Digging her way with words

Irish Times; Aug 12, 2006

Turkish novelist Elif Safak might seem the perfect writer to become an
interpretive guide to the east. But no one person can be the
representative of a culture, she tells Nick Birch

‘No word polarises more than the word genocide," observes Halil
Berktay, a well-known historian of the late Ottoman Empire. "If you
use it, Turks get angry. If you don’t, Armenians do. Either way, it
stops the conversation."

It’s an observation internationally renowned Turkish novelist Elif
Safak has learnt to her cost since her sixth novel came out in Turkey
this March. The Bastard of Istanbul topped the country’s bestseller
lists for three months here and received largely positive critical
reviews for its description of the growing intimacy between two
families, one Turkish and one Armenian-American.

But it also attracted the attention of ultra-nationalist lawyer Kemal
Kerincsiz, whose rise to prominence as an opponent of free speech has
paralleled Turkey’s European Union accession efforts. He was the one
who tried to close down a conference on the Armenian issue last
year. He is novelist Orhan Pamuk’s nemesis. In the case of Elif Safak,
he has surpassed himself.

His gripe is not with something she said, but with comments made by
Armenian characters in her book. "I am the grandchild of a family
which lost all its relatives to the Turkish butchers in 1915," says
one. "I learned to betray my roots, I was brought up to deny the
genocide."

An insult to Turkishness, Kerincsiz claims, citing the notoriously
vague terms of Article 301 of Turkey’s new criminal code, used against
dozens of writers since its ratification last year. A first prosecutor
laughed him out of court this June, but his appeal was accepted by a
higher court on July 6th.

Elif Safak can’t help seeing the absurd side. The thought of Uncle
Barsam and Auntie Varsenig, both figments of her imagination, being
called to the dock to testify feels like something out of Gogol, an
author she’s always loved.

With her first child due in September, though, she’s in no mood to
laugh. Her case is likely to be long.

And after a High Court decision last week to convict a
Turkish-Armenian journalist under Article 301, the first such
conviction in Turkey, the threat of three-year sentences at the end of
it for her, her publisher and translator no longer seems so empty.

It’s not that she denies having an interest in 1915; far from it. The
daughter of a diplomat mother, she remembers growing up in western
Europe at a time when Turkish embassy staff were the targets of ASALA,
the Armenian terrorist group.

"We all have our personal dictionaries, and my first perception of the
word Armenian was somebody who wanted to kill my mother," she
says. "It took me a long time to ask where all this hate was coming
from."

Yet she insists The Bastard of Istanbul is much more than a novel
about 1915 and its aftermath.

"First of all it’s a book for and about women," she says, referring to
the four generations of female characters who make up the novel’s
fictional universe. "Indirectly, it’s about the role women have played
in fighting against historical amnesia in Turkey."

THE POINT WAS understood well by a woman who approached her at a
recent book-signing in the south-eastern Turkish city of Diyarbakir.

"She wore a headscarf, she was obviously conservative, and she told me
she cooked biscuits every Easter," Safak remembers. "I was intrigued."

The biscuits turned out to be the woman’s way of honouring the memory
of her grandmother, whom she had discovered to be an Armenian
orphan. Did other family members know the significance of her cooking,
Safak asked her. "The men just eat," she replied.

"If we want Armenians to forget what happened in 1915, we have an
obligation to remember it first," Safak says. "To do that, we must
find an alternative to the aggressive, macho language of
nationalism. An alternative voice can be created by following women’s
stories and women’s memories.

"Many people think 1915 is the only thing we in Turkey are unable to
talk about. That is not the case. This is a country built on a rupture
in time. For many people, time starts with the founding of the
republic in 1923, and everything before that is a foreign country. You
feel as if you are walking over rubble, trying to hear if there’s
anything alive inside. If there is, you try to dig it up, bring it to
light."

It’s a perception she says has informed her fiction since she
published her first novel in 1998. It has earned her success, in the
form of three Turkish bestsellers and a handful of prizes. But it has
also earned her enemies.

"I’ve been called everything from a traitor to a so-called Turk," she
says. In a twisted way, the latter insult is surprisingly
apposite. With her perfect English and her western ways, Elif Safak
seems the epitome of what her countrymen call "white Turks" – members
of the country’s westernised elite.

Both in her life and her work, though, Safak is an enemy of easy
categorisations. Her novels are peopled with outsiders, a dwarf and an
obese woman in The Gaze, foreign postgraduates at an American
university in The Saint of Incipient Insanities, named Araf in Turkish
after the Koranic word for purgatory.

"My ideal is cosmopolitanism, taking elements from wherever I choose,
refusing to belong to either side in this polarised world," she
says. The attitude lies behind her decision, much criticised in
Turkey, to begin writing columns for a newspaper closely linked to an
influential religious leader.

In the eyes of Kemalists, she says, referring to the followers of the
architect of Turkey’s secularist revolution, Kemal Ataturk, Turkey is
divided into us and them, westernisers and Islamists.

"They see modernisation in dualistic terms. You choose the West and
get rid of the other side of the duality. That’s wrong. Ambiguity,
synthesis, hybridity: these are the things that compose Turkish
society. We are western-oriented and eastern, and that is not
something to be ashamed of."

In a society increasingly fascinated with its multi-cultural,
imperial, Ottoman past, it’s an argument that is gaining ground
fast. But Turkey is still a country where polarising cultural politics
inform everything from the cut of your moustache to the way you say
"hello", and where writing is the last thing a writer is judged by.

TIRED OF THE attention that came with her growing fame, Elif Safak
fled to the United States in 2001, only to return this year. In many
respects, she says, the five-year period of exile was a
revelation. Well-known in Turkey for her efforts to recuperate Persian
and Arabic words purged from Turkish by the nationalists of the early
Republic, she vividly remembers the first time she heard the word
"chutzpah" used.

"Some in Turkey still get upset if you use ‘ihtimal’ rather than
‘olasilik’," she says, referring to two words – one Arabic, one
Turkish – for possibility. "The English language is blind to ethnic
origins."

Using it, she adds, also gave her what she calls "an additional zone
of existence". She illustrates the point with a story about the
upper-class Turkish women she met while in the States. Like all
well-bred Turkish women, swearing in Turkish was out of the question
for them, but the same self-censorship disappeared when they spoke in
English. Safak used the same linguistic freedom to rather more serious
ends: in 2004, The Saint of Incipient Insanities was published, the
first of two books she has written in English. Hardly surprisingly,
the linguistic switch angered some in Turkey.

"There were articles saying I belonged to American literature now,
that I was no longer one of ‘us’," Safak remembers. "But I don’t see
language as an either/or choice. Sometimes, it is good to be right on
the threshold in between things, both an insider and an outsider."

Despite personal satisfactions, though, she ultimately found that the
US remained as inimical as Turkey to the cosmopolitan vision she has
espoused.

"For the average American, I’m a Muslim woman writer, and expected to
produce accordingly," she says. "Why should I? Why can’t I tell the
story of a Chinese man?"

Smiling, she remembers a book-reading evening in Boston that she
shared with an Indonesian novelist and a Canadian of Indian origin.

"I assumed we would have something in common, maybe our style or our
choice of themes," she says. "In fact, all we shared was our
non-western origin. You sometimes feel like something you add to a
salad to give it colour, something which has no taste."

In a rare critical review of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, published in the
Atlantic Monthly late in 2004, Christopher Hitchens observed that the
West had for some been searching for "a novelist in the Muslim world
who could act the part of dragoman, an interpretive guide to the
east". The Egyptian novelist, Naguib Mahfouz, was one, he added, Orhan
Pamuk another. With one foot firmly planted in two worlds, and as
rational as the most rational-minded westerner could possibly wish,
Elif Safak might seem a perfect writer to take up the baton. Already
some critics see her as challenging Pamuk as Turkey’s foremost
novelist.

Despite the disappointment she feels at the West’s limited interest in
Turkish literature, she has no desire to be anybody’s dragoman. For
her, the fetishisation of "exotic" authors is profoundly dangerous, an
implicit acknowledgement that cultures are as monolithic as the
advocates of a "clash of civilisations" would like us to believe.

"No one person can be the representative of a culture, least of all
one as multi-faceted and confused as Turkey’s is," she says.

Above all, an author employed to play the role of dragoman is
implicitly expected to tell his own story. That, Safak concludes, is a
travesty of the role of writing.

"Literature is not telling my own story. It is the ability to stop
being myself, to transcend the self that has been given me by
birth. That includes religious boundaries, ethnic boundaries, and
national boundaries."