“When history takes a darker turn, it always starts with the omission of words.”
Award-winning Turkish creator Elif Shafak sat down with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim on The World podcast to speak about her newest 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 have been placed on trial in a Turkish courtroom.
It was the primary time ever a Turkish creator had been accused of “insulting Turkishness” underneath Article 301 of the nation’s legislation.
The novel outraged many nationalists for its that includes of the Armenian Genocide, which Shafak says “is still one of the biggest taboos in Turkey” at this time.
Avenue mobs burned and spat on footage of her, torched EU flags within the streets, and referred to as her a traitor.
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Pics: AP
She was acquitted however relocated to London after the “scary” and “unsettling” episode.
Nineteen years later and Shafak is apprehensive that this crackdown on free speech is being replicated throughout 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 factors to the e book bans throughout the USA – PEN America has counted greater than 10,000 bans in public colleges – which “we haven’t seen anything like” for the reason that McCarthy period.
Shafak can be apprehensive how the unique idealism of the web has turn out to be 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 many largest ironies is, sadly, oftentimes populist demagogues are higher at connecting with folks’s feelings than their liberal counterparts.”
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Elif Shafak. Pic: Ferhat Elik
She believes this has created a really perfect breeding floor for populist demagogues like Erdogan in her native Turkey, Viktor Orban in Hungary and now Donald Trump in America.
For Shafak, these populist leaders appropriately determine the issues however “what is not true is the solutions they are promising”.
“They’re promising us simplicity, fake solutions.”
The reply to this “age of anxiety” for Shafak lies in confronting these feelings head on and channelling them appropriately.
“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.”
That is no small job in a world the place algorithms create extremely personalised echo chambers. Add to {that a} concerted retreat of a globalist outlook and it may very well be an uphill battle for the likes of Shafak.
However, she is steadfast in her dedication to the humanities. For Shafak, the necessity for literature on this populist age has by no means been higher.
If historical past is determined by those that write it, Shafak makes use of her novels to deliver to life those that have been forgotten. Shafak’s books have all the time been entangled in how reminiscence shapes political discourse.
Her new e book, There Are Rivers In The Sky is not any completely different. One of many three protagonists within the novel is a younger Yazidi lady. The selection is deliberate.
In a group the place historical past is handed 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 approach for her to file their struggling, and resilience, in everlasting kind.
In 2014, ISIS carried out a genocide in opposition to the Yazidi folks, wiping out complete villages and enslaving 1000’s of younger ladies and ladies as sexual slaves to serve ISIS fighters throughout the area.
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Greater than 3,000 Yazidi ladies are nonetheless lacking. One younger Yazidi girl was present in a avenue close to to the place Shafak grew up in Ankara whereas she was writing the e 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’s her compulsion to make the world see atrocities like this that compels Shafak to maintain writing.
And regardless of the numerous challenges that the world faces at this time, she stays, at coronary heart, a agency believer within the human spirit and the transformative energy of artwork and literature for now and future generations.
“In every family there’s at least one memory keeper,” she says. “And I think writers are the memory keepers of their societies.
“One factor that makes me very completely happy is that the novel, even on this age of hyper info and on the spot gratification, the lengthy type of the novel continues to thrive, and we’re seeing an increasing number of younger males coming to literary occasions and studying novels.
“So there is, I think, enormous hope in that too.”
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