The Economist
January 13, 2007
U.S. Edition

BOOKS & ART

Who to believe?;
New fiction 2

This article contains a table. Please see hard copy.

ELIF SHAFAK is an award-winning novelist who was little known outside
her native Turkey before a brush with the authorities last year over
her sixth novel, "The Bastard of Istanbul".

This is a deftly spun tale of two families – one Armenian-American and
the other Turkish – who are burdened by dark secrets and historical
tragedies rooted in a common Istanbul past. The heroine is Asya
Kazanci, a rebellious teenager born out of wedlock (hence the title)
with a passion for nihilism and Johnny Cash. She shares a crumbling
Ottoman mansion in Istanbul with her mother, three aunts, a
grandmother, a step-great-grandmother and a cat, each one endearingly
eccentric and strong-willed.

Asya’s counterpart is Armanoush Tchakmakchian, an Armenian-American
teenager whose interest in her people’s history is awakened during a
series of late-night exchanges with an online community of fellow
diasporans called Café Constantinopolis. The story comes to a head
when, fired by a desire to explore her past, Armanoush travels
secretly to Istanbul where she stays with the Kazancis and discovers
that, despite their historic differences, Turks and Armenians have
more in common than not.

One issue does separate them, and that is, of course, their differing
beliefs as to what happened between their two peoples in the
confrontation of 1915. As Asya explains in one of the book’s most
compelling passages, Armenians cling to history because "your crusade
for remembrance makes you part of a group where there is a great
feeling of solidarity", whereas "Turks like me cannot be
past-oriented not because I don’t care but because I don’t know
anything about it."

Asya is pointing to the grim realities of an education system that
stifles free thinking and whitewashes history. Few Turkish children
are taught that their Ottoman forebears killed up to 1m Armenians
just after the start of the first world war. Rather, their
schoolbooks state that it was theArmenians who slaughtered the Turks
in far greater numbers than they were slaughtered themselves.

Subtly, yet firmly, Ms Shafak sets the record straight. Armanoush’s
great-grandfather, a poet, is among hundreds of Armenian
intellectuals who were rounded up by Ottoman soldiers on April 24th
1915, in a bid to "get rid of the brains" first. Her grandmother is
an orphan, who survived the "death march" to the Syrian desert.

Incensed by these depictions in a work of fiction, last June a group
of ultra-nationalist Turkish lawyers tried to bring a case against Ms
Shafak, arguing that her book had been manufactured by "imperial
powers" who were bent on dismembering Turkey. Much like Orhan Pamuk,
who also faced charges over comments he made about Armenian-Turkish
history to a Swiss newspaper and who, last November, became the first
Turk to win the Nobel prize for literature, Ms Shafak’s crime was to
have drawn attention to the Armenian genocide.

Setting a bizarre precedent, prosecutors rested their case on the
words of one of the fictional Armenian characters in her book, which
was originally written in English, but which is only now coming out
in America. The offending phrase talked of "genocide survivors, who
lost all their relatives at the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915".
That phrase and other unflattering references to Turkish behaviour
were deemed to have violated the penal code under which insulting
"the Turkish identity" is a criminal offence.

Ms Shafak was eventually acquitted after the court agreed that she
could not be convicted on the basis of comments made by a fictional
character. She remains undaunted by her travails: "When I write, I
don’t calculate the consequences of what I’m writing," she noted
recently. "I just surround myself with the story."

GRAPHIC: The Bastard of Istanbul.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress