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.