Elif Shafak: ‘As a Writer in Turkey, You Can Be Attacked, Put on Trial, Imprisoned’

When she was 10, life suddenly became more challenging. Her mother graduated with multiple languages, landed a job with the foreign ministry – and her first posting was Spain. “It was a huge culture shock for me to be zoomed into this very international, posh school in the middle of Madrid, where I was the only Turkish student,” Shafak recalls. “I had to learn Spanish very fast. I had to learn English very fast, and I really cherished that experience. To be able to read Don Quixote in Spanish; to suddenly discover that there’s a vast literature in English that I could now access – that was the brilliant part. The difficult part was keeping up with the other kids. I was a massive introvert and I was bullied at school a lot.”

Writing in another language gave me the distance to look at where I came from

Although Spanish was her second language, English became her safe space, in which she wrote poems and kept up her diary. Many years later, after publishing her early novels in Turkish, she made the decision to switch over entirely to English. “There came a moment in my life when I felt so suffocated,” she says. “But that was a very scary thing to do, because you’re nobody. You have to start from scratch again. At the same time, paradoxically, it was liberating, because being a novelist in Turkey is really hard, and being a woman is even harder. Everything you say, everything you write, can be attacked, targeted; you can be put on trial, exiled, imprisoned – words are heavy, you know. Writing in another language gave me the cognitive distance that I needed to be able to take a closer look at where I come from.”

The second novel that she published in English, The Bastard of Istanbul, dealt with the Armenian Genocide of 1915, which the Turkish state still does not acknowledge. It was longlisted for the women’s prize in the UK but found a different sort of notoriety in Turkey itself, where she was prosecuted for “insulting Turkishness”. Though she was later acquitted at the request of the prosecutor, she was also investigated for obscenity for 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, and for an earlier novel, The Gaze. Neither of those cases has been resolved, as a result of which she has now gone into voluntary exile from her homeland.

“For me,” she says, “the biggest turning point was being put on trial after The Bastard of Istanbul. I was pregnant at the time. And by coincidence, I was acquitted the day after I gave birth. The whole year was really unsettling. There were groups on the streets spitting at my picture and burning EU flags. I was accused of insulting Turkishness, even though nobody knew what that meant. And it was quite surreal, because the words of fictional characters were taken out of the novel and used as evidence in the courtroom, as a result of which my Turkish lawyer had to defend my Armenian fictional characters.”

She is keen not to paint a completely dark picture, “because I also received so much love from readers in Turkey”. But, she adds, “I think that scarred me in many ways. In terms of authorities, it’s very difficult to be a novelist in Turkey, especially the way I write, because I do question the silences in our history.”

There Are Rivers in the Sky goes into battle once again on two fronts that are unlikely to win Shafak friends among the powers-that-be across the Middle East. The first is against the dam-building of Turkey’s President Erdoğan, which led to the flooding of the ancient cave city of Hasankeyf on the Tigris, in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish south-east region. Up to 80,000 people who had lived there were displaced, in what a local activist group described in 2020 as an “apocalypse”.

“This entire area is so precious, because of its history, but also its ecology. For a dam, which lasts only 50 years, they’ve destroyed thousands of years of cultural value and artefacts,” she says. “Also, when you build dams, it alters the flow of the water downriver, and affects other countries as well. So we need international solutions. We need countries to act together, rather than just one country taking the water for themselves.”

The second injustice it confronts is the persecution of the Yazidi people, a religious minority who have faced centuries of massacres across the Middle East. Fleeing the flooding of their valley, the characters of Narin and her grandmother blunder into the 2014 genocide by Islamic State in Iraq, when more than 5,000 were killed and thousands of women and children were taken prisoner and forced into sexual slavery.

“The Yazidis are one of the most maligned, misunderstood and mistreated minorities by almost every culture or religion surrounding them throughout history, and they are a very delicate, vulnerable, beautiful community,” Shafak says. “I want to talk about this, because, as we’re speaking, there may be close to 3,000 Yazidi women and girls still missing. And many of these women are held captive in – quote unquote – ordinary households in Turkey, in Syria, in Iraq, in Saudi Arabia.”

Just a few years ago, one Yazidi girl was rescued from a house in the Ankara neighborhood where Shafak herself grew up. “So I keep thinking, you know, just a few streets away from my grandmother’s home, in another ordinary house, a girl has been held captive and suffered horrific cruelties. How is it possible that people don’t see?” she asks. “How is it possible that they are so numb? There’s a lot we still need to talk about, because the genocide is not over yet.”

Underlying all the storylines are highly topical questions about colonial history and the ownership of cultural artefacts. As she was writing the novel, the temperature of the debate suddenly rose, with the scandals about alleged thefts from the British Museum in London and the provenance of objects at the New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“To whom does cultural heritage belong?” Shafak asks. “It’s a particularly important issue for many of us coming from the non-western world. Of course, it belongs to all humanity. But at the same time, it belongs to the minorities of the region, which we never talk about. It’s very complicated. There are multiple layers, you know. That’s why I wanted to write this novel – to tackle it.”

(There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak will be published on 8 August by Viking. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com.)