Turkish novelist Elif Safak might seem the perfect writer to become an interpretive guide to the east. But no one person can be the representative of a culture, she tells Nick Birch
'No word polarises more than the word genocide," observes Halil Berktay, a well-known historian of the late Ottoman Empire. "If you use it, Turks get angry. If you don't, Armenians do. Either way, it stops the conversation."
It's an observation internationally renowned Turkish novelist Elif Safak has learnt to her cost since her sixth novel came out in Turkey this March. The Bastard of Istanbul topped the country's bestseller lists for three months here and received largely positive critical reviews for its description of the growing intimacy between two families, one Turkish and one Armenian-American.
But it also attracted the attention of ultra-nationalist lawyer Kemal Kerincsiz, whose rise to prominence as an opponent of free speech has paralleled Turkey's European Union accession efforts. He was the one who tried to close down a conference on the Armenian issue last year. He is novelist Orhan Pamuk's nemesis. In the case of Elif Safak, he has surpassed himself.
His gripe is not with something she said, but with comments made by Armenian characters in her book. "I am the grandchild of a family which lost all its relatives to the Turkish butchers in 1915," says one. "I learned to betray my roots, I was brought up to deny the genocide."
An insult to Turkishness, Kerincsiz claims, citing the notoriously vague terms of Article 301 of Turkey's new criminal code, used against dozens of writers since its ratification last year. A first prosecutor laughed him out of court this June, but his appeal was accepted by a higher court on July 6th.
Elif Safak can't help seeing the absurd side. The thought of Uncle Barsam and Auntie Varsenig, both figments of her imagination, being called to the dock to testify feels like something out of Gogol, an author she's always loved.
With her first child due in September, though, she's in no mood to laugh. Her case is likely to be long.
And after a High Court decision last week to convict a Turkish-Armenian journalist under Article 301, the first such conviction in Turkey, the threat of three-year sentences at the end of it for her, her publisher and translator no longer seems so empty.
It's not that she denies having an interest in 1915; far from it. The daughter of a diplomat mother, she remembers growing up in western Europe at a time when Turkish embassy staff were the targets of ASALA, the Armenian terrorist group.
"We all have our personal dictionaries, and my first perception of the word Armenian was somebody who wanted to kill my mother," she says. "It took me a long time to ask where all this hate was coming from."
Yet she insists The Bastard of Istanbul is much more than a novel about 1915 and its aftermath.
"First of all it's a book for and about women," she says, referring to the four generations of female characters who make up the novel's fictional universe. "Indirectly, it's about the role women have played in fighting against historical amnesia in Turkey."
THE POINT WAS understood well by a woman who approached her at a recent book-signing in the south-eastern Turkish city of Diyarbakir.
"She wore a headscarf, she was obviously conservative, and she told me she cooked biscuits every Easter," Safak remembers. "I was intrigued."
The biscuits turned out to be the woman's way of honouring the memory of her grandmother, whom she had discovered to be an Armenian orphan. Did other family members know the significance of her cooking, Safak asked her. "The men just eat," she replied.
"If we want Armenians to forget what happened in 1915, we have an obligation to remember it first," Safak says. "To do that, we must find an alternative to the aggressive, macho language of nationalism. An alternative voice can be created by following women's stories and women's memories.
"Many people think 1915 is the only thing we in Turkey are unable to talk about. That is not the case. This is a country built on a rupture in time. For many people, time starts with the founding of the republic in 1923, and everything before that is a foreign country. You feel as if you are walking over rubble, trying to hear if there's anything alive inside. If there is, you try to dig it up, bring it to light."
It's a perception she says has informed her fiction since she published her first novel in 1998. It has earned her success, in the form of three Turkish bestsellers and a handful of prizes. But it has also earned her enemies.
"I've been called everything from a traitor to a so-called Turk," she says. In a twisted way, the latter insult is surprisingly apposite. With her perfect English and her western ways, Elif Safak seems the epitome of what her countrymen call "white Turks" - members of the country's westernised elite.
Both in her life and her work, though, Safak is an enemy of easy categorisations. Her novels are peopled with outsiders, a dwarf and an obese woman in The Gaze, foreign postgraduates at an American university in The Saint of Incipient Insanities, named Araf in Turkish after the Koranic word for purgatory.
"My ideal is cosmopolitanism, taking elements from wherever I choose, refusing to belong to either side in this polarised world," she says. The attitude lies behind her decision, much criticised in Turkey, to begin writing columns for a newspaper closely linked to an influential religious leader.
In the eyes of Kemalists, she says, referring to the followers of the architect of Turkey's secularist revolution, Kemal Ataturk, Turkey is divided into us and them, westernisers and Islamists.
"They see modernisation in dualistic terms. You choose the West and get rid of the other side of the duality. That's wrong. Ambiguity, synthesis, hybridity: these are the things that compose Turkish society. We are western-oriented and eastern, and that is not something to be ashamed of."
In a society increasingly fascinated with its multi-cultural, imperial, Ottoman past, it's an argument that is gaining ground fast. But Turkey is still a country where polarising cultural politics inform everything from the cut of your moustache to the way you say "hello", and where writing is the last thing a writer is judged by.
TIRED OF THE attention that came with her growing fame, Elif Safak fled to the United States in 2001, only to return this year. In many respects, she says, the five-year period of exile was a revelation. Well-known in Turkey for her efforts to recuperate Persian and Arabic words purged from Turkish by the nationalists of the early Republic, she vividly remembers the first time she heard the word "chutzpah" used.
"Some in Turkey still get upset if you use 'ihtimal' rather than 'olasilik'," she says, referring to two words - one Arabic, one Turkish - for possibility. "The English language is blind to ethnic origins."
Using it, she adds, also gave her what she calls "an additional zone of existence". She illustrates the point with a story about the upper-class Turkish women she met while in the States. Like all well-bred Turkish women, swearing in Turkish was out of the question for them, but the same self-censorship disappeared when they spoke in English. Safak used the same linguistic freedom to rather more serious ends: in 2004, The Saint of Incipient Insanities was published, the first of two books she has written in English. Hardly surprisingly, the linguistic switch angered some in Turkey.
"There were articles saying I belonged to American literature now, that I was no longer one of 'us'," Safak remembers. "But I don't see language as an either/or choice. Sometimes, it is good to be right on the threshold in between things, both an insider and an outsider."
Despite personal satisfactions, though, she ultimately found that the US remained as inimical as Turkey to the cosmopolitan vision she has espoused.
"For the average American, I'm a Muslim woman writer, and expected to produce accordingly," she says. "Why should I? Why can't I tell the story of a Chinese man?"
Smiling, she remembers a book-reading evening in Boston that she shared with an Indonesian novelist and a Canadian of Indian origin.
"I assumed we would have something in common, maybe our style or our choice of themes," she says. "In fact, all we shared was our non-western origin. You sometimes feel like something you add to a salad to give it colour, something which has no taste."
In a rare critical review of Orhan Pamuk's Snow, published in the Atlantic Monthly late in 2004, Christopher Hitchens observed that the West had for some been searching for "a novelist in the Muslim world who could act the part of dragoman, an interpretive guide to the east". The Egyptian novelist, Naguib Mahfouz, was one, he added, Orhan Pamuk another. With one foot firmly planted in two worlds, and as rational as the most rational-minded westerner could possibly wish, Elif Safak might seem a perfect writer to take up the baton. Already some critics see her as challenging Pamuk as Turkey's foremost novelist.
Despite the disappointment she feels at the West's limited interest in Turkish literature, she has no desire to be anybody's dragoman. For her, the fetishisation of "exotic" authors is profoundly dangerous, an implicit acknowledgement that cultures are as monolithic as the advocates of a "clash of civilisations" would like us to believe.
"No one person can be the representative of a culture, least of all one as multi-faceted and confused as Turkey's is," she says.
Above all, an author employed to play the role of dragoman is implicitly expected to tell his own story. That, Safak concludes, is a travesty of the role of writing.
"Literature is not telling my own story. It is the ability to stop being myself, to transcend the self that has been given me by birth. That includes religious boundaries, ethnic boundaries, and national boundaries."