amNewYork, New York
Jan 21 2007
Young Turks, old family ways
East meets West, and the personal clashes with the political, in Elif
Shafak’s whirling novel
BY DONNA SEAMAN
SPECIAL TO NEWSDAY
January 21, 2007
THE BASTARD OF ISTANBUL, by Elif Shafak. Viking, 370 pp., $24.95.
Elif Shafak’s provocatively titled second novel, "The Bastard of
Istanbul," begins on a crowded street in the Turkish metropolis
during a rainstorm as an increasingly enraged woman hurries over
broken cobblestones in very high heels. With her lavender miniskirt,
nose ring, long unruly hair, propensity for swearing and zero
patience with the lustful eyeballing of men and the censorious
glances of other women, it’s clear that this is a gal Islamic
conservatives would find more than objectionable. Zeliha is 19 and
single; she smokes; she purports to be an atheist; and she’s on her
way to the gynecologist for an abortion.
A somewhat subdued Zeliha returns home to her all-female (except for
the cat) household just in time for dinner. Food is a constant in
this womanly tale. Each chapter title is the name of a food or spice,
and food is presented as nourishment for the soul as well as the
body, and a source of familial cohesion and cultural pride. As Zeliha
takes her seat, still pregnant, Shafak circles the groaning table,
briskly covering a remarkable amount of family and Turkish history as
she introduces each eccentric character.
There’s Zeliha’s enigmatic grandmother, Petite Ma, and Zeliha’s
mother, Gulsum, who "could have been Ivan the Terrible in another
life." For oldest daughter Banu, food is a vocation. Cevriye is a
very proper history teacher. Feride the bizarre has been diagnosed
with assorted mental maladies, and is forever changing her hair color
and style. The Kazanci family does include a son, Mustafa, once as
coddled as a king. But he has been hustled off to college in the
United States in the hope that he will escape the family curse. It
seems that Kazanci men have always "died young and unexpectedly."
Shafak is lavish in her descriptions and backstories as conversation
among the women gets underway, but what isn’t said looms large. Why
is her family indifferent to Zeliha’s pregnancy? Who is the father?
The scene shifts from Istanbul, a mesh of the old and the new, to a
shiny Arizona supermarket, where Shafak presents another harried and
aggravated woman. Rose’s marriage has failed, leaving her craving
fattening foods and sweet revenge. Blond, plump and a bit ditzy, Rose
was married briefly to Barsam, an Armenian, whose extended family
"was another country where people bore a surname she couldn’t spell
and secrets she couldn’t decipher." Now Rose is alone with her baby
girl, Armanoush, and furious with her meddling ex-in-laws. After she
runs into handsome and seemingly shy Mustafa in front of the garbanzo
beans, she thinks: Wouldn’t it drive the Tchakhmakhchians crazy if
she dated a Turk?
Sure enough, Barsam’s family gathers in San Francisco around their
laden table, utterly distraught, and determined to "rescue" Armanoush
from Rose and her new Turkish boyfriend (soon to be second husband).
Barsam’s uncle launches into an impassioned speech about how
Armanoush is the "grandchild of genocide survivors who lost all their
relatives at the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915."
It is this passage that landed Shafak in court in Istanbul, accused
of the crime of denigrating Turkey by using the word "genocide" in
reference to the forced removal and deaths of more than 1 million
Armenians. The charge of "insulting Turkishness" has been leveled
against other Turkish writers, most famously the 2006 Nobel laureate
Orhan Pamuk, who has spoken publicly about the same taboo subject.
His case was dropped on a technicality. Shafak faced a possible
sentence of three years in prison. Pregnant during the trial, she was
in the hospital with her newborn when she was acquitted.
Shafak is an outspoken political scientist and activist as well as a
writer. An expert in gender issues and Turkish history and politics,
and fascinated by mysticism, she secured every major Turkish literary
award before she turned 30. Shafak’s first English-language novel,
"The Saint of Incipient Insanities" (2004), was critically acclaimed.
Her second, a saucy, witty, dramatic and affecting tale in the spirit
of novels by Amy Tan, Julia Alvarez and Bharati Mukherjee, should
prove irresistible to readers.
Jump forward 19 years. Petite Ma is succumbing to Alzheimer’s. Feride
is still crazy, Gulsum still stern, Cevriye still teaching. But Banu
has become a famous clairvoyant and fortune teller thanks to an
invisible djinni on each shoulder – one good, Mrs. Sweet; one bad,
Mr. Bitter. Zehila, still sexy and audacious, is now the proprietor
of a fashionable tattoo parlor. Her 19-year-old daughter, Asya, is
just as mouthy and independent as her mother, and simmering with
pent-up rage about her status as bastard, the mystery of her father’s
identity, and way too much mothering from all the women in the house.
A die-hard Johnny Cash fan with nihilistic fantasies, she has found a
secret sanctuary, the Café Kundera, where she hangs out with
dissident artists and intellectuals, including a cartoonist who has
just been indicted for the second time for "insulting the prime
minister in his cartoons."
Meanwhile, college student Armanoush, disconcertingly beautiful and
seriously bookish (Kundera is her favorite author), is torn between
her dizzy if well-meaning mother (she has little to say about her
quiet Turkish stepfather) and her Armenian father and his warm and
meddlesome extended family. Increasingly curious about her Armenian
heritage and enraged about what her grandmother and others suffered,
she has found refuge in Café Constantinopolis, a cyber cafe
frequented by grandchildren of the Armenian diaspora and others
forced out of Istanbul. Determined to trace her roots and come to
terms with Turkish atrocities, she travels to Istanbul without
telling either parent. Her stepfather’s family welcomes her
enthusiastically (except for skeptical Asya), then listens in
bewilderment to her tale about the fate of her Armenian relatives.
Initially puzzled by the Kazancis’ response, Armanoush soon realizes
that "they had seen no connection between themselves and the
perpetrators of the crimes. She, as an Armenian, embodied the spirits
of her people generations and generations earlier, whereas the
average Turk had no such notion of continuity with his or her
ancestors. The Armenians and the Turks lived in different time
frames." Indeed, as Cevriye sees it, the Ottoman Empire is a
completely separate country from the modern Turkish Republic.
Armanoush and Asya are useful, and compelling, mirror images. Unlike
Armanoush, Asya is scornful of history. Without knowing who her
father is, how can she reflect on her heritage? Like Turkey itself,
she is denied the truth about the past, and therefore lacks a sense
of continuity or connection. Shafak tries to be subtle with this sort
of explication, but she is so intent on illuminating the tragedy of
the Armenian genocide and the injustice and psychic harm wrought by
its denial that she does slip into soapbox mode now and then. Because
of her skill and intensity, however, such authorial intervention,
common in the great 19th century novels, doesn’t detract from the
reader’s appreciation for her complex characters and many-faceted
plot. And Shafak is careful to balance the gravity of her
truth-telling mission with humor, until the shocking revelations and
resolutions of the concluding chapters.
Shafak’s charming, smart and profoundly involving spinning top of a
novel dramatizes the inescapability of guilt and punishment, and the
inextricable entwinement of Armenians and Turks, East and West, past
and present, the personal and the political. By aligning the
"compulsory amnesia" surrounding the crimes in one family with
Turkey’s refusal to confront past crimes against humanity, Shafak
makes the case for truth, reconciliation and remembrance. She also
tells a grandly empathic and spellbinding story.
Donna Seaman is an associate editor for Booklist, and host of the
radio program "Open Books" in Chicago.