Where Being A Writer Can Endanger Your Liberty

 Reading Orhan Pamuk interested me in Turkish novelists. I came to believe that they have something to teach Americans - having a dual identity, how to live with history, the legacy of a lost empire. 

However, I have not read Elif Shafak.

The Guardian published yesterday Elif Shafak: ‘As a writer in Turkey, you can be attacked, put on trial, imprisoned’. Yes, being a Turkish writer can be a hazard.

Although Spanish was her second language, English became her safe space, in which she wrote poems and kept up her diary. Many years later, after publishing her early novels in Turkish, she made the decision to switch over entirely to English. “There came a moment in my life when I felt so suffocated,” she says. “But that was a very scary thing to do, because you’re nobody. You have to start from scratch again. At the same time, paradoxically, it was liberating, because being a novelist in Turkey is really hard, and being a woman is even harder. Everything you say, everything you write, can be attacked, targeted; you can be put on trial, exiled, imprisoned – words are heavy, you know. Writing in another language gave me the cognitive distance that I needed to be able to take a closer look at where I come from.”

The second novel that she published in English, The Bastard of Istanbul, dealt with the Armenian genocide of 1915, which the Turkish state still does not acknowledge. It was longlisted for the women’s prize in the UK but found a different sort of notoriety in Turkey itself, where she was prosecuted for “insulting Turkishness”. Though she was later acquitted at the request of the prosecutor, she was also investigated for obscenity for 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, and for an earlier novel, The Gaze. Neither of those cases has been resolved, as a result of which she has now gone into voluntary exile from her homeland.

This could be America, if the MAGA Republicans and the Christian Nationalists get their way. Who else pushes book banning with such gusto? 

“For me,” she says, “the biggest turning point was being put on trial after The Bastard of Istanbul. I was pregnant at the time. And by coincidence, I was acquitted the day after I gave birth. The whole year was really unsettling. There were groups on the streets spitting at my picture and burning EU flags. I was accused of insulting Turkishness, even though nobody knew what that meant. And it was quite surreal, because the words of fictional characters were taken out of the novel and used as evidence in the courtroom, as a result of which my Turkish lawyer had to defend my Armenian fictional characters.”

 Ideas are dangerous weapons, worse than nuclear bombs. Novels carry their viruses. Those who would control your thinking know the dangers of books. Elif Shafak has ideas.

The ninth novel the Turkish author has written in English and her 13th overall, There Are Rivers in the Sky is a story of “three characters, two rivers and one poem”, she says. The rivers are the Thames and the Tigris, and the poem is Gilgamesh. But Shafak wanted to make a drop of water the unifying motif, she explains, because “when we talk about climate crisis we’re talking about a crisis of fresh water, which affects everyone, but in some parts of the world it’s particularly bad. Seven of the most water-stressed nations are in the Middle East and north Africa, and it has massive consequences for women and impoverished people.”

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“To whom does cultural heritage belong?” Shafak asks. “It’s a particularly important issue for many of us coming from the non-western world. Of course, it belongs to all humanity. But at the same time, it belongs to the minorities of the region, which we never talk about. It’s very complicated. There are multiple layers, you know. That’s why I wanted to write this novel – to tackle it.”

I think my own ideas are facile, works in progress at best, but I am working on them. How about you? It may be that this country needs your voice - maybe even more in the coming years.

And a review of her latest novel from The Financial Times, There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak — a fascinating stream of storytelling.

The art of writing may “represent a desire to efface dualities, dissolve hierarchies and transcend boundaries”. But does fiction about “fractured or fluid” realities need to show its hand as overtly as Shafak’s does? In her defence, this much-loved fixture of anglophone bestseller charts began, in Turkish, as the bearer of scandalous tidings about repressed truths: not least, the fate of Turkey’s Armenian minority. She could not then assume any cosy consensus about the virtue of diversity. That hinterland fuels her didacticism. 

 Besides, from the Chelsea foreshore where Victorian “toshers” sift mud for treasure, to the holy mountain of Sinjar where Yazidis encounter the arid savagery of Isis, she animates ideas into densely imagined scenes that make past and present “bleed into each other”. There Are Rivers in the Sky melds science, scholarship and myth, domestic drama and moralised history. It becomes just as much a hybrid entity as the Assyrian lamassu that intrigues its characters — a divine creature with “the head of a human, the body of a bull and the wings of a mighty bird”. The beast may be outlandish, but it still beguiles.

sch 8/4