“When history takes a darker turn, it always starts with the omission of words.”
Award-winning Turkish author Elif Shafak sat down with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim on The World podcast to talk about her latest novel There Are Rivers In The Sky, the parallels she sees between Turkey and America, and what it was like being on trial for “insulting Turkishness”.
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In 2006, Elif Shafak’s fictional characters from her bestselling novel The Bastard Of Istanbul were put on trial in a Turkish courtroom.
It was the first time ever a Turkish author had been accused of “insulting Turkishness” under Article 301 of the country’s law.
The novel outraged many nationalists for its featuring of the Armenian Genocide, which Shafak says “is still one of the biggest taboos in Turkey” today.
Street mobs burned and spat on pictures of her, torched EU flags in the streets, and called her a traitor.
She was acquitted but relocated to London after the “scary” and “unsettling” episode.
Nineteen years later and Shafak is worried that this crackdown on free speech is being replicated across the West.
Notably, for her, she sees the echoes in America.
“When history takes a darker turn, it always starts with the omission of words,” Shafak warns. She points to the book bans across the United States – PEN America has counted more than 10,000 bans in public schools – which “we haven’t seen anything like” since the McCarthy era.
Shafak is also worried how the original idealism of the internet has become corrupted.
“Everyone was going to have a voice,” she says. “Everybody’s voice was going to be heard. What happened is amidst this noise and cacophony, people feel like they’re not being heard.
“One of the biggest ironies is, unfortunately, oftentimes populist demagogues are better at connecting with people’s emotions than their liberal counterparts.”
She believes this has created an ideal breeding ground for populist demagogues like Erdogan in her native Turkey, Viktor Orban in Hungary and now Donald Trump in America.
For Shafak, these populist leaders correctly identify the problems but “what is not true is the solutions they are promising”.
“They’re promising us simplicity, fake solutions.”
The answer to this “age of anxiety” for Shafak lies in confronting these emotions head on and channelling them correctly.
“We have to turn these emotions that we find debilitating into something much more positive and constructive, both for ourselves and for our communities and for humanity. And the only way to do that is by reconnecting.”
This is no small task in a world where algorithms create highly personalised echo chambers. Add to that a concerted retreat of a globalist outlook and it could be an uphill battle for the likes of Shafak.
Nevertheless, she is steadfast in her commitment to the arts. For Shafak, the need for literature in this populist age has never been greater.
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If history is decided by those who write it, Shafak uses her novels to bring to life those who have been forgotten. Shafak’s books have always been entangled in how memory shapes political discourse.
Her new book, There Are Rivers In The Sky is no different. One of the three protagonists in the novel is a young Yazidi girl. The choice is deliberate.
In a community where history is passed down orally, “if you kill the elderly, basically you’re killing collective memory”, she says – “and when you kill collective memory, you kill collective identity”.
To immortalise them in ink is a way for her to record their suffering, and resilience, in permanent form.
In 2014, ISIS carried out a genocide against the Yazidi people, wiping out whole villages and enslaving thousands of young women and girls as sexual slaves to serve ISIS fighters across the region.
Read more: How ISIS tried to wipe out the Yazidis
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More than 3,000 Yazidi women are still missing. One young Yazidi woman was found in a street near to where Shafak grew up in Ankara while she was writing the book.
“How is it possible that a human being is kept in a house under these circumstances for years, and the entire neighbourhood doesn’t know, doesn’t see?”
It is her compulsion to make the world see atrocities like this that compels Shafak to keep writing.
And despite the many challenges that the world faces today, she remains, at heart, a firm believer in the human spirit and the transformative power of art and literature for now and future generations.
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“In every family there’s at least one memory keeper,” she says. “And I think writers are the memory keepers of their societies.
“One thing that makes me very happy is that the novel, even in this age of hyper information and instant gratification, the long form of the novel continues to thrive, and we are seeing more and more young men coming to literary events and reading novels.
“So there is, I think, enormous hope in that too.”
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