Elif Şafak on Turkey in a polarized world

As a fan of Elif Şafak’s novels, I’m always watching for periodic columns in the Turkish Daily News. If you’re not familiar with her, more about her at the end of this post.

One of her recent pieces, One Hundred Years of Angst, especially caught my eye. Written before the recent elections and related controversy, the piece describes the anxiety and gloom many felt in its anticipation. I liked her description of the relationship between the the “Islamic fundamentalists” and the “Western Islamophobics,” and relational nature of “East” and “West”:

It is not easy to be a Turk in a world that is becoming more and more polarized...A world in which more and more hardliners claim that Islam and Western democracy cannot coexist. At first glance, Islamic fundamentalists and Western Islamophobics might seem to be poles apart. But they are not. They share the same prejudice and narrow-mindedness toward the Other and the same desire to exclude everyone who doesn’t echo their views. Hardliners in one country produce more hardliners elsewhere.

“East” and “West” are relational categories, and yet, they are often used as if they were mutually exclusive...Biases are produced mutually, and they keep breeding one another.

Read the whole article here.

Elif Şafak is, alongside Orhan Pamuk, one of Turkey’s most famous writers. Yet to call her a Turkish writer might be a bit simplistic; of Turkish descent, born in France, having lived in Spain and Jordan and attended university in Ankara, Turkey, she is now a professor at the University of Arizona.

Her novels, written Turkish and English, however, are generally tied to Turkey in setting, background, character and theme, exploring many issues related - but certainly not limited to - Turkey. Elif Şafak is one of the authors recently prosecuted (and acquitted) under Article 301, a law making it illegal to insult “Turkishness.” This law is quite controversial, and currently under revision to some degree.

You can also listen to this May 2006 BBC interview with Elif about her novel The Gaze, writing in English, nationalism, and her childhood.