Taboo tale of the Ottoman empire
Irish Times
Published: Aug 18, 2007

Fiction: Like Ireland, Turkey takes its writers seriously, but the
stakes can be higher there than here. Elif Shafak was already a
literary celebrity in Turkey when charges were brought against her last
year under a 2005 statute for the offence of "insulting Turkishness",
writes Richard Tillinghast .

If convicted, she could have served three years in prison. The charges,
like those brought earlier against Orhan Pamuk, though they were
eventually dropped, have made the 35-year-old Shafak’s name well-known
in the West.

It is not the case , as the publisher claims, that this charge was
brought "by the Turkish government", but rather by a group of ultra-
nationalist lawyers who have been responsible for the indictments
against Pamuk and others.

Death threats have been made against Pamuk and Shafak by extremists of
the same ilk that assassinated the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant
Denk last January. Turkish culture is fractious and volatile.
Nationalists, Islamists, the Turkish military, and liberals such as
Pamuk and Shafak are locked in a battle for the nation’s soul.
Ironically, prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s "moderate Islamist"
party have been strong backers of Turkish membership in the EU.
Shafak’s vision of a tolerant, pluralistic Turkey reflects the secular,
Europeanised atmosphere of a multicultural Istanbul, which now finds
itself under siege from reactionary forces.

Shafak divides her time between Istanbul and the US, and has written
her last two novels, The Saint of Incipient Insanities and The Bastard
of Istanbul, in English. I prefer to read her in Turkish, difficult as
that is because of her labyrinthine sentences and arcane vocabulary.
Despite great fluency, her English is not completely colloquial. Like
everyone, she writes more expressively in her native tongue.

Both her recent novels speak to today’s world of emigration,
trans-national identity and ethnic hybridity. Bastard tackles the
legacy of the forced migrations and massacres of Armenians in the chaos
surrounding the death throes of the Ottoman empire. The subject is
taboo in Turkey, yet it is hard to understand precisely why. Most
nations, particularly great powers, have something dark and vicious in
their histories.

Research into what actually happened is not complete; many scholars
feel that, terrible as these events were, "genocide" does not
accurately describe them. Nevertheless Shafak is courageous in raising
an episode in their history most Turks strenuously deny. Ironically,
Turks and Armenians have much in common. Most older Armenians speak
Turkish, often as their first language. Their cuisine is practically
identical. In the US there is a consortium of Armenian and Turkish
scholars seeking rapprochement.

The Bastard of Istanbul takes a while to decide what kind of novel it
wants to be. An insider-outsider, both in the US and Turkey, Shafak is
able to turn a satirical eye on both cultures, and the book starts out
like a satirical novel. Much of the satire is funny and pointed but
does little to advance the plot.

Many secrets come out when Armanoush, a young Armenian-American, flies
to Istanbul on impulse because she wants to see the home of her
ancestors. She stays with her mother’s second husband’s Turkish family,
and there she becomes friends with Asya, her young Turkish cousin.
Armanoush boldly tells her hosts about the forced migration and
slaughter of Armenians. She recites what her relatives in the US have
told her, and her stories are typical of Armenian refugee narratives.
Yet her new friends have never heard about these things.

IN THE END, the novel has an old-fashioned plot worthy of Dickens,
Sarah Waters, Michael Faber or Charles Palliser. Coincidence is at the
heart of it. Yet Shafak gives the narration a particularly Turkish
twist, commenting, "Life is coincidence, but sometimes it takes a
djinni to fathom that".

Asya’s Auntie Banu, a headscarf-wearing clairvoyant, has two djinns
(the word has been anglicised as "genie") at her command, Mrs Sweet and
Mr Bitter. Mr Bitter is a gulyabani, a sinister spirit who "had come
from places where the wind never stopped howling. Mr Bitter was very
old, even in terms of djinn years":

Ill-omened soldiers, ambushed and massacred miles away from their home,
wanderers frozen to death in the mountains, plague victims exiled deep
into the desert, travellers robbed and slaughtered by bandits,
explorers lost in the middle of nowhere, convicted felons shipped to
meet their death on some remote island . . . the gulyabani had seen
them all.

Mr Bitter has witnessed the forced marches:

"I was a vulture," he commented bitterly, the only tone in which he
knew to talk. "I saw it all. I watched them as they walked and walked
and walked, women and children. I flew over them, drawing circles in
the blue sky, waiting for them to fall on their knees."

"Shut up!" Auntie Banu bawled. "Shut up! I don’t want to know."

Despite the bitterness of the past it describes, this is a magical
novel of reconciliation and inclusiveness. At one point, Aram, an
Armenian Turk, Asya’s mother’s boyfriend, says to Armanoush:

"This city is my city. I was born and raised in Istanbul. My family’s
history in this city goes back at least five hundred years. Armenian
Istanbulites belong to Istanbul just like the Turkish, Kurdish, Greek,
and Jewish Istanbulites do. We have first managed and then badly failed
to live together. We cannot fail again."

If a Turk can write a novel like this, there is hope that Aram’s, and
Elif Shafak’s, vision of the future will come to pass.

Richard Tillinghast’s eighth book of poetry, The New Life, is due out
in 2008. He and Julia Clare Tillinghast have recently finished Dirty
August, a selection of translations from the Turkish poet, Edip Cansever

The Bastard of Istanbul, By Elif Shafak, Penguin Viking, 360pp. GBP16.99