The Turkish novelist Elif Shafak is tired of political questions. “In Turkey literature is a very politicised activity,” she says, “even language is, so we end up talking about politics more than literature and art. And in the Western world, because of the way I am defined, because of the identity I carry with me wherever I go— Muslim woman riter— again I’m always being asked political questions.”

She wraps her arms around her small frame and leans a little further away from the microphone on the table between us, looking at once fragile and defiant. There is rather more at stake than literary style in a newspaper interview for a writer who was prosecuted for “insulting Turkishness” last year under Turkey’s notorious Article 301.

Her fellow novelist Maureen Freely, who has been campaigning with the writers’ organisation, PEN, in support of more than 80 Turkish authors who have recently faced prosecution, smiles back at her from across the table.
“Turkey”, Shafak continues, “is very writer-orientated.” “Instead of focusing on the writing, we focus on the writer. We talk about the person in the spotlight, when what we need is to talk about the book.”

Her success there (her latest novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, was a bestseller) has increased the pressure on Shafak to act as a representative of her home country. It is a role full of ironies for a writer who has always focused on figures from the margins of Turkish society, and an expectation which she resists.

Identity ‘crisis’

“I am not very comfortable with it,” she explains. “How can I represent anyone other than myself?” On a recent tour of America, women from Turkey asked her to represent “modern, Turkish women”, to show Americans how ‘emancipated’ Turkish women are, but she’s not interested in representing anything so straightforward.

According to Shafak, fiction is about looking at a story from different angles and letting the reader decide. “Fiction, for me, is something very fluid and the world of politics is very concrete— they’re made of different material,” she explains. “I’m a storyteller— I have to give room to different voices.”

“Each one of us is composed of multiple selves,” she continues, “voices we have to suppress for the sake of appearing socially normal. But when you’re writing fiction you can be multiple selves; you don’t have to suppress anything. All those different conflicting and coexisting voices can come forward, and it’s perfectly acceptable to be confused. I like that.”

Perhaps the different perspectives of Shafak’s fiction owe something to a childhood spent outside her home country. Born in Strasbourg in 1971, she spent her teenage years in Spain, returning to Turkey to study social sciences. In 2002 she spent a year at the University of Michigan, before becoming an assistant professor at the University of Arizona. Based now in Istanbul, she continues to travel widely.

Freely’s upbringing offers almost a mirror image of Shafak’s. She was born in New Jersey in 1952 and moved to Turkey when she was eight, before returning to the US to study at Harvard. According to Freely, her childhood puts her “outside of all categories”.

She is now based in the UK, where she teaches creative writing at Warwick University and works as a journalist and translator— notably of Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk— as well as a novelist. American audiences often give her a ‘hard time’, she says, because “they don’t understand why you’re not (living) there.”

In between...

Freely’s background gives her a unique perspective on Turkish life. “I’m never going to be Turkish,” she says, “but I’m not an outsider.” Even during the cold war, when Turkish society was at its most impenetrable, she continues, Istanbul was always linked to the outside world through foreigners and westernised Turks who came and went. “We’ve been left out of the picture, we hybrid types,” she says.

Her latest novel, Enlightenment, is an attempt to “put us back onto the map, for better or worse.”
It’s a story which sets a couple of nice college girls from America loose in an Istanbul cut from the pages of a book by Graham Greene, complete with CIA safe houses, bourbon-soaked bureau chiefs and agents provocateurs— a world drawn from personal experience.

“During the cold war years I was living inside a thriller without knowing it,” she explains. “My classmates’ fathers were spies— we never gave a party without the KGB trying to infiltrate it. This was normal life.”

The book is inspired by a political murder which ‘cast a shadow’ over her generation. “If you go to a question that’s at the very centre of your life, and that forces you to actually rewrite your own history, it takes a long time.”

Enlightenment changed over and over again during the 10 years she was working on it, she says. “I’ve lost count of how many drafts. I would give the story to a particular narrator and find out that they didn’t want to know the truth, or didn’t want to tell the truth.”

Eventually she found the right narrator, the right place to begin, “and most importantly the right voice”.
It’s a voice which is, in some sense, shared between each of the book’s narrators.

When Freely’s family arrived in Istanbul in 1960, the American university where her father worked was over 100 years old, but no one who worked there had any idea of this history, “because everybody who had gone there had gone there for three years. If you put us all together we add up to something, but we have no idea what we add up to if we haven’t been in touch with anybody else.”

The Guardian