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Book Review: The Bastard Of Istanbul by Elif Shafak

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  • Book Review: The Bastard Of Istanbul by Elif Shafak

    Blogcritics.org, OH
    March 1 2008

    Book Review: The Bastard Of Istanbul by Elif Shafak

    Written by Richard Marcus
    Published March 01, 2008

    The human memory can either be a blessing or a curse; a blessing
    because it allows you to hold onto moments in time that you cherish
    and a curse because it won't let you forget things you'd rather
    not remember. No matter how hard you try, once something has been
    observed and recorded by your brain it's stored there permanently
    unless you have that piece of your brain killed - and even that isn't
    foolproof because nobody's quite sure which parts of the brain do
    what. Memories thought isolated to one part of the mind can migrate
    of their own volition and show up again somewhere else completely
    unexpected and unwanted.

    History is a recording of past events that sometimes has nothing to
    do with what actually happened, but unlike memories, history has a
    way of surviving unchallenged. Somehow because it is written down,
    or recorded officially, it is considered much more accurate than
    anything the human brain is capable of remembering. The fact that
    histories are sometimes written by people with vested interests in
    how they read and years after the events recounted took place doesn't
    seem to change anyone's opinion of their veracity. Only in the face
    of irrefutable evidence can history be re-written, and even then
    there will always be resistance.

    All of us have a history; we were all born, we all were children,
    adolescents (a time a lot of would choose to forget if we could,
    I'm sure), young adults, and so on down the line until we die. As we
    age we formulate our own histories based on the memories we have of
    the days we've lived. Yet like any history there are points in time
    that are beyond the reach of our own memories, and we have to rely
    on what other people claim has happened.

    The Bastard Of Istanbul by Elif Shafak, first published in Turkish
    and now available in English through Penguin Canada's Viking imprint,
    is about both personal memories, history and how they both can deny
    the past. Unfortunately for Elif Shafak, Turkey is in such denial of
    its own past that she faced three years imprisonment for the crime of
    besmirching Turkey's good name for something one of her characters said
    in the book. The best thing you can say about the Turkish government
    is that they probably not only helped boost sales of the book, but
    also nicely proved the point it makes about history and memory being
    precarious and easily falsified.

    In the last days of the Ottoman Empire, the rulers of Turkey took
    it into their heads that the Armenian population of the country was
    a threat. So it began the first mass extermination of a people during
    the 20th century. As the world turned a blind eye (as it continues to
    do so today when it comes to Turkish treatment of its minority Kurdish
    population, and the Kurdish population in Northern Iraq which they
    relentlessly bomb and harass), first Armenian intellectuals were
    rounded up and shot for sedition; then as many Armenians as they
    could find were rounded up in Istanbul and force-marched across the
    country with no food or water and shipped into exile.

    Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, died of malnutrition during
    the march and subsequent confinement. Children who survived were
    placed into orphanages where they had their names, language, and
    culture stolen from them so that they could be raised as good Turkish
    citizens and the Armenian culture would be eliminated. Thankfully
    the Ottoman Empire was nowhere near as efficient as Nazi Germany in
    their methods, and thankfully a good many regular citizens interceded
    to protect their friends and neighbours, so Armenians survived both
    in Istanbul and to flee the country to start new lives abroad.

    The memory and history of what happened has never left them, and each
    generation of Armenians living abroad is weaned on tales of those
    whose lives were lost and the dispossession of their homes. Armanoush
    Tchakhmakhchian is the daughter of an Armenian-American and an
    American. Her mother and father divorced when Armanoush was only two,
    because her mother Rose couldn't take the pressure of so many people
    judging her every move while always treating her as an outsider. Her
    revenge against her former in-laws was swift and merciless - her
    second marriage was to Mustafa Kazanci, a Turkish man whose family
    still lived in Istanbul.

    While Armanoush is growing up spending half of her time with her
    father's family in San Francisco learning the horror of her family's
    past, Mustafa's niece is growing up in Istanbul without even a past
    of her own. Asya is the daughter of the youngest of the Kazanci
    sisters, four in total, who live with their mother and grandmother in
    the family's ancestral home. Men have a habit of dying young in the
    family - so his mother had sent Mustafa off to the United States in
    the hope that he would beat the curse that had deprived the family
    of their precious men.

    Asya is the bastard of the title and not only does she not live with
    her father, she has no idea who her father is. That's a secret known
    only to three people; her mother, the man who is her father, and her
    oldest aunt Banu. Banu is blessed and cursed with the ability to read
    people's futures in a small way, and can find out the answers to any
    questions about the past that she cares to if she is brave enough.

    Ever since the two djinni came to live on her shoulders, Miss Sweet
    and Mr. Bitter, she hadn't known a moment's peace from the past.

    It's her own fault, she knows, but she has to ask, and Mr. Bitter
    has lived longer than long and has borne witness to everything,
    and his bitterness is the truth. With her grandmother's memory lost
    to Alzheimer's, her mother wrapped up in worshipping a son she
    hadn't seen in twenty years, her middle sisters lost to reality,
    her youngest sister running from the past as hard as she can, and her
    nineteen-year-old niece asking why she should care about history if
    she doesn't even know who her father is, who else is there but her
    to bear the burden of the family's and Turkey's histories?

    When Armanoush (or Amy as her mother calls her) is nineteen she
    decides that she has to go to Turkey and see her past for herself.

    Going to Istanbul to find the places her grandmother's family
    once lived will be the only way she feels that she can understand
    who she truly is. Of course who else would she stay with but her
    stepfather's family? Telling her mother she's spending spring break
    with her father, and her father that she's decided to spend spring
    break with her mother, she flies to Istanbul to uncover her past,
    and inadvertently sets off a sequence of events that brings all of
    their pasts home to roost.

    It's all very well and good to write a novel where actual history
    and fictional history intersect, and the attitudes of a country are
    reflected in the microcosm of the characters, but the trick is to
    make it worth reading beyond the political or social points that the
    author wishes to make. Elif Shafak has succeeded in this task because
    her primary concerns are the people in the book and telling their
    stories. Initially it seems like the book is populated by extras from
    one of Hollywood's "ethnic" movies, two-dimensional characters whose
    only personality stems from their ethnicity.

    On one side there are the happy, eccentric, doting Armenians, where
    everything has a double meaning and there is an underlying sorrow to
    almost everything they do. On the other side are the happy, eccentric
    Turks, where everything has a double meaning and there is an underlying
    sorrow to almost everything they do. Yet Elif doesn't leave her people
    stranded, and with the help of her two nineteen-year-old protagonists,
    Armanoush and Asya, we quickly move beyond the realm of superficial
    and cliched.

    This not only makes it a far more interesting and entertaining book to
    read, it also takes a subject, genocide, which is next to impossible
    for most of us to understand, and personalizes it in such a way that we
    can understand why the Armenians feel the way they do. Why doesn't the
    Turkish government admit it happened? They can easily blame it on the
    autocratic Ottoman Empire that was overthrown in favour of a secular
    government in the early 1920s, yet to this day there is a steadfast
    refusal to acknowledge what the rest of the world knows took place;
    it's only in Turkey that the past is denied.

    As long as one person remembers the past there will always be the
    danger the secret you've hidden, the secret you hide from, will come
    out in the open. The longer it remains hidden, the longer it takes
    to recover from and the worse the damage that is caused when it's
    revealed. Memory and pain are part of the same nervous system in the
    human body; it's how we are conditioned to know not to stick our hand
    in an open flame, the memory of the pain tells us not to do it again.

    If we are smart we learn our lesson and remember the pain; The Bastard
    Of Istanbul is about what happens when the pain is ignored and the
    wound of memory is allowed to fester until the damage is irreversible.

    http://blogcritics.org/archives/200 8/03/01/131530.php
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