San Francisco Chronicle, CA
Jan 20 2007
Families’ lives, lies rooted in the Armenian genocide
Reviewed by Saul Austerlitz
Sunday, January 21, 2007
The Bastard of Istanbul
By Elif Shafak
VIKING; 360 PAGES; $24.95
With her sixth novel, the Turkish writer Elif Shafak has joined the
short list of authors as well known for their purported criminal
offenses as for their books. But unlike her partners in literary
crime Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk, Shafak was far from a household
name in the United States when she was charged in 2005 with "public
denigration of Turkishness" for offensive material in her novel "The
Bastard of Istanbul."
Like Pamuk, though, Shafak has run into trouble with the Turkish
judicial system over her desire to mention the unmentionable: the
1915-1923 Armenian genocide, in which 1.5 million Armenians were
murdered by the Young Turks of the Ottoman Empire. Shafak possesses
the courage to acknowledge the truth — an acknowledgment that’s a
crime in Turkey. The incriminating material shows up early in the
book, when an Armenian uncle castigates a nephew for abandoning his
daughter to the loving embrace of the enemy: "What will that innocent
lamb tell her friends when she grows up? My father is Barsam
Tchakhmakhchian, my great-uncle is Dikran Stamboulian, his father is
Varvant Istanboulian, my name is Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian, all my
family tree has been Something Somethingian, and I am the grandchild
of genocide survivors who lost all their relatives at the hands of
the Turkish butchers in 1915, but I myself have been brainwashed to
deny the genocide because I was raised by some Turk named Mustafa!"
The bond between Turks and Armenians, and the tangled dance of
victimizer and victim, is actually the subject of "The Bastard of
Istanbul." Shafak’s reference to the "Turkish butchers" is far from a
throwaway jab at her country’s penchant for selective memory
(although that, too, would require a great deal of courage); it is
actually the fundamental principle that sets the book’s gears in
motion. Two young women, one Turkish and one Armenian, one living in
Turkey and the other in the United States, find themselves
inextricably drawn together by history and family — two unique
motors of remembrance that share more in common than might be clear
at a glance.
The Armenians and Turks in "Bastard" are separated, more than
anything else, by their relationship to memory. The Turks —
19-year-old Asya Kazanci and her extended family — treat the past as
something to be boxed away and forgotten for the sake of familial
harmony, however tenuous that peace may be. The Armenians —
Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian and her Armenian American relatives —
think of the past as a gruesomely ugly yet precious flower, one that
must be preserved no matter how unpleasant the odor. For the
Armenians, in many ways, the past holds more value than the present.
For the Turks, the present exists at the edge of a bottomless
precipice; look backward and be swallowed by the abyss.
"The Bastard of Istanbul" begins with Zeliha, another young woman,
out on the Istanbul streets, taking in the sights and sounds of a
modern city in motion before audaciously entering a doctor’s office
and loudly demanding an abortion. She ultimately decides not to go
forward with the abortion, however, and the result is Asya, one of
"Bastard’s" two protagonists. For Asya, her large, squabbling family
is a burden, to be escaped at all costs, while for the Armenian
American Armanoush, the Armenian side of her family is an escape from
the constricting embrace of her overprotective native-born mother.
Her preference for ethnic solidarity over white-bread American life
leads Armanoush to embrace her Armenian roots, and eventually to
journey to Istanbul to look for answers. Shafak dives into the
genocide itself, with the story of Armanoush’s relative Hovhannes
Stamboulian, an intellectual and children’s book writer abducted and
killed by the Turkish authorities, but she is uncertain in such
foreign territory (a disease that creeps into "Bastard’s" American
sequences as well), and the subplot is a rare misstep in this
otherwise assured novel.
"The Bastard of Istanbul" details the process of two families, and
two pasts, drawing closer together, with the sins of the family
standing in for the collective sins of a country, and the rebellious
Zeliha serving as an honorary Armenian — a victim forced to stay
silent about the past for the sake of an illusory unity. In addition
to its fictional priorities, Shafak intends her book to serve as a
primer to Turks — an intended change of course for a country
dedicated to forgetting all that was unpleasant or humiliating. For
Shafak, and her amateur Armenian scholar Armanoush, what is most
surprising is the Turkish refusal to take possession of their own
history: "Slowly it dawned on Armanoush that perhaps she was waiting
for an admission of guilt, if not an apology. And yet that apology
had not come, not because they had not felt for her, for it looked as
if they had, but because they had seen no connection between
themselves and the perpetrators of their crimes."
The purposeful ignorance of Shafak’s Turks, born out of a willful
turning away from past familial horrors, becomes a symbol for the
collective Turkish turning away from the horrors of the Armenian
genocide. Shafak is incapable of bringing harmony to such unsettled
matters, even in the pages of a fictional narrative. All she can do,
and does, is shine a light on the past, and keep it shining so that
everyone — Turkish, Armenian, and otherwise — must look.
Saul Austerlitz’s "Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video
>From the Beatles to the White Stripes" was published in December.