When Elif Shafak finished her talk, I looked back on the event \u2013 an intimate gathering at Manchester Central Library \u2013 and reflected on her aesthetic turns of phrase, the lingering visions of her lively prose, and the sobering inevitability with which all discussions now turn to politics.<\/p>\n
Shafak is described as British-Turkish (or Turkish-British) but considers herself a \u201ccitizen of the world\u201d and admits to carrying Istanbul wherever she goes. The Istanbul of her book is not, she explains, the Istanbul proffered by the Ministry of Tourism. It\u2019s an Istanbul that\u2019s conjured before me as she reads: wheelie bins, streets all named after men \u2013 she zooms in on one particular street: there\u2019s a church, a synagogue. It\u2019s also home to the oldest licensed brothel in town.<\/p>\n
Shafak wasn\u2019t able to set foot in Istanbul at the time of writing but has recreated it sensually, through the tastes and smells of street food and coffee: sense-memories that germinated into larger chapters.<\/p>\n
She is \u201cbeginning at the end,\u201d by which she means our protagonist is dead; though Leila seems very much alive as she castigates Shafak for using the past tense.<\/p>\n
Shafak\u2019s writerly approach casts her in the role of a question-asker. The new novel is 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World<\/em>, named for the length of time the brain allegedly continues to function after death. What would that dying person think, she asks?<\/p>\n Leila ends up buried (not a spoiler, insists Shafak) in a cemetery where the graves have no names, only numbers. It\u2019s a real cemetery in Istanbul known to inter LGBT+ people, suicides, sex-workers and other so-called undesirables. When refugees drown trying to swim to Europe it\u2019s where they might end up too. What were their lives like, she wonders?<\/p>\n Thus, Leila. Shafak gives a name to the number. \u201cLiterature tries to re-humanise those who\u2019ve been dehumanised,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Now writing in English and overseeing the Turkish translations, Shafak\u2019s insights into language are fascinating to the monolingual Brits, like me, in the room. Being bilingual makes her more attentive to the nuances of language. Turkish is apparently better suited to emotions whereas English befits irony and sarcasm. In Turkish there\u2019s a big distinction between \u201cold words and new words\u201d, since words from other cultures, like Persian, were nationalistically culled by the Ottoman Empire. What\u2019s good about English is that \u201call words are welcome\u201d, she says.<\/p>\n In a crowd-pleasing moment, Shafak relates her struggle with her \u201cacquired language\u201d, highlighting how her children mock her pronunciations of \u201csquirrel\u201d and \u201ctortoise\u201d. The audience laughs, perhaps seeing the inherent silliness of those words for the first time.<\/p>\n After the extract, short and tantalising enough to guarantee queues at the merch stall, Shafak takes us into the grim reality of Turkey today. Turkey is \u201cgoing backwards\u201d, she says, and when she talks about police seizing her books and underage refugee girls being married-off to polygamous husbands, it\u2019s hard for even the most hopeful progressive to disagree.<\/p>\n Shafak, as in her book, lightens the doom and gloom with a certain wryness. She\u2019s cognizant of the absurdities around her. When she was unable to attend the Booker Prize Shortlist (11th<\/sup> October in the Martin Harris Centre) the Turkish media claimed she\u2019d been kicked out of Manchester. Some of us bravely chuckle.<\/p>\n Naturally on the agenda is the other ubiquitous topic of all discourse: social media and its dark side. But Shafak isn\u2019t without insights. In the Middle East, folks were so optimistic about social media that there was an Egyptian baby named Facebook and an Israeli one named Like. Ever the question-asker, Shafak wonders what their lives are like now, long after the world has come down from the euphoria of the Arab Spring, to wake up in a world of online rape threats and dangerous misinfo. Perhaps the subject of her next novel looms.<\/p>\n So is there any hope for humanity? Elif Shafak says stories can make a difference.<\/p>\n She finds it impossible to be \u201cnot-political\u201d in Turkey, and urges us in the UK, perhaps also on a backwards slippery slope, not to succumb to Brexit-fatigue. \u201cWhen moderates become disconnected, the space is taken over by hardliners.\u201d<\/p>\n She\u2019s already made a difference to her apparently diverse readership (inclusive of nationalists, xenophobes and homophobes) who identify with these outcast protagonists. \u201cWhy did you make them suffer?\u201d they ask her, as their minds vainly fight the empathy infecting them.<\/p>\n In a typically strange but beautiful choice of words, Shafak says stories \u201copen up an underground tunnel\u201d. I suppose it leads to those nameless people in the graveyard.<\/p>\n Probert Dean<\/p>\n Probert Dean<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Elif Shafak finished her talk, I looked back on the event \u2013 an intimate gathering at Manchester Central Library \u2013 and reflected on her aesthetic turns of phrase, the lingering visions of her lively prose, and the sobering inevitability with which all discussions now turn to politics. Shafak is described as British-Turkish (or Turkish-British) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[16,283,18],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n