Daily Star – Lebanon, Lebanon

Turkey’s ‘national bitch’ talks about perils faced by female authors

By Agence France Presse (AFP)

Monday, October 20, 2008

Aurelia End

Agence France Presse

FRANKFURT: "Of course Turkish women are stronger than men," says
Perihan Magden with a laugh. Like her, many Turkish women writers
provoke the wrath of officials with uncompromising works. "I’m the
national bitch anyway in Turkey. I think they just want me to shut
up," she told AFP at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

But silence obviously does not sit well with the small woman in her
late 40s, who was dressed simply in black and had tied her hair up in
a quick knot.

Asked about freedom of expression, persecution of Armenians and the
situation of the Kurdish minority, she launches into animated
discourse underscored by lots of gesturing.

She also quickly forgets to speak about her book, "Two Girls," – that
has been translated into German – which describes the tumultuous love
affairs of two Turkish adolescents.

In Turkey, Magden is as well known for her novels as for her
commentary in leftist media.

In late 2005, she took up the defense of an imprisoned conscientious
objector and was taken to court by the army.

Booed by the public during her trial, she was nonetheless acquitted,
though several legal procedures are still ongoing.

Magden now has trouble hiding lassitude in the face of what she said
is chronic harassment.

The former communist militant, "I would even say I was Soviet," would
like to send her daughter to study in the United States "because in
Turkey it can be very claustrophobic."

While Magden has been attacked for her views on military service,
novelist Elif Shafak drew unwanted attention for comments made by
figures in her books on what Armenians charge is genocide by the
Ottoman Empire, a highly disputed subject in Turkey.

Armenia has campaigned for the the recognition of the mass killings of
Armenians during World War I as genocide.

Turkey rejects the genocide label and argues that 300,000-500,000
Armenians and at least as many Turks died in civil strife when
Armenians took up arms for independence in eastern Anatolia and sided
with invading Russian troops.

Shafak was prosecuted under Turkish law that prohibits "defamation" of
the state, but was also cleared of the charges.

The France-born academic now wants to turn the page.

"I am too often assimilated" with the issue, she said in an interview
published Thursday by the German magazine Stern.

On the other hand, Shafak remains a staunch feminist. "We don’t say
enough about the history of women. History is always written by
men. Religion was written by men," she said.

Another Turkish writer, Fethiye Cetin also tackles taboos, raising a
fuss in the process.

In her novel "My Grandmother’s Book," a best seller in Turkey
according to the publisher, the human-rights activist searches for
Armenian and Christian roots that had long been hidden from her by her
own family.

Cetin, also a lawyer who represents the family of Hrant Dink, a
journalist of Armenian origin who was killed last year, tells the
story of how her grandmother escaped the early 20th-century slaughter.

Invited to the stand sponsored by Germany’s Green party, she said:
"You cannot bury the past. It always rises back to the surface!"