Fictional characters in dock
The Australian (Australia)
September 20, 2006 Wednesday
All-round Country Edition
TURKEY: Uncle Dikran, Grandma Shushan and Auntie Zeliha may be
figments of the novelist Elif Shafak’s imagination but they will be
in the dock this week in a bizarre trial that has become a test for
Turkey’s European ambitions and commitment to freedom of speech.
Shafak, 34, has been charged under Article 301 of the penal code
with "insulting Turkishness" through the fictional dialogue in
her bestselling novel The Bastard of Istanbul, which is about the
intertwined history of a Turkish and an Armenian-American family.
The European Union, with which Turkey began accession talks last year,
has been a strong critic of the law and is expected to condemn curbs
on freedom ofexpression in a report on October 24.
Turkey’s parliament is holding an emergency meeting this week on
further EU-related legal reform, but the Government has failed to
act on Article 301 — which was also used to put Orhan Pamuk, the
country’s most famous novelist, on trial — pointing out that cases
end in acquittal anyway. That is not the point, Shafak says.
"I think the biggest worry regarding Article 301 is not that it puts
people in prison but it silences them," she said.
Even the briefest of Article 301 court cases has proved a platform for
harassment of top writers but for Shafak it is even worse. She gave
birth to a baby girl last Saturday and, since the court refused her
request for the hearing to be postponed, she must now excuse herself
through a medical report or leave a five-day-old baby to go to court
on Thursday.
Charging fictional characters is a new step, Shafak said.
"It means they are now trying to control art, and this is very alarming
because in Turkey — a country that witnessed three military takeovers
— art and literature had always been autonomous."
The crime committed by her characters is to refer to the taboo subject
of mass killings of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey in 1915. The Armenians
call it genocide, Turks say large-scale wartime deaths. The fictional
Uncle Dikran speaks of "Turkish butchers", others talk about being
"slaughtered like sheep" and claim all Turks are either nationalist
or ignorant. More absurdly, some Turkish characters are charged over
routine gripes about the country.
The accusations demonstrate a wilful misreading of the book, in
which the families are so mixed up it is hard to take sides. Shafak,
describing how many contemporary Turks are descended from minorities
in a multicultural Ottoman Empire, is critical both of Turks’ amnesia
about events before the country became a republic in 1923 and of the
Armenian diaspora’s apparent obsession with history.
This trial is not just about her book, she says. The case is part
of a political effort by extreme nationalists to hamper Turkey’s EU
aspiration by demonstrating how un-European it is.
"We are seeing a clash between those who wholeheartedly support the EU
process, and others who want to turn this society into a xenophobic,
isolationist country," she said.
Kemal Kerincsiz, the lawyer who brought the case against Shafak,
is behind several other such cases. He insists EU membership would
be a disaster for Turkey, and that it was not Shafak but some shady
imperialists who penned her novel as part of a plot to destroy Turkey.