The Statesman (India)
May 18, 2008 Sunday

A SENSITIVE CRITIQUE OF NATIONALISM

The Bastard of Istanbul By ELIF SHAFAK Viking (Penguin) Price: GBP
11.99 Turkish writer Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul has already
generated its share of controversies. The author became a victim of
right-wing Turkish nationalism soon after the book was published; she
was dragged to court on charges of insulting Turkish national
identity, and the notorious Article 301, which has been previously
used against writers like Orhan Pamuk and Perihan Magdan, was invoked
to try and silence Shafak. While Shafak was later acquitted, the
response to her book highlights Turkish nationalist anxieties even as
the country seeks to enter the EU and negotiate its Asian legacy with
its European loyalties.

The ‘provocation’ in the immediate context lay in Shafak highlighting
the massacre of Armenians by Turks in 1915 and the comfortable amnesia
of the Turkish state on the issue. As Armanoush, the Armenian-American
girl who comes visiting to Istanbul, puts it, the Turkish state lives
in continual denial of the genocide unleashed under the Ottoman
Empire. It is difficult not to think of Gabriel Garcia Marquez when
one reads The Bastard of Istanbul. The motifs of incest and solitude,
the suppression of an authentic history by the hegemonic claims of an
official history, the merging of family history with national history
and Shafak’s occasional use of what could be termed ‘magic realism’
will remind readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The book
straddles and juxtaposes various temporal registers, beginning, in
fact, with a flashback to the time the nineteen-year-old Zeliha went
to a clinic to try and have an abortion. Asya, whom Zeliha conceives
after being raped by her brother, Mustafa, is the ‘bastard of
Istanbul.’ Mustafa later goes off to the USA and settles there and
does not come back even for a visit for all of twenty years. It is
when his Armenian-American stepdaughter, Armanoush, comes to Istanbul
to find her roots that she meets Asya; their relationship acts as a
catalyst for exploring the ‘Armenian question’. Mustafa’s refusal to
confront his guilt mirrors the Turkish denial of the crimes of 1915,
when first Armenian intellectuals and then ordinary Armenians were
deported, executed and persecuted. The Bastard of Istanbul teems with
an eccentric cast of remarkable characters and is a sensitive critique
of the homogenizing and hegemonizing claims of nationalism.
Unfortunately, the immediate response elicited by the book only
underscores just how relevant the critique continues to be in today’s
world. – Sayantan Dasgupta (The reviewer is Lecturer in Comparative
Literature at Jadavpur University)