By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: September 9, 2006
Filed at 12:06 p.m. ET
1 ISTANBUL, Turkey (AP) — Elif Shafak, one of Turkey’s leading authors, is about to have a baby — and go on trial.
The reason for this strange conjunction of joy and foreboding is her new novel, which has exposed her to a charge of ”insulting Turkishness” because it touches on one of the most disputed episodes of her country’s history — the massacres of Armenians during the final years of the Ottoman Empire.
A University of Arizona literature professor, the 35-year-old Shafak divides her time between Tucson and Istanbul. She sought a postponement of her trial, set for Sept. 21, until after her first child is born but was refused.
She could get three years in prison, though similar trials of other Turkish writers have usually folded on technicalities and no one has gone to jail.
For now, she is sitting at a cafe on an Istanbul back street, reflecting on the peculiarities of being tried for the words she gave to an Armenian voice in the novel.
”I think my case is very bizarre because for the first time they are trying fictional characters,” Shafak, a striking woman with unruly locks of blond hair, told The Associated Press.
The case has broad ramifications, highlighting a rising wave of Turkish nationalism and the whole question of whether Turkey, a Western ally and NATO member, should be admitted to the liberal, democratic European Union — something the Bush administration supports.
Turks who long for EU membership worry that trials of writers are setting back their cause. But nationalists such as Kemal Kerincsiz, one of the lawyers suing Shafak, say Turkey shouldn’t have to forsake bedrock convictions — for instance, that there was never any Armenian genocide — just to please Europe.
”The Easterner has to insult himself and degrade his own culture to ingratiate himself with the West,” Kerincsiz said in a recent interview. ”Our place is in Eastern culture.”
Shafak said the law on insulting Turkishness ”has been used as a weapon to silence many people. … My case is perhaps just another step in this long chain.”
That chain includes Turkey’s best known novelist, Orhan Pamuk, and dozens of other writers and intellectuals forced to defend themselves against charges of ”insulting Turkishness.”
Shafak says the rising nationalism is a reaction to Turkey becoming more democratic and pluralistic as it strives to join the EU, and welcomes it as a sign her country is undergoing a momentous transformation.
”This ultranationalist movement is taking place not because nothing is changing in Turkey, but just the opposite, because things are changing,” said Shafak. ”The bigger the transformation, the bigger their panic.”
The novel in question, ”The Bastard of Istanbul,” deals with taboos — domestic violence and incestuous rape — that are rarely discussed in this conservative, predominantly Muslim country.
But it is what her Armenian-American characters say that has landed Shafak in court.
For instance, this from a man worried about his niece being brought up by a Turkish stepfather:
”What will that innocent lamb tell her friends when she grows up? … (That) I am the grandchild of genocide survivors who lost all their relatives to the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915, but I myself have been brainwashed to deny the genocide because I was raised by some Turk named Mustapha!”
Turkey insists the deaths of up to 1.5 million Armenians during forced evacuations in World War I was not a planned genocide but the result of the bloody breakup of the Ottoman Empire.
Shafak’s book has sold 60,000 copies, a best seller by Turkish standards, and will appear in English next year.
Her mother was a diplomat, and she says she first became aware of the Armenian issue when she was a girl and Armenian militants were assassinating Turkish diplomats.
”My very first acquaintance with the word Armenian was so negative, it just meant someone who wanted to kill my mother,” Shafak said. ”I then started to ask questions: ‘Why so much hatred against Turkish diplomats? What is behind this?”’
She does not take sides on the genocide debate, but accuses Turkey of having ”collective amnesia.”
”Turks and Armenians are not speaking the same language,” she said. ”For the Turks all the past is gone, erased from our memories. That’s the way we Westernized: by being future-oriented. … The grandchildren of the 1915 survivors tend to be very, very past-oriented.”
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Associated Press writer Benjamin Harvey contributed to this report.
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