The Straits Times (Singapore)
February 4, 2007 Sunday

A history of amnesia;
Elif Shafak’s controversial The Bastard Of Istanbul is an epic soap
opera that tackles the genocide question

by Stephanie Yap, ARTS REPORTER

MOST writers and journalists would have been riveted by the recent
drama that surrounded Turkish novelist Elif Shafak. Last year, she
was put on trial for ‘insulting Turkishness’, and faced three years’
imprisonment under Article 301 of the country’s penal code.

More than 60 writers, including Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, had
been charged under that law since its introduction in June 2005, but
Shafak’s case was the first time it had been applied to a work of
fiction.

That controversial work? Her sixth novel and her second in English,
The Bastard Of Istanbul, in which characters refer to the exile and
deaths of thousands of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to
1917, as genocide. Turkey, the Empire’s modern-day descendant, denies
it was genocide.

Readers searching for the controversial parts are rewarded early in
the book. An Armenian American man scolds his nephew for doing
nothing while the latter’s ex-wife, who raises their daughter,
marries a Turkish man:

‘What will that innocent lamb tell her friends when she grows up? …
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!’

Emotions and exclamation marks run rife in this epic soap opera,
which shuttles between a Turkish family in Istanbul and an Armenian
American family in San Francisco. At the heart of each is a teenage
girl.

On the Armenian side is Armanoush, the beautiful and bookish daughter
of an Armenian American father and a white mother. Her mother sparks
the tirade above when she marries a Turkish man, Mustafa Kazanci.

Armanoush visits her stepfather’s family in Istanbul in a quest to
discover her Armenian ancestors’ haunts. She meets four generations
of Kazanci women, including her stepfather’s four sisters – variously
a clairvoyant, a history teacher, a schizophrenic and a tattoo artist
– along with their moody mother and their Alzheimer’s-stricken
grandmother.

Lastly, there is Asya, the daughter of the tattoo artist, and the
bastard of the title. Unlike Armanoush, the headstrong, Johnny
Cash-loving Asya has no knowledge of – or interest in – her ancestry.

Armanoush represents the Armenians’ unwillingness to forget, while
Asya embodies the Turkish people’s blindness, deliberate or
otherwise, to the past.

In her eagerness to tackle the genocide question head-on, Shafak’s
writing can get heavy-handed and didactic, reading like a dramatised
textbook as characters reel off dates and statistics in conversation.

Just as often, though, she effectively uses the domestic setting to
explore a nation’s psyche. When Armanoush tells the Kazancis about
the deaths of her ancestors, she is initially surprised that the
women are unapologetic. But she then realises it is ‘not because they
had not felt for her… but because they had seen no connection
between themselves and the perpetrators of their crimes’.

However, as characters reel from the onslaught of revelations that
rain down in the last few chapters – some more believable than others
– even Armanoush might be tempted to admit that ignorance is bliss.

As the clairvoyant Auntie Banu, the one character who has access to
the whole truth, wonders: ‘Was it really better for human beings to
pine to discover more of their past? Or was it simply better to know
as little of the past as possible and even to forget what small
amount was remembered?’

Shafak does not provide the answer, but she has taken the first step
in realising that the question should be asked.

If you like this, read: The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk (1990, $23.10
with GST, Books Kinokuniya).

An Istanbul lawyer takes on the identity of a journalist while
searching for his runaway wife.

ysteph@sph.com.sg

THE BASTARD OF ISTANBUL By Elif Shafak Viking/Hardcover/ 357 pages/
$39.90 (with GST)/ Major bookstores/*****