More on Turkey

Turkish authors and the Turkish past has been a recurring theme on this blog - which is strange because I didn't know I was so interested in the subject. The latest news is a new defamation case. This one isn't about Orhan Pamuk, thank goodness, but is in many ways more troubling.

Author Elif Sharak is facing jail time over her new novel, The Bastard of Istanbul.

Shafak's book is the story of an Armenian family in San Francisco and a Turkish family in Istanbul whose lives intersect over nine decades.

Its references to the slaughter of some 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during and after World War I are by Shafak's own admission "difficult to digest" because the overwhelming majority of Turks deny that the genocide took place.

However, the book has topped best-seller lists, selling more than 50,000 copies since its publication in March. "The feedback I received has been very, very positive," Shafak, 35, said in a recent interview.

[snip]

Kemal Kerincsiz, a right-wing lawyer, filed charges against Shafak last month. In one of the passages, presented by Kerincsiz as evidence against the author, an Armenian character says, "I am the grandchild of genocide survivors who lost all their relatives in the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915."

Shafak argued that comments made by fictional characters could not be used to press charges, and the case was throw out. An appeals court, however, overruled that decision last week.

Did you catch that? What a fictional character says is grounds for a defamation case against the author?! I hope that Turkish society can move past the censors and nationalists that want to prevent a national dialogue about a tragic and complicated time in Turkey's history.

Two "Reviews"

I haven't posted in a while because the thought of figuring out what to write about Cynthia Ozick's Heir to the Glimmering World depressed me. (As did the book, for that matter.) The book has some wry humor and is fascinatingly unsympathetic. During our book club conversation, we also decided that Ozick provided a troubling commentary on the alienation of people. If alienation and a cast of exiles is your thing, check it out. As for me, I preferred the book that it almost reminded me of, Muriel Spark's A Long Way from Kensington.

Enough said.

Moving onto my most recent read, Azadeh Moaveni's Lipstick Jihad. This was much more enjoyable, largely because it seemed more human. Azadeh was someone I almost understood (although at my age she was a correspondent for Time magazine). She is probing, and catty, and ridiculous, and thoughtful, feeling her way for an identity that fits. I never questioned my national identity, blissfully American - in fact envious of my friends whose family cultures included more that a null set of commercialized values and traditions. In many ways, I was very lucky, unlike Azadeh, who discovers that - having grown up between two worlds - she will not find a single place where she "belongs". But everyone knows the feeling of not belonging (see Ozick above), and so even when the memoir is utterly foreign, it is also not.

My best friend in fourth grade had an American journalist father and a Persian mother. She was born the year of the revolution. That didn't mean anything to me at the time, but now I am old enough to wonder about their lives. The mother - how did she suffer the loss of her homeland? In Thousand Oaks was she close enough to an emigre community? Would she have lived and raised her daughter in America regardless? And my friend herself - we grew apart and moved in very different circles by high school. I saw her clique as pretty shallow, and I mourned the loss of my funny, brilliant friend. But was she struggling to carve out her own identity, embracing the American, the Persian, the Iranian, the Valley Girl?

There's been a spate of interest in women and Iran of late: Reading Lolita in Tehran (read my review here), Marjane Satrapi's graphic novels, a recent episode of KQED Forum, and more. And from it, I believe that we better understand Iran and Iranians, at least those of the diaspora, who so often go home. But - and perhaps this is good - we are no closer to predicting what the future holds for Iran.