasbourg, France in 1971. After spending her
teenage years in Spain, she returned to Turkey. She graduated with
a degree in International Relations from the Middle East Technical
University in Ankara. She earned her PhD in 2004 from the Department
of Political Science of the same University. She has taught at Bilgi
University, Istanbul and at the University of Michigan. Currently,
she is an Assistant Professor in the Near Eastern Studies Department
at the University of Arizona.
She has published five novels: “Pinhan” (1997), “Sehrin Aynalari”
(1999), “Mahrem” (2000), “Bit Palas” (2002), and “The Saint of
Incipient Insanities” (2004), her first novel in English.
Although some people in Turkey consider those who attempt to wash the
Turkish Republic’s makeup “backstabbers”, it is intellectuals like
Elif Shafak who will usher the country to confront its past and face
the future.
Khatchig Mouradian – Heraclitus says, “Nothing endures but change”. As
a person with “incessant itineraries” who sees life “as a perpetual
journey where there is neither a final destination, nor the desire
to find one”, and as a writer whose heroes are often prone to
metamorphosis, how do you explain your commitment to change?
Elif Shafak – At birth we are all born into a certain identity -be
it in terms of religion, nationality, gender, etc. Our name is given
to us, and so is our habitat, and sometimes even our worldview. The
question is the following: living the life we are to live, are we
going to die in the same bay, in the same identity? My answer to
this question is negative. I am intrigued by metamorphosis. I am not
a settler. If anything, I guess I am a nomad. This kind of nomadism
was not my choice at the beginning, but then it became something I
deliberately, consciously chose.
I was born in France, raised by a single mother, I saw two utterly
different grandmothers with two utterly different understandings of
Islam, traveled back and forth between different cities and countries,
each time the setting changed profoundly, the ground beneath my feet
was always subject to change and life a series of sudden ruptures… I
spent my childhood in Spain, and traveled back and forth between
Amman-Jordan, Cologne-Germany, Ankara, and then Istanbul… Then
Boston, Michigan, Arizona… I now live in two places at the same time:
Arizona on the one hand and Istanbul on the other hand. The only
continuity that existed in my life, the only luggage that came with
me everywhere I went was my writing, was fiction.
Transformation and transcendence are at the heart of my fiction.
I think fiction and Sufi thought share something deep in common. For
both of them transformation and transcendence play a pivotal
role. Fiction, for me, is not the ability to tell your own story
to others, but the ability to make others’ stories yours and your
story others’.
I have roots but I am not rooted. According to the Islamic narrative,
there lives a tree in the skies above. Its name is Tuba. This tree
is turned upside down and thus has its roots up in the air. Sometimes
I think my fiction is a continuous quest for the Tuba tree.
K.M. – Unlike the roots of the Tuba tree in heaven, our earthly
roots can be struck by shame and pain, which is why we, human beings,
might want to keep them under the soil. We might take pride in our
roots but we rarely reveal them entirely. Can fiction bear fruits of
transformation, transcendence, and, yes, tuba (beatitude)? Does it
make readers less rooted, less uprooted, and more open to their own
stories and the stories of others?
E.S. – The clash between representing a particular identity and
questioning the very essence of identity politics is one that intrigues
me deeply. I am a bit torn in between because I am a nomad but I am
a political nomad.
Then there is another dilemma: those who seek to be pastless,
memory-free, in other words the future-oriented and then those for
whom the past determines the basic parameters, in other words the
past-oriented. I do not believe this is an easy dilemma that can be
overcome by solely reasoning. Today’s international politics does
not like ambiguity. Politics does not like ambivalence.
Yet the universe of art, the world of fiction necessitates ambiguities,
flexibilities. It has to be fluid. Only then, fiction can bear the
fruits of transformation and transcendence. You need to be uprooted in
order to feel empathy, if not a rapport, with others’ stories, at least
until the book is over you need to step outside your zone of existence.
In the USA, for instance, there is a tendency to attribute a function
to fiction, as if every book has to have a function. Likewise, if you
happen to be “Middle Eastern woman writer” then you are expected to
be writing on “women in the Middle East”. Your identity walks ahead
of the quality of your fiction, which I find very troublesome. In
fact, I find this all-encompassing expectation highly detrimental for
fiction. Fiction for me is not telling my own story but the ability
not to be myself.
At the same time, I should say I am not propagating a fiction devoid
of political considerations. To the opposite, the relation between
aesthetics and politics is of deep interest to me.
“Politics and aesthetics” is not an easy marriage but as a Turkish
novelist, I do not believe I have the luxury to be apolitical in
this world. Therefore, fluidity or flexibility does not mean being
apolitical; to the opposite it entails a political choice and the
proclivity for empathy.
K.M.- In one of your opinion articles, you say: “While it might be true
that many Westerners have to take a closer look at Turkey’s remarkable
achievements and unusual history in searching for an answer to the
vital question of how compatible Islam is with Western democracy,
many Turks, in return, have to start washing the make-up on their
face and start admitting the bruises left in their history”. Can you
speak about those bruises?
E.S.-“The bruises and the make-up” is a metaphor I use in order to
better depict Turkish modernists’ obsession with “our image in the
eyes of the Western world.” The elite likes to prove the Westerners how
Westernized, modernized we Turks are. Yet when it comes to critically
reading the past, the same elite is indifferent, if not ignorant.
Turkey’s modernization went hand in hand with the transformation
from a multiethnic, multilingual, multifaith empire to a supposedly
homogeneous Turkish nation-state. This process is replete with traumas,
losses, and painful memories many of which have been somehow erased
from our collective memory.
Our family lines, if you trace it back to centuries, might be most
probably multiethnic but ethnicity is a source of suspicion if you
choose to talk about it in the public arena. You can be whoever you
are in the privacy of your house, but in the public domain, you should
just be a Turk. This distinction between private sphere and public
sphere is of great interest to me.
In the past, this society was ethnically so heterogeneous but right
after 1923 we have gotten used to acting and thinking as if we were now
a homogenous whole. The interesting thing about Turkish nationalism
is that it relies very much on words, rather than on blood or genes
or race, as some other types of nationalism do in other countries.
For Turkish nationalism, you can be a Kurd, an Armenian, a
Serbian… all the same, as long as you utter the words: How happy is
the one who calls himself a Turk! This is a very interesting feature
of Turkish national identity. What you say, what you do, in other
words always the outer appearance is essential.
It is this concern with the “outward appearance” that I find quite
troublesome. Instead, I suggest washing this make-up off to see both
the beauties and the bruises underneath, both the beauties and the
atrocities of the past. There are stains and scars left from the
transition from a multiethnic empire to a supposedly monolithic
nation-state. The loss of the cosmopolitan heritage and multiethnic
structure is a cultural, social, economic, political and a big moral
loss for Turkey and for the next generations growing up without the
knowledge of this loss.
K.M.-Is it to regain part of the knowledge of this loss that you are
“planning a project on “Women’s Oral Histories vis-a-vis Collective
Amnesia: The Narratives of Armenian & Turkish & Greek Grandmothers”?
Why do citizens of the Turkish Republic in the 21st century “need
to listen to the suppressed memories of the Turkish grandmother”
regarding “the atrocities…Turks have committed against Armenians”
a century ago in the Ottoman Empire, for example?
E.S.-The whole debate on the Turkish-Armenian past is deeply
politicized and polarized today. It is also obsessed with written
documents and archives. However, I think oral culture is just as much
valuable. As a storyteller, it is those stories that I am primarily
interested in. The stories old women in Turkey still remember. In
many families today there are old women who remember the atrocities
committed against the Armenians in the past, I think it is especially
valuable to bring out that accumulation of knowledge. This is another
source of knowledge.
It is not only the atrocities of the past but also the beauties of
the past that we can discover in this vein because many of these old
women had Armenian neighbors, friends; they have memories. The Armenian
Question is the battle of memory against amnesia and I believe we need
the memories of the grandmothers more than anything, because they are
not as politicized or polarized as historians or politicians are today.
K.M.- In reference to the cancellation of a conference in Istanbul
challenging the state’s thesis on the “Armenian issue”, you say in
an article entitled “So, Did I Stab the Nation in the Back?”, “If our
perceptive politicians had not intervened at the last minute, I would
have failed to stop myself from uttering very damaging statements.”
Your presentation was going to be on the Armenian writer Zabel Yeseyan.
Would you now give a summary of this “very damaging” and “backstabbing”
paper you were going to present?
E.S. – My presentation at the Conference in Istanbul was going to be on
Zabel Yeseyan. I am fascinated by her life and work, and I think it is
a pity that today Turkish intellectuals do not know anything about her.
Likewise, we know almost nothing about the Armenian intellectuals of
the late Ottoman era.
More significantly perhaps is the question: why was the Turkish
governmental elite so much disturbed by the writing of the Armenian
intellectuals? Why did they want to suppress their voices? Why were
poets, novelists, journalists deemed to be dangerous? How and why
was writing thought to be dangerous? These are the questions I was
planning to raise at the conference.
Today in Turkey not many people know that before the deportation
begun, a list of around 240 Armenian intellectuals was concocted
by the government; a list of dangerous minds! Dangerous pens! Among
them were many artists and writers. It was this list that the state
wanted to suppress and silence. Zabel Yeseyan seems to be the only
woman in the list.
It is an old tactic of power and dominion. If you want to control and
constrain a minority population, you first and foremost control and
constrain its brainpower, its intellectuals, its thinking minds. The
Ottoman elite seems to have taken this step.
If we can understand the list of Armenian intellectuals of 1915,
I hope, we Turkish intellectuals of 2005 can better understand,
recognize and mourn the injustice done against the Armenian minority,
and the power dynamics behind this historical process.