Village Voice, NY
Feb 17 2007

Under Siege
Elif Shafak talks about her novel and the real trial of imaginary
characters

by Lenora Todaro
February 16th, 2007 6:43 PM

"When I am writing fiction I am a different person with many
personalities – and I am very daring," says Turkish novelist Elif
Shafak during a conversation at the Warwick Hotel. "Then in my daily
life I return to being a person with anxieties and fears."
Shafak is registered under an alias. She cancelled a six-city book
tour (reading only in New York) after ultranationalist Turks declared
her an "enemy of the state" for passages in her novel The Bastard of
Istanbul referring to the "genocide" of Armenians "at the hands of
Turkish butchers." Another such "enemy" was assassinated on January
19: the Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink, a dear friend
of Shafak’s. The Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk cut short his tour of
Germany after learning the news. Now Shafak is shadowed by a
bodyguard, complete with earpiece and jerky, roving eye.

Of the 60 or so intellectuals taken to court by the same
ultranationalists for "public denigration of Turkishness" – a crime
punishable by three years in prison – only Shafak was called out for
the words of her characters. Shafak believes the lawsuits are
intended to derail Turkey’s bid to enter the European Union by making
the nation appear "insular and xenophobic."

A bestseller in Turkey, The Bastard of Istanbul follows two families:
one a Turkish clan living in Istanbul, the other Armenians living in
California and Arizona (where Shafak teaches part of the year).
Through their stories, Shafak explores a political taboo known in
Turkey as "the Armenian question," which asks whether in 1915 the
deportation and death of more than one million Armenians at the hands
of the Turks was "genocide" or (as the Turkish government contends)
part of World War I.

Shafak describes herself as a nomad and a free spirit – a girl raised
by her divorced mother, a diplomat with whom she lived in Spain,
Jordan, and Germany. "I am someone who is always writing either on my
way to Turkey, or away from it," she says. "When I feel suffocated I
leave." The 35-year-old writer in front of me doesn’t exactly exude
free spiritedness, cocooned in a black turtleneck, blouse, and long
black skirt. Living under threat makes her careful to stay on message
in public. No displays of righteous anger, no emotional
leakage – except one watery-eyed moment, while talking about the birth
of her daughter in Istanbul during her trial in September 2006. (She
was acquitted.) While nursing the newborn in a hospital bed, she
watched on TV as protesters burned posters with her picture. "An
amazing dialectic was happening within our room," she says. "On the
TV was darkness and violence, and you’re in a room where babies are
born every minute and there’s hope and light."

The Bastard of Istanbul, too, opens dramatically with the birth of a
child into difficult circumstances. Zeliha Kazanci’splans to abort
her fetus goes awry. Asya, the daughter born to her, becomes the
linchpin between the two families. Shafak’s Turkish women are writ
large: Zeliha runs a tattoo parlor and has three sisters: a
clairvoyant, a Turkish history teacher, and a schizophrenic. The
mother of the clan "might have been Ivan the Terrible in another
life." The story’s focus moves swiftly to Asya, a Dostoyevskian
19-year-old Johnny Cash fanatic and the "bastard" of the book. The
American-Armenian family, also replete with a brainy daughter
Armanoush, functions as a mouthpiece for Armenians’ anger toward
Turks. For 100 pages, Shafak skillfully sets up the collision of the
two plot lines, when future BFFs Asya and Armanoush will discover the
cross-pollination of their family secrets. Along the way, Shafak’s
steady glide is punctuated by her characters’ amusing existential
freak-outs and winking nods at the raucous finale.

Throughout the novel Shafak attends to the details of women’s daily
lives, especially the foods they eat. "It always amazes me how common
cuisines transcend nationalistic boundaries," says Shafak. At the
table, the taste of pilaf stirs Armanoush and Asya to realize their
families share a history. The Turkish dessert ashure anchors the
book’s structure with its ingredients shaping chapters and plays a
role in the tidy conclusion.

While food elicits memories, Alzheimer’s wipes them away. Some of the
most beautiful writing in the book comes in the depiction of
96-year-old grandmother, Petit-Ma, who has the disease: "The words of
the prayer she had to utter had all of a sudden fastened together
into an elongated chain of letters and walked away in tandem, like a
black hairy caterpillar with too many feet to count." Alzheimer’s
raises the question of how one remembers – the same quandary behind the
Armenian question. "If the past is sad," Shafak asks, "would you like
to know about it?" Her characters would and would not. Auntie Banu,
seeking answers about the Armenian question, says, "Either grant me
the bliss of the ignorant or give the strength to bear the knowledge
. . . but please don’t make me powerless and knowledgeable at the
same time."

Shafak says she’s reading Don Quixote right now. Given her
circumstances, it provides an apt comparison. Quixote and Bastard
share a penchant for satirizing nationalism and exploring the ethics
of deception. While Quixote moves between farce and philosophy,
between real adventures and imagined ones, Shafak, against her
wishes, is doing the same – moving from a real-life trial of imaginary
characters to an imaginative meditation upon mortality and new life.