On December 16, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, whose memoir Istanbul: Memories and the City was published in June, will go on trial for remarks he made recently to a Swiss newspaper regarding the 1915 Armenian genocide: "thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it."
Currently at home in Istanbul, Pamuk is being charged with "insult[ing] the Republic," and faces up to four years in prison. Pamuk may be the best known, but he is far from the only writer in legal trouble for demanding that Turkey face up to its violent past. According to PEN International, there are more than 50 cases on similar charges pending in Turkish courts. Seen in this context, novelist Elif Shafak is either very brave, a little reckless, or both.
On Sunday, September 25, on the occasion of a repeatedly scuttled, finally consummated conference in Istanbul on recognizing the genocide, Turkish novelist Shafak, 34, published an op-ed in the Washington Post that refers to "the massacres, atrocities and deportations that decimated Turkey's Armenian population in the last years of Ottoman rule, particularly 1915." While there has been no official reaction yet, Pamuk's case suggests that Shafak's writing could provoke the government to bring charges against her. It's a possibility that Shafak acknowledges, but does not seem to dwell on. Even before her op-ed, the literati in Istanbul and elsewhere had been bracing for a widening of the controversy in the form of her sixth novel, The Bastard of Istanbul.
The novel, written in English and recently delivered to agent Marly Rusoff, features an Armenian woman who grows up in Turkey during the deportations, and later decides to emigrate to the U.S. with her brother, leaving her son behind. The consequences of those decisions drive the book. Moving back and forth between the U.S. and Turkey, the novel covers four generations of women in two families: the descendents of the mother's son, who converts to Islam and lives as a Turk, and the Armenian-American family of which the émigré becomes the matriarch.
"It looks at how the situation of women intersects with the sort of nationalist amnesia—the things we choose not to remember—that has taken hold," Shafak says. "It's a feminist book, and it's very critical in terms of talking about the sexist and nationalist fabric of Turkish society."
While the genocide is accepted as fact in the West (one made vivid in books like Peter Balakian's Black Dog of Fate), the Turkish government continues to enforce its denial. The efforts to suppress speech continue despite Turkey's aspirations of being admitted into the European Union. Pamuk was unavailable for comment, but has issued a statement that turns on two points: "1. What I said is not an insult, but the truth. 2. What if I were wrong? Right or wrong, do not people have the right to express their ideas peacefully in this Turkey?"
International attention surrounding the charges against Pamuk and other Turkish writers could ultimately help sales of Shafak's novel. But for the moment the book's publication status in the U.S. is uncertain. FSG's John Glusman, who edited Shafak's previous novel, had right of first refusal on the project. Glusman rejected an earlier version and is expecting to see another. Rusoff says she will submit the latest version to Glusman, but is also preparing to show it to other publishers.
Shafak, who is seen as a sort of heir to Pamuk, believes that she is the first Turkish writer to deal directly with the genocide in a novel, and hopes The Bastard ofIstanbul will speak to all sides of the controversy over recognizing the atrocities. Partly for that reason, she wrote the novel in English, which Shafak says helped her move beyond the polarizing terms of the debate. But the choice has political implications as well, ones with which Shafak is already familiar.
Shafak also wrote The Saint of Incipient Insanities, her previous novel and U.S. debut, in English. (FSG published the book to mixed reviews in 2003.) When it was translated and published in Turkey, reviewers generally ignored the merits of the book and concentrated on the language of its composition: "because it had been written in English and come out first in America, they saw it as a cultural betrayal," says Shafak. The Bastard of Istanbul is set to push things much further due to its content, but the "betrayal" runs deep: Shafak's use of English also reads, in Turkey, as a refusal of the "Turkification" of the Turkish language—the purging of borrowed words and expressions from Arabic, Persian and other languages. Turkification has been going on since the time of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (who came to power in 1923); the nationalist position is that the borrowed language came in as an imperialist result of the polyglot Ottoman empire. Shafak's use of Ottoman Turkish in her other novels has already brought her criticism, to which she responds: "I find linguistic cleansing as dangerous as ethnic cleansing." She also finds old words beautiful. The Turkish translation of The Bastard of Istanbul will make generous use of them.
Meanwhile, Shafak, who divides her time between the U.S. and Istanbul, has returned from the Istanbul conference to the University of Arizona (where she is a professor of Near Eastern studies) with a surprisingly favorable report. Although there were conservative protests, the conference, which came out of a working group of more than 50 Armenian and Turkish scholars of which Shafak is a part, and which was titled "Ottoman Armenians During the Demise of Empire: Responsible Scholarship and Issues of Democracy," took place without major incident. Shafak sees it as one of a growing number of signs of a government divided against itself: "elected officials did not condemn the conference. It's the old state machinery—the bureaucracy, the military, the courts—that is so difficult to change."
The conference's success, however, has not changed the fact of Pamuk's court appearance, or the possibility of charges being brought against Shafak. "You never know, some bureaucrat gets angry, and decides to take someone to court, and it gets bigger and bigger from there," Shafak says "We all deal with that danger. There are no guarantees. But all I know is that things are changeable in Turkey, and that they are changing." Talks on Turkey's candidacy for entry into the European Union are scheduled to begin October 3.
