Turkish author Elif Shafak’s cautionary tale for the West

LONDON — “History doesn’t necessarily move forward,” says Elif Shafak. “Sometimes, it does go backward.”

It’s a line that Turkey’s most celebrated female novelist has taken to repeating, and she tells it to me again in London over tea at the Monocle Café. “We can make the same mistakes our ancestors made,” she says.

Living in “self-imposed exile” in West London, Shafak has assiduously cultivated her role as an interlocutor between Turkey and Europe — East and West.

In a torrent of recent public appearances, she has urged her Western colleagues to look at her homeland as a cautionary tale, one that hints at the fragility of their own. “I come from a place that has lost its cosmopolitanism,” she tells me. “I wouldn’t want any other countries to make the same mistake.”

As Americans and Europeans worry over their fracturing liberal orders, Shafak’s defense of globalism and cosmopolitanism has resonated, so much so that her role as a political commentator may soon eclipse her literary renown.

Westerners, she tells me, have traditionally seen their countries as occupying a different reality than countries like Turkey, which too many regard as distant, backward and naturally vulnerable to losing basic rights like freedom of speech.

“Our perception [in Turkey] is: In order to be modern, you need to destroy” — Elif Shafak

“What has changed in the last two years, particularly in the last year, is that basic assumption,” she says. “Now many people in the West, particularly in America and Europe, realized that, wait a minute, we’re living in a very liquid world, and the rights that we have taken for granted, it is possible to lose them.”

As a result, she says, “East and West are more connected than before.”

Born in Strasbourg and raised by a single mother in Turkey’s diplomatic corps, Shafak is a model of multiculturalism, happy to speak at length about her cross-border upbringing and the many places she considers her homelands — her favorite being what she calls “storyland.”

For most of her life, Shafak led a nomadic existence, living in Jordan, France, Spain, Germany, the U.S., the U.K., and Turkey. In grade school, at a “posh” international school in Madrid, she envied the ease with which her Northern European classmates navigated the world, an experience that introduced her to the “hierarchy of nationalities.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan | Elif Sogut/Getty Images

“It was interesting to see how popular it was to be Dutch, or Norwegian, or Swedish — it seemed very easy,” she says. “Whereas, when you came from lands like Turkey, you had to deal with lots of negative perceptions, negative stereotypes. And of course, some of them were true.”

For the past eight years, Shafak has lived with her family in London, a city that offers her refuge from the pressure of being a Turkish public figure.

Though it has been some time since she last lived in Turkey, she feels its absence. “Istanbul is not a city you can leave behind,” she says. “It’s a very lonely life, exile. It’s a very fragmented life — you’re in two places at the same time.”

Her Twitter feed is full of appeals to help colleagues in the Turkish literati who have become victims of Erdogan’s purge, as artists, writers, journalists and activists lose their jobs and livelihoods and sometimes their freedom. Her husband, Turkish journalist Eyüp Can, was placed on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s wanted list in October 2016.

Shafak’s 10th novel, “The Three Daughters of Eve,” came out in June. Like Shafak herself, it ricochets between Istanbul and Oxford, East and West, comparing and contrasting the two cities on distant edges of continental Europe. “In Istanbul, ancient though the city was, the past was treated like a visitor who had overstayed his welcome,’ she writes. “Here in Oxford, it was clearly the guest of honor.”

“If the Bodleian [Library in Oxford] were in Istanbul, it would be a shopping mall today. It wouldn’t have survived,” she tells me. “Our perception [in Turkey] is: In order to be modern, you need to destroy.”

“That is so wrong, but the backlash to that approach is that of the Islamists and nationalists; they do the opposite, which is equally wrong,” she says. “They say, ‘Our past was very glorious, we had a golden age, our ancestors never did anything wrong. We need to revive that golden age.”

Both impulses — to erase the past or to destroy the present — are calamitous, products of what Shafak calls “the malady of certainty.”

“Certainty is a dogma,” she says. “It’s healthy to have a little confusion, it’s healthy to have a little modesty, it’s healthy to say, ‘You know what? I’m still learning.’”

During a cycle of literary festivals earlier this year — Hay-On-Wye, Dublin, Glastonbury —Shafak found herself discussing Turkey’s changing role in the world, in conversations with titles like “Can you be a good Muslim and a feminist?” and “Why do young Muslims go bad?”

Protesters hold pictures of jailed Cumhuriyet journalists during a demonstration in Istanbul on July 28, 2017. Elif Shafak’s husband, journalist Eyüp Can, was placed on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s wanted list in October 2016 | Ozan Kose/AFP via Getty Images

At Glastonbury, she had a conversation with former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis on how to “keep hope alive” in the age of populism.

“As a Turkish writer, I’m quite accustomed to defending the EU from isolationists and nationalists in Turkey,” she said on stage with Varoufakis at the Glastonbury Festival. “But to be honest, I never thought that there would come a day when I would have to defend the EU here in the United Kingdom, or across the European continent.”

That, of course, is precisely how Shafak has been spending most of her time. “Turkey’s trajectory holds incredibly important lessons for Europe,” she said at Glastonbury. “It’s important to understand how liberals and democrats and secularists in Turkey have been defeated.”

In novels with titles tinged with mysticism — “The Architect’s Apprentice” (2014), “The Saint of Incipient Insanities” (2004), “The Bastard of Istanbul” (2007) — Shafak tells stories that point out how easy it is to repeat the mistakes of the past, how dangerous it is not to question one’s world.

“The job of literature, I think, is to break down those dualities, and hopefully to introduce a more nuanced way of thinking” — Elif Shafak

Extremism, Shafak tells me, is “a two-way street.”

“There are sweeping generalizations being produced on all sides, and people internalize clichés without questioning them,” she says. “That’s very dangerous, because that’s the kind of ground upon which extremism breeds.”

“The job of literature, I think, is to break down those dualities, and hopefully to introduce a more nuanced way of thinking,” she says. “There’s a part of me that always wants to show what’s happening on the periphery, to bring the periphery to the center.”

Linda Kinstler is a contributing writer at POLITICO.