The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a la Turk

Last summer, I wrote about Elif Shafak, a Turkish author who faced defamation charges because of her characters' comments about the Armenian genocide. The charges were dropped, and the novel in question is available in English.

So this week, I read The Bastard of Istanbul. It is beautiful, full of richly eccentric characters and scents and sights. Women dominate this book; men, to the extent they appear at all, are foils to their more colorful female counterparts, even as their actions have such an impact on the course of all their lives.

The book is about family, in all its convoluted and messy forms. That alone would make a compelling novel. But Shafak has greater aspirations.

It is also about discovery and reconciliation. Within the family, and within the broader family of the old Ottoman Empire. The interplay of memory and forgetting is constant. Characters shed old identities in order to forge on; the matriarch slips into Alzheimers, the "bastard" of the title knows nothing of her past. And superimposed on each character's battles with memory is the broader Armenian-Turkish dispute. Were the events of 1915 a genocide? Why is it important to know? Sometimes it's necessary to forget the past in order to escape its grasp.

Trained as a historian, I obviously have pretty strong views about why we need to address and study the past. For the beauty of its stories, for one, and in order better understand ourselves and those around us. Maybe even to learn from it. But despite (or maybe because?) of my historical bent, I can also see the need to address it and move on. And why for so many individuals and even culture, the second step in that process is often so much easier than the first.

These themes come out clearest in an exchange between Asya, the eponymous fatherless young woman, and Armenian Americans on a message board. She writes,

perhaps it is exactly my being without a past that will eventually help me to sympathize with your attachment to history. I can recognize the significance of continuity in human memory. I can do that...and I do apologize for all the sufferings my ancestors have caused your ancestors.

And a response from another poster, after her "private" apology is rebuffed:

the truth is [...] some among the Armenians in the diaspora would never want the Turks to recognize the genocide. If they do so, they'll pull the rug out from under our feet and take the strongest bond that unites us. Just like the Turks have been in the habit of denying their wrongdoing, the Armenians have been in the habit of savoring the cocoon of victimhood. Apparently, there are some old habits that need to be changed on both sides.

And there you have it. An argument for why history must neither be shunned, nor wielded as a weapon. And yet so much easier said than done.