Stories that transcend boundaries

After surviving a courtroom ordeal and a bout of post-natal depression, Turkish novelist Elif Shafak has divided herself into 'six small women' in her new book, she tells Lara Marlowein Istanbul

Elif Shafak says she is all the characters in all her novels. I imagined her as Zeliha in The Bastard of Istanbul, the tall, beautiful non-conformist who strides through the city in mini-skirt and high heels, stopping to buy little glass tea-cups, arriving hours late for appointments.

But the 36-year-old writer who sits across from me in a café beside the Bosphorus is more like Auntie Banu, the mystic who retreats into her room for 40 days before emerging with the heavy burden of knowledge her djinnis (spirits) impart to her. Sufism, the gentle strain of Islam whose founder, Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, was born 800 years ago, is a recurring theme with Shafak.

"I feel very connected to Sufism," she says. "In the beginning it was an intellectual affinity. In time, it became more emotional."

Sufism was in vogue in Britain in the 1970s, Shafak notes. Doris Lessing wrote about it, and Britons named their children Omar (after Omar Khayyam) and Rumi. But it was then forgotten, by Turkish as well as western intellectuals.

"The elite should overcome their fear and read more about Islam, and particularly about Sufism," she urges. "Because Turkish Islam has always been a more flexible, fluid, moderate form of Islam, for centuries and centuries."

If she had to summarise Sufism in one word, Shafak says, that word would be love. "Love is the essence of Sufi thought. A more orthodox Muslim might have fear as a central element: God will punish us,hell will be so awful . . . For a Sufi, it's love that really matters. You learn to love human beings and everything around you, as part of the same cycle of love . . . We all carry a part of the divine essence."

Shafak was born in Strasbourg, where her father was studying. Her parents divorced while she was an infant, and her mother took her back to Turkey.

"I was raised by a very spiritual grandmother," she says. "Her world was full of folk Islam, superstitions, djinnis, evil-eye beads. I learned that kind of culture from my grandmother and I love it dearly. I put that in my work."

Do Sufis pray five times a day? Fast? Go to mosque? Yes, Shafak replies. Does she consider herself a practising Sufi? "I can't say that. I consider myself someone who is in love with Sufism, attached to Sufism by mind and heart."

Her words are nearly drowned out by the prayer call from a neighbouring mosque. "If you ask me am I a Muslim, yes, I am a Muslim," Shafak says. But you are very westernised, I observe.

"I don't think that's a 'but' sentence," Shafak chides me. "I don't think there's a conflict between being westernised and being Muslim."

Shafak's mother became a Turkish diplomat, and Elif spent four childhood years in Spain. In Ankara, she earned degrees in women's studies and political science. She lectures in US and European universities and calls herself a nomad or a "migrating bird carrying stories from one place to another". Her husband, Eyup, the editor of an economic newspaper, and the city of Istanbul, are her anchors.

SHAFAK HAS JUST completed her eighth book. The last four sold more than 100,000 copies each in Turkey. Along with the Nobel laureate, Orhan Pamuk, Shafak is the Turkish writer to whom western readers turn when they want to understand Turkey. The responsibility weighs on her.

"Sometimes I get the feeling that in huge literary markets in the West, one or two authors are picked from each country," she says. "These people are used to understand that country. It's so misleading . . . I cannot represent anything larger than myself."

Despite her talent and success, Shafak conveys a sense of vulnerability, even frailty. She speaks frankly of her recent battle with post-natal depression, but refuses to broach the subject that made The Bastard of Istanbula cause célèbre: the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by Turks in 1915.

A group of Turkish nationalist lawyers filed a lawsuit against Shafak, as they had against Pamuk and Hrant Dink, the Armenian intellectual who was assassinated last January. Shafak was dragged into court on charges of "insulting Turkishness" in September 2006, days after giving birth to her daughter, Shehrazat Zelda. Though she was acquitted, Shafak appears to have been traumatised by the experience. She bans what she calls "the G-word" from our conversation and will not discuss her trial or article 301 of the criminal code, under which she was prosecuted.

In The Bastard of Istanbul, Shafak skilfully weaves past and present, Armenian and Turkish narratives. It is a beautiful book, the finest I have read about Turkey. It inspires jealousy among the intellectuals who frequent the cafes of Beyoglu. Two Turkish writers told me that Shafak and Pamuk owed their success to the fact that they'd spoken out about Armenians.

Shafak has also been criticised for writing her last two books in English, even for inserting the "h" in her family name, so that the Turkish pronunciation is not lost in English. "Western newspapers don't have an 'S' with a dot under it," she explains. "So they spell your name as Safak. That might seem a trivial detail to some people, but to me, the loss of that sound "sh" is important."

All sorts of people show up at her book signings. "Women in headscarves, activists, hard rockers, youths from very different backgrounds, people who wouldn't easily break bread together, but they are reading the same book," Shafak says. "Literature has an amazing potential to transcend boundaries, to break into mental ghettos."

She shuns Istanbul's literary circles. "People can gossip a lot; there can be a lot of envy. I don't like that kind of energy. I don't say negative things about other authors."

She doesn't have to. In The Bastard of Istanbul, Shafak portrayed the intellectual habitués of the fictional Cafe Kundera to devastating effect. "We cannot abandon this rabbit hole for fear of a traumatic encounter with our own culture," says one. "We are a bunch of cultured urbanites surrounded by hillbillies and bumpkins on all sides."

Shafak sees language as "a passion, not an instrument. I write within language". She wrote her last two books in English "because I wanted to recreate my literary voice in another terrain, in another topography altogether". For her, English is "the language of precision. If you are looking for a very precise word, it's out there and all you do is grab it, learn it".

Turkish, on the other hand, "is a very emotional language. Especially if you are talking about the past. We have a past tense that doesn't exist in any other language, the masal zaman, the time of tales. It's very elusive. The Turkish language is based on agglutination, like a train, with suffixes being added, one after another. With one suffix in Turkish, you can change the meaning completely. For a writer, that is an amazing exercise."

SHAFAK WROTE BLACK MILK, which is about to be released in Turkey and will be published in English by Viking Penguin next year, in Turkish.

"This was very emotional for me, right after a long depression, and it came to me in Turkish. It had to be written in my mother tongue," she says.

Black Milkis part autobiography, part fiction. For 10 months after her daughter was born, Shafak says, "I couldn't write anything. I couldn't produce anything". The experience strengthened her belief in traditional wisdom.

"My grandmother's generation knew more about post-natal depression than my mother's generation," she says. "Old Muslim women, who have lots of superstitions, believe there's a particular kind of djinni that attacks new mothers, and you should never leave a woman who has just given birth alone for 40 days. An old woman stays with her at all times. They put red ribbons around her bed, scatter black seeds around her bed, to ward off the djinni."

In Black Milk, Shafak divides herself into "six small women, each of whom represents a different aspect of me. There's a small woman called Cynical Intellectual Woman. She's the one who likes books and writing and thinks that's the most important thing I should be doing. But there's also Motherly Cuddly Figure, and she thinks I should stop writing and become a housewife and learn to cook . . .

"One is more carnal, and I'm not very happy with her because I also question the way we as writers carry our bodies, the way we try to defeminise and desexualise ourselves. In this society, if you want to be respected for your brains, you try to cover your body as much as you can. All these things are in the book."