The Independent (London)
September 15, 2006 Friday
BOYD TONKIN;
BOOKS A Week in Books
What do you call a state that puts a writer on trial because of
remarks made by a character in a novel, on a charge that carries a
three-year sentence, and then schedules the hearing for a few days
before her first baby is due? A likely candidate for swift progress
towards entry to the European Union? Probably not. Yet, in Turkey,
the surface story seldom tells the entire truth.
Elif Shafak, who will face a court in Istanbul on 21 September to
answer a case of "insulting Turkish identity" under the notorious
Article 301, knows that better then anyone. Her fiction (The Gaze and
The Flea Palace are published here by Marion Boyars) sets out with
passion, wit and courage to break down every Turkish monolith. It
tells tales within tales, shows layers under layers, to reveal a past
and present full of fractures that let the daylight in and banish the
shadows that narrow minds. Fair-haired, fashionably-dressed, raised
in Spain and France and with a university post in Arizona, Shafak
nonetheless rescues old Ottoman traditions and Sufi beliefs from the
disdainful condescension of Ataturk’s secular state. I heard her
speak, compellingly, about her work in London this summer. Any
country should be saluting such a writer, not menacing a mother-to-be
with a prison stretch for thought-crimes.
Armies of her admirers in Turkey share that opinion. Yet the recent
spate of prosecutions under Article 301 – about 60 in the past year
or so, most famously against Orhan Pamuk – is being driven by
right-wing secular nationalists who dread the dilution of "pure"
Turkishness into a European super-state. Sounds familiar? As Shafak
says, many lands now host culture-wars between hopeful openness and
xenophobia.
So every foreign pundit who howls that such cases should scupper
Turkey’s EU accession talks does the diehards’job for them. They fear
European influence, and the cosmopolitanism that an author such as
Shafak brings. Another point that needs endless iteration in today’s
nervy climate is that these artistic persecutions have nothing
whatever to do with any official "Islamist" agenda. Exactly the
contrary: Shafak has shown plenty of sympathetic interest in the
rising appeal of the headscarf and the mosque for educated Turks of
her (thirtysomething) generation. She carefully calls the
pro-European government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan a "Muslim democratic"
regime, not an Islamist one. Like it or not, judicial independence
(and competing powers) fuels this war against the written word.
The deeper truth is that Turkey is a political nation at war with
itself. Shafak likens it to "a tapestry of clashing and coexisting
forces", where "the government and the state are not one and the
same". Last autumn, a conference on Armenian history in Istanbul was
initally banned by the justice minister (it later went ahead) but
welcomed by the foreign minister. And it is, of course, the
still-open wound of the Armenians’ terrible fate as the Ottoman
empire broke apart that has led to Shafak’s day in court next week.
In her new novel The Bastard of Istanbul (originally written in
English – another "insult" in nationalist eyes), an Armenian figure
whose grandparents died in the massacres regrets having "been
brainwashed to deny the genocide" of 1915. Invoke the G-word with
reference to the mass death of Armenians, and every warning light in
the Turkish "deep state" will glow a wrathful red. The outcome is a
Satanic Verses-style furore in which fictional creatures stand
accused of a secular blasphemy. Shafak drily points out that: "As
much as I believe in their vivacity, my Armenian characters cannot go
to court to be tried under Article 301." So she must, with – I hope –
the support of every reader and writer who cherishes the freedom she
upholds.