In Elif Shafak’s newest novel, a single raindrop rises and falls via millennia. In Nineveh, within the seventh century BC, it lands on the scalp of Ashurbanipal, a king whose obsession with constructing an excellent library saves the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh from destruction for blasphemy; in Nineteenth-century Constantinople, it lands on Arthur, who has simply arrived on an official mission to discover a lacking part of the epic, depicting a pre-biblical flood. It reappears because the final drop of water in a bottle that terrified Twenty first-century Yazidis carry with them on their flight from slaughter into the parched mountains of Iraq.
The ninth novel the Turkish writer has written in English and her thirteenth total, There Are Rivers within the Sky is a story of “three characters, two rivers and one poem”, she says. The rivers are the Thames and the Tigris, and the poem is Gilgamesh. However Shafak wished to make a drop of water the unifying motif, she explains, as a result of “once we discuss local weather disaster we’re speaking a few disaster of recent water, which impacts everybody, however in some components of the world it’s notably dangerous. Seven of essentially the most water-stressed nations are within the Center East and north Africa, and it has huge penalties for ladies and impoverished folks.”
We’re speaking within the examine of Shafak’s London house, the place books of each style tower in bookcases over a big leather-topped desk, beneath which just a little white canine referred to as Romeo makes himself snug. “I do a loopy quantity of analysis,” Shafak says. “, I used to be in academia for a very long time, in political science, girls’s and cultural research. That interdisciplinary information is one thing that I actually treasure, and I don’t prefer it when folks put it into separate packing containers. I really like novels which are stuffed with concepts, multiplicity, nuances, layers – this actually speaks to my coronary heart. So there’s lots of analysis, however there’s additionally lots of creativeness and instinct.”
Once we meet, it’s the finish of the faculty time period, and each Shafak’s teenage kids are hanging round, having simply completed essential exams. However an aura of serenity emanates from the family, in addition to from Shafak herself. The surfaces are uncluttered. She glides in with glasses of tea and enormous slices of home made cake, earlier than settling down to elucidate her dismay in regards to the state of the world and her perception that fiction is one of its final democratic areas.
It’s not that Shafak is averse to different types of discourse. Her novels are interspersed with works of nonfiction, most just lately a chic meditation on the impression of social media, Easy methods to Keep Sane in an Age of Division. She has delivered three Ted Talks, written a number of newspaper opinion columns, and provides common updates to her 1.6 million followers on X (previously Twitter). She additionally has her personal weekly Substack, titled Unmapped Storylands, to mop up anecdotes and insights from her private diaries. These vary from uncared for historic characters she has found to musings on the idiosyncrasies of language, and writers’ ideas (“Don’t spill tea on keyboard”).
However the novels are central. “In many methods,” she says, “I believe fiction is the antidote to our extraordinarily polarised and fractured instances. It’s a spot the place we are able to nonetheless maintain nuanced conversations, have a number of ideas on the identical time, open up troublesome points and calmly ruminate. And likewise do some sluggish considering, as a result of we’re all the time dashing into judgments. It’s about empathy, attempting to place your self within the footwear of one other particular person, to turn into that particular person for just a few hours over just a few days. I believe that’s an excellent and humbling train for the soul.”
Her personal novels occupy a charmed house, the place romance meets faith (Three Daughters of Eve), the political traumas of Cyprus are noticed by a fig tree (The Island of Lacking Bushes) and a complete novel is narrated from a garbage bin by a murdered Istanbul intercourse employee (the Booker-shortlisted 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Unusual World).
“I’m all in favour of mixing east and west, folks story with the European canon. I need my fiction to be bridge-building, however my coronary heart all the time goes in the direction of the peripheries – to folks whose tales we don’t hear about, truths which have been erased,” Shafak says. “In some methods that is my very own journey, due to the way in which my life developed. None of us belongs in a single field however I’ve a multiplicity.”
Shafak spent her early years together with her grandmother, after her mother and father break up up and her thinker father disappeared from her life for 20 years. Unusually for a Turkish girl of her technology in a conservative neighbourhood of Ankara, her mom went again to college to finish the diploma she had dropped out of to get married.
Her grandmother, says Shafak, was “a little bit of a healer”, who would soften result in push back the evil eye, and was additionally a storyteller, “so I’m very deeply versed within the oral tradition of Anatolia”. On the age of eight, Shafak began writing a diary. “However actual life was so boring that I had virtually nothing to say, and so I began to jot down about individuals who didn’t exist and issues that hadn’t occurred. It was a really fast journey from diaries into quick tales, and from that second onwards, I saved writing, all the time.”
When she was 10, life all of the sudden grew to become tougher. Her mom graduated with a number of languages, landed a job with the international ministry – and her first posting was Spain. “It was an enormous tradition shock for me to be zoomed into this very worldwide, posh faculty in the midst of Madrid, the place I used to be the one Turkish pupil,” Shafak remembers. “I needed to study Spanish very quick. I needed to study English very quick, and I actually cherished that have. To have the ability to learn Don Quixote in Spanish; to all of the sudden uncover that there’s an enormous literature in English that I might now entry – that was the good half. The troublesome half was maintaining with the opposite children. I used to be an enormous introvert and I was bullied in school quite a bit.”
Though Spanish was her second language, English grew to become her secure house, through which she wrote poems and saved up her diary. A few years later, after publishing her early novels in Turkish, she made the choice to change over solely to English. “There got here a second in my life after I felt so suffocated,” she says. “However that was a really scary factor to do, since you’re no person. You need to begin from scratch once more. On the identical time, paradoxically, it was liberating, as a result of being a novelist in Turkey is admittedly onerous, and being a lady is even tougher. All the pieces you say, all the pieces you write, could be attacked, focused; you could be placed on trial, exiled, imprisoned – phrases are heavy, . Writing in one other language gave me the cognitive distance that I wanted to have the ability to take a more in-depth take a look at the place I come from.”
The second novel that she printed in English, The Bastard of Istanbul, handled the Armenian genocide of 1915, which the Turkish state nonetheless doesn’t acknowledge. It was longlisted for the ladies’s prize within the UK however discovered a distinct kind of notoriety in Turkey itself, the place she was prosecuted for “insulting Turkishness”. Although she was later acquitted on the request of the prosecutor, she was additionally investigated for obscenity for 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Unusual World, and for an earlier novel, The Gaze. Neither of these circumstances has been resolved, on account of which she has now gone into voluntary exile from her homeland.
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“For me,” she says, “the largest turning level was being placed on trial after The Bastard of Istanbul. I was pregnant on the time. And by coincidence, I used to be acquitted the day after I gave start. The entire yr was actually unsettling. There have been teams on the streets spitting at my image and burning EU flags. I used to be accused of insulting Turkishness, though no person knew what that meant. And it was fairly surreal, as a result of the phrases of fictional characters had been taken out of the novel and used as proof within the courtroom, on account of which my Turkish lawyer needed to defend my Armenian fictional characters.”
She is eager to not paint a totally darkish image, “as a result of I additionally obtained a lot love from readers in Turkey”. However, she provides, “I believe that scarred me in some ways. When it comes to authorities, it’s very troublesome to be a novelist in Turkey, particularly the way in which I write, as a result of I do query the silences in our historical past.”
There Are Rivers within the Sky goes into battle as soon as once more on two fronts which are unlikely to win Shafak buddies among the many powers-that-be throughout the Center East. The primary is in opposition to the dam-building of Turkey’s President Erdoğan, which led to the flooding of the traditional cave metropolis of Hasankeyf on the Tigris, in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish south-east area. As much as 80,000 individuals who had lived there have been displaced, in what a neighborhood activist group described in 2020 as an “apocalypse”.
“This whole space is so valuable, due to its historical past, but in addition its ecology. For a dam, which lasts solely 50 years, they’ve destroyed hundreds of years of cultural worth and artefacts,” she says. “Additionally, while you construct dams, it alters the circulation of the water downriver, and impacts different international locations as properly. So we’d like worldwide options. We want international locations to behave collectively, somewhat than only one nation taking the water for themselves.”
The second injustice it confronts is the persecution of the Yazidi folks, a non secular minority who’ve confronted centuries of massacres throughout the Center East. Fleeing the flooding of their valley, the characters of Narin and her grandmother blunder into the 2014 genocide by Islamic State in Iraq, when greater than 5,000 had been killed and hundreds of ladies and youngsters had been taken prisoner and compelled into sexual slavery.
“The Yazidis are probably the most maligned, misunderstood and mistreated minorities by virtually each tradition or faith surrounding them all through historical past, and they’re a really delicate, weak, stunning neighborhood,” Shafak says. “I need to discuss this, as a result of, as we’re talking, there could also be shut to three,000 Yazidi girls and women nonetheless lacking. And lots of of those girls are held captive in – quote unquote – peculiar households in Turkey, in Syria, in Iraq, in Saudi Arabia.”
Only a few years in the past, one Yazidi woman was rescued from a home within the Ankara neighbourhood the place Shafak herself grew up. “So I preserve considering, , only a few streets away from my grandmother’s house, in one other peculiar home, a woman has been held captive and suffered horrific cruelties. How is it potential that individuals don’t see?” she asks. “How is it potential that they’re so numb? There’s quite a bit we nonetheless want to speak about, as a result of the genocide isn’t over but.”
Underlying all of the storylines are extremely topical questions on colonial historical past and the possession of cultural artefacts. As she was writing the novel, the temperature of the talk all of the sudden rose, with the scandals about alleged thefts from the British Museum in London and the provenance of objects on the New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Artwork.
“To whom does cultural heritage belong?” Shafak asks. “It’s a very essential challenge for many people coming from the non-western world. After all, it belongs to all humanity. However on the identical time, it belongs to the minorities of the area, which we by no means discuss. It’s very sophisticated. There are a number of layers, . That’s why I wished to jot down this novel – to deal with it.”
