Otium

Vol. 2, No. 1 | ISSN 1554-8228 | 11 April 2005

A Conversation with Elif Shafak

On March 3, 2005, staff members Alison MacDonald and Sarah Frank met with visiting writer Elif Shafak to discuss her recent novel, The Saint of Incipient Insanities. Read on for the politics behind words and names, the usefulness of ambivalence, and how abandoning one s mother tongue can be a scary—albeit fruitful—experience for a writer.

Alison MacDonald:

One of the major things that occurred to both of us as we were reading your novel was the importance of names: the way the characters, especially Gail, have so many different names, and choosing names for her seems to be especially important because it seems to be linked to her drive toward either death or life. We wanted you to speak a little bit about names and the significance of names.

Elif Shafak:

Actually that’s a very good question. And I think it’s a little bit difficult for me to explain because it’s so abstract, but ever since my… I mean, you can see this, I mean, it’s a pattern. You can see this in my other novels in different ways. But names have always been important for me. I kind of follow this Eastern tradition which believes that when you name someone you attribute whatever that name entails—it might be a charm—to that person. What I’m trying to say is, a name is not just a combination of letters. It’s deeper than that. And oftentimes as a novelist, when I have to work with a character the name comes first, and if I don’t feel the name I can’t write the character. I remember so many times: you change the name of the character, play with it, you’re not quite comfortable with the name you find, and you can’t write. So they are very, very crucial for me.

In the case of Gail it was a little bit maybe a step further because names are so important. I mean, imagine the religious traditions. It always fascinates me how—it’s an Islamic tradition—as soon as the baby is born his or her name is instantly said into her ear so that the name can sink in. And then in the Jewish tradition, it’s fascinating, especially the Jews in Istanbul, they practiced this: when someone is sick they change the name of that sick person so that the sickness would follow the old name. And usually they gave them name of chai, which means life. So changing a person’s name is a very serious step. When you look at all these folk traditions, you come across that. And I do take that seriously. Now in the case of Gail, I think, as I said, I suppose it’s a step further because names are so crucial. Because she didn’t want a fixed identity, a stable identity anchored in just one name once and for all. She needed to change her name.

I’d like to compare that to the foreigners in the book like Abed, like Omer. Losing the dots in your name was, you know, such a tragic thing for Omer, whereas for Gail the name was something disposable. So there are two ways of approaching that. And when you’re a foreigner oftentimes you find the second direction because foreigners are people with transformed names. And when you’re a foreigner that’s the very first thing you learn to change, your name. The most basic thing to me.

And interestingly, it also in a way concerns my personal story because my surname was written with a dot, a dot under S. When my books started to be published in English, there was so much reaction from the Turkish nationalists (especially because of this book) who were so angry that this book was written in English—and there were these articles saying "how could you give up your dot?" So a dot is very political, it’s not innocent. Even the dot under just one letter is something very ideological, very political.

A:

How do you find the reaction in Turkey now that the book has been translated into Turkish?

E:

Well, there are mixed reactions. I mean, I do have kind of my own readership that keeps coming perhaps from the very first novel to this day. So there is that group of people. There are other groups of people interested in this particular book and this particular story.

I think what upsets me most is that in Turkey the literary world is very much writer-oriented rather than writing-oriented. So when you publish a new novel they oftentimes talk about you but they don’t talk about the book as much, which is what I need: literary criticism. So I do feel that’s an obstacle for a writer. Some writers do enjoy that because it’s a small pond in that sense and people can become the king and the queen of that and life becomes a loop or a repetition. I think it’s very much European continental tradition. You know, you have your cafés, you go to those cafés, you write there, you meet this poet, that novelist, it’s a small circle of literati in a way. But it can be very suffocating in that sense.

In my case I believe part of the difficulty stems from the fact that I chose the novel as a genre and in countries like Turkey, also Russia, the novelist is very important. It’s a public figure because we modernized from a book. The cultural level is extremely important. Novels are the leading force of modernization.

Now if you are a woman and if you’re writing poetry, that’s fine; everyone’s fine with that because women are expected to be emotional and poetry is thought to be emotional, so it matches in their eyes. That said, there’s a very old tradition of poetry in the Ottoman Empire so it’s a very old tradition. But the novel was the voice of the bourgeoisie; it was the voice of European Enlightenment, of modernization, so it’s something new, relatively speaking. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most novelists were fathers to their readers. So you have to be a man, you have to be above a certain age. The novel is seen as a cerebral activity—you are constructing a society—and you are giving a message through your work to the reader. Now if you’re a woman you don’t fit into that pattern; if you’re young you don’t fit into that pattern. The only way a woman can be respected—well there are two ways for a woman to be respected as much as a man would be respected. Either you have to be old, you know, then you are respected; or you have to defeminize yourself and be more masculine, and then you are respected. So these are biases that I have to struggle against at each step in Turkey.

A:

How do you find that that’s different with your readership in the United States, or do you find that it’s different?

E:

Of course I do find it different. Coming to this country and starting to write in another language has been very difficult but it has also been invigorating for me. You know I was a different person, I am a different person now. My voice changes, my tone changes, and I like that. I mean, some people panic when they lose their personality; I enjoy that, I see it as a richness. You meet this other person in you who perhaps hasn’t had the chance to come forward that much.

One other thing that I very much enjoyed—again when I compare, my language has always been extremely important for me which is a bit unusual for a novelist. Especially in the genre, oftentimes you use language as a vehicle like a fork and knife, you know, but that was not the case with me. I always write with language and within language. It is not instant for me. I shape language but language shapes me.

So I was very much upset because in Turkey in the name of westernizing and modernizing the society, the first thing they did was to change the language, and they changed the alphabet. They got rid of old words whereas I loved those old words. It was always a struggle for me. Let’s say if you’re open minded, if you’re a liberal, if you’re a leftist you shouldn’t be using those old words because they are something old. So it’s very politicized, and very polarized.

When I came to this country it was like a relief. Here you hear the word chutzpah from someone who is not Jewish. I love that. I love that the word has traveled to another community. Or I learned this word that was perhaps read by the Irish four hundred years ago and no one is saying "this word is old, let’s take it out." So that multi-layered aspect of the English language is fascinating for me. And in that sense maybe Borges was right in saying that English is the language of precision. If you’re looking for the precise word, with this vocabulary, it is amazing.

And one other thing that I experienced is unlike me and my personal life: my writing has a lot of humor. Humor has always been important for me. But I guess when I was writing in Turkish I was very much conscious of my humor. You know, you put a dash of humor here, a dash of humor there; you kind of control it, or try to control it. When I started writing in English I just let it flow, and that was a relief.

But I need to say, I don’t kind of construct the sentences in my head, in my mind in Turkish first, and then translate them into English. I don’t do that. And this is something kind of abstract but there has always been a very obvious distinction for me between oral language and written language. I mean, as I speak to you now I am very conscious of what I’m saying, my own voice, you know, everything: grammatical mistakes, pronunciation. So you’re very conscious. But when you start writing you’re not that conscious anymore. It’s the subconscious that talks. And that helps. It’s a natural rhythm and music. So it’s more, I guess, related to music than grammar, and it’s thanks to that I can switch to another language.

Sarah Frank:

Do you think that’s where the word play comes from?

E:

Yes. Yeah, definitely.

A:

There was also a lot of mention of music in your novel.

E:

That’s true.

A:

There’s a lot of familiarity with different musicians. It seemed to inform in a large way Omer’s character, and we were wondering if music had other significance for you. You were just talking about the way that you write…

E:

Yeah, definitely. Music has such a central place in my life, and especially in my writing. I can never write in silence. So when I first came to Mount Holyoke on this fellowship, it’s a gorgeous place, it’s a gorgeous campus, but it’s extremely silent. And the place where I used to live in Istanbul was even more noisy during the night than during the day and I like that—the sounds, cadence of the city. So people were telling me, you’re gonna love this place, it’s so quiet you can even hear the sound of your hair as you move, which was very frightening for me. I don’t want to hear the sound of my hair.

But the thing is when I start writing I always listen to kind of harsh music. So it is my music at that same time. I mean, I do listen to punk, post-punk. I like that tradition very much, or gothic, industrial, sometimes jazz, blues, usually harsh. So most of the stuff that I wrote there was stuff that I was listening to.

A:

Oh really? That is interesting, too, because a lot of time in the novel is recounted through music. So to have you listening to music at the same time as you’re going through the experience of writing the novel, and the time of it…

E:

Absolutely. I mean, each novel, when I come to think about it that way, is associated with several songs. So that has always been the case. When I think of The Flea Palace, it is always songs that come to mind because I used to sing those songs. It was a little bit different at that time, depending on your mood, the topic you are dealing with. One thing that doesn’t change is music; it always has to be there, and often times in a loop, which I guess might be weird for many people but I like loops.

S:

So you do listen to the songs more than once?

E:

I do, yes.

A:

Actually, we noticed there were a lot of loops in the novel, this notion of circularity.

E:

Absolutely. The metaphor of circles is very important to me. I am very much interested in Islamic mysticism. I see deep, deep connections between Islamic mysticism and Jewish mysticism especially. It’s just fascinating to me to see how people who have never seen each other—they lived in completely different cultures, different countries, different centuries even—come up with very similar things. I like the cyclical understanding of time in which, you know, time doesn’t have to flow in a line, in a progressive line where the past, the present, and the future have a neat order of their own. I guess I’ve benefited a lot from various heterodox traditions and old religions that follow that more circular understanding of time. I also did my research, I wrote my master’s thesis on that understanding of time and its implications, which I think can be very, very radical because some of these mystics, they even came to the point of rejecting the notion of hell and heaven. They had a complicated understanding of life and death. Depending on your understanding of time, your understanding of life changes, your understanding of death changes, even your understanding of sexuality changes. So it is very radical, I believe, this notion of time.

A:

Also in the novel, you seem to use the notion of time to draw together disparate geographies. For instance, you list the time in different parts of the world.

E:

But you know, that’s also something connected to music. When this instrument plays that, that instrument plays this. Somehow, you know, they are both individual voices and yet they act in harmony. That harmony fascinates me. When I say harmony it’s not necessarily positive all the time, you know, it’s more chaotic than that. But sometimes that’s the way I interpret the world. As we are talking now, what’s happening in Istanbul? I mean, I am a foreigner in this country but perhaps unlike others.… well, for instance, at the University where I teach, I look at other scholars who come from the Middle East from the region of the Balkans. Oftentimes they have a very clear distinction in their minds, like they have drawn a distinction, a line, between their past and their future. So, let’s say they used to live in Syria once and they are not living there anymore. So, full stop. You know what I mean? Or many other people, many immigrants. You know, they have this past in this other country; now they’re here and full stop. That’s not quite the case with me. I mean, rather than doing that, the way I feel it is, I live in two places at the same time. I live in Istanbul and Arizona at exactly the same time, which is kind of weird because these are completely different contexts and completely different places. So it’s not an either/or for me. It’s both, and I believe in that. I believe in the possibility of being multi-lingual, multi-cultural, multi-faith, and sometimes living in multiple places at the same time. Writing is something that enables that. When you’re a writer… for instance I am a columnist in Turkey. Your voice is there, your writings are published there, and published here. So writing enables you perhaps to be in multiple places at the same time.

A:

That is interesting because you can take part in the literary world in Istanbul at the same time that you’re here.

E:

Yes. But it also comes with a loss. I mean, it has its shadows as well. I believe every step you take somewhere, every success, comes with a loss somewhere else. Even when we’re talking right now you are noting something else at home, right? So that notion of success and loss or every step we take and what they are connected to—my mind always operates like that, with connections. I connect bits and pieces.

A:

I think I saw that in the novel when Lynn, one of Omer’s girlfriends, had this sudden feeling that she’s in the wrong place with the wrong guy and she’s flipping out, and that just seemed so real.

E:

Yes.

S:

It’s interesting too to connect what you were saying about loops to the cycle of addiction that’s in the novel, especially with Omer towards the end. I noted that you connect language to violence at times. So I’m curious how you see circularity in the bulimia aspects of the novel?

E:

You know, when I look at my novels next to one another, although they are incredibly different, in terms of content, in terms of story, in terms of style, perhaps one underlying pattern that I see in my writing is this fascination with opposites. The dilemma between things that are seemingly opposites. It just fascinates me, the dualities, the contradiction between inside and outside, or between weakness and power. So you name it, I mean all these dualities are very much connected in my mind. But what I’m trying to say is rather than seeing personalities as, okay this character is strong, full stop, or that character is weak, full stop. I don’t see, I don’t percieve life like that. I think we have our very strong sides and then the same people have their very weak sides. And it fascinates me to see, let’s say, the precise moment when a very timid, shy person kind of becomes this brave personality. Even he or she doesn’t understand how this is happening. Or this very brave person kind of has this moment of, I don’t know, maybe weakness. What I’m trying to say is that it’s the opposites in our character—I think we have a lot of those but many people try to repress them. For a novelist it’s fascinating to find them, to pull them out, and to see them and to show them.

So for instance in Allegra’s case, that duality between inside and outside: you eat and then, you know, you give it back. You take something beautiful, all this nicely decorated food, and you turn it into something disgusting. Except that it’s not disgusting for her. Those adjectives, I mean, every adjective we attribute to every little thing, is relative. I like to play with that. But in daily life we tend to think it’s fixed. You know, we have a certain definition of beauty, we have a certain definition of what is that word, gestalt. It’s not like that, it’s very much relative. It’s shifty. The ground is shifting in the world of adjectives. And I think that can be fascinating for a writer.

I perhaps took it to another level in my first novel, which was the story of a hermaphrodite, The Sufi. And there, for instance, the notion of night and day, femininity and masculinity—which are supposed to be very different things—playing with that and showing that they’re not that different, or they can kind of penentrate into one another’s zones. A person can embody both. That contradiction you have in your own body, your own personality. Things like that always fascinate me. I am attracted to the play between the opposites.

A:

Right, and I think there’s a line in the book: "human beings are notorious for their fear of ambivalence." It seems like ambivalence is very important.

E:

Ambivalence is very important. I mean, I can understand it’s very scary; I know it’s scary. I think honestly it’s also very much connected to the way I grew up, because I didn’t grow up in a family environment likechildren my age… I mean, there’s a certain pattern: father, mother, grandfather, grandmother. These children’s books you read, you have a house, whereas in my case I grew up without seeing my father; until this age I have only seen him like two or three times. I was raised by a single mom but I had to be away from her, too, sometimes because she was abroad and then she became a diplomat so we travelled a lot from Anchora. First there was France, then Turkey, then Spain, then Jordan, and Germany, and Istanbul. So for me life has always been ruptures, and writing is the only thing, it’s the only continuity that comes with you. It’s the only luggage you have wherever you go. Now that makes you strong and perhaps courageous in many ways but it makes you also anxious in many ways because you can never be sure of the ground beneath your feet. Whereas for many people who have lead normal lives, they don’t have to fear, unless something really bad happens, whereas in this other context you always expect, you know, the worst, which might make you ready for the worst, or strong when something bad happens, but perhaps it makes you more cynical, it makes you more anxious. These are good things for art. I’m not sure they are that good for the artist.

A:

I guess one thing that interested me about ambivalence was the character Abed in this novel, his use of proverbs. He says towards the end that he liked proverbs because they are "pure wisdom. Simple and clear." And yet we see his mother at first use a proverb to exclaim her dislike of Gail and later her affinity with her.

E:

Yes, Omer doesn’t like ambivalence. He is a person who is not at home there, definately. The thing is that I am never perhaps objective towards my characters. I feel them. There is always something we share. This includes the seemingly bad characters or good characters, you know, you name it. I understand Abed’s connection with folk Islam, which is also something that I experienced with my grandmother. I grew up with two different grandmothers. One of them lived shortly. It gave me the chance to observe the fact that two women, both Muslim, both in the same age group, both from the same culture, both from the same class, can have utterly different understandings of religion, can have utterly different understandings of Islam, can interpret the holy book in completely different ways. I never forgot that. When you, you know, use gross generalizations, you say, okay Muslims are like this, Christians are like this. But which Muslim? Which Christian? There are so many branches. These are very old, complicated maps.

Folk Islam is one of those branches, one of those threads within the history of Islam. Abed is someone who has enjoyed that world, because it’s a world full of superstitions, it’s a woman’s world at points. The written book, orthodoxy, has almost always been the world of men: educated men, men in religious hierarchy, men with power. But then there is this other world of folk Islam, mostly operated by women, women who are weak in other spheres of life. Superstitions and many other things, that’s a completely different world. I think there is enchantment there, which can also be fascinating for the artist. So those are the things that helped me feel closer to Abed. Other than that, however, Abed is someone who doesn’t like ambivalence. He wants to belong fully.

A:

But at the end it seems like he comes to the realization that he can’t.

E:

Yes. There is a carnivalesque tradition which Bahktin talks about. The carnival in which—imagine, it’s such an old tradition—for a day, three days, you stop being yourself. If you want to wear a mask you wear a mask, if you want to become a different personality, you become a different personality, if you want to act in a different way, you do so. That was very liberating for many people, and art is like that oftentimes.

When there is no tradition of the carnival in a society, when you always have to be yourself, period, it is very suffocating. And I think it’s a big irony because one thing that I experience in this country—interestingly among more progressive circles among the university campuses—is if you’re coming from the Middle East, people look at you as a Middle Eastern woman novelist. So your identity walks ahead and the quality of your fiction has to follow. Before looking at the quality of your fiction they look at your identity. And they fix, pigeonhole you. That’s something I don’t need. I can write a book about what it means to be a woman in a particular Middle Eastern country. The next book might be about a gay in San Francisco, you know, why not? Whereas this framework says no, you can’t write the second story if it’s not your story—tell me your story. And it works both ways. I mean, writers write—if you’re an Algerian woman novelist, you write about the problems of being a woman in a Muslim country, in Algeria, and then many doors open. This is what you tell, this is what people want to hear.

The other path is very difficult because you’re saying yeah, I’m telling you my story but I’m also telling you your story. And as a matter of fact there is no me and you, you know, everything is very much interconnected. In today’s world this is not something people want to hear. That is what scares me. There is this tendency to attribute a function to fiction. We have to learn something from a book, it has to have a function, it has to represent a minority, it has to represent a community. It’s okay, I mean, some books do that. But art is also the ability to be someone else. It’s also the ability to imagine, to lie, to be able to change identity, to abandon your own identity. So that second aspect of art should not be killed.

A:

Do you feel that that’s a theme in your novels, characters trying on and fitting themselves into different identities?

E:

Briefly, my first novel about the life of a hermaphrodite had a more mystical, heterodox interpretation of Islamic Sufism. So it is a book that has layers. You can read it in different layers. And depending on which layer you follow you can come up with a different story. Just to give you an example, I once received one of the most interesting letters. It was a long letter, like eight pages long, amazing analysis of the novel. She analyzes so many things I hadn’t noticed, you know? It was fascinating, I mean, really. And then on the sixth page she says, perhaps you’d like to learn something about me too. She lives in this little town in Turkey, she’s a covered woman, she covers her head. She comes from a conservative family. She’s in her third year at the University in public administration, which is an important detail because if you want to cover your head and if you want to do public administration, you can’t do it in Turkey because it’s a secular regime. It’s secular in the French way, so it’s very much state-dominated secularism. I mean, a woman can’t cover her head as a public state official. So you see that dilemma.

And she loved the book, adores the book. She says on the last page, I have a friend of mine, she is my best friend, we are buddies, we grew up together, she too covers her head, she too is in public administration, everything, you know, they are doing everything in common. When I finished the book I loved it so much that I gave it immediately to her and she read it until page forty and she gave it back. She hated the book. And she said, "What is this? This is pure blasphemy." So this woman was very much surprised, you know, this is the only time that these very good girlfriends disagree so bitterly on an issue. And the letter ends, "Who is right? Is she right or am I right?" And this is precisely why I like the art of fiction because there is no right and wrong. I mean, one of them hated the book, the other one adores the book. That’s why I am more happy with ambivalence if you call it ambivalence, or flexibility. I like fiction that’s fluid better than static. When you have to give a message to the reader, when you are the representative of something, you oftentimes have to talk in blocks, static blocks, and fiction can’t be fluid anymore. So that dilemma is something that I keep in mind.

That said, for instance, my second novel was the story of Sephardim Jews coming from Spain to Turkey, Ottoman Empire. It is the only novel I wrote that is completely historical from the beginning to the end. It takes place in the seventeenth century Ottoman Empire. And then the third book is basically centered about the notion of gays, the gays of the Muslim God, the gays of the male lover, the gays of the society and how each can be very suffocating in their own way and very much interconnected. It’s a love story of dwarf and a very, very fat woman who both are very… this is the society of the spectacle as Debord would say. So these are not people who would be very comfortable in that spectacle. Then there is The Flea Palace, which is the story of an apartment building, where I am very much intrigued by the notion of what is clean, what is dirty, what is inside, what is outside, who is a foreigner, who is one of us. So these are the themes I follow.

What I’m trying to say is I guess I’ve always been attracted to personalities and themes kind of located in the margins rather than at the center. It’s always those marginal people or those people who have been pushed to the margins that intrigue me. I feel closer to them in many ways.

That was the case with this book. I mean, I feel very close to Gail. I don’t have to be an American to feel close to Gail. Our national identities are so determined there is no way out, you know, we can’t move. Sometimes you can feel very close to a male character. You don’t have to be male. If you have a plural personality—and I believe we all have plural personalities—you know, some people treat their plurality badly, some people glorify it. That’s the only difference. Depending on how you treat your own plurality you can get in touch with different characters.

A:

How do you feel that your teaching feeds into your writing?

E:

Honestly, until this year, it has been extremely difficult for me, especially when I was in Turkey. I used to teach at the private university. I always enjoyed intellectual activity. To be more precise, not every writer is a public intellectual. And I find that tradition very important, that tradition of being a public intellectual, being connected to not only what you are doing but being curious about what’s going on outside this window. If there is a pain outside, to feel that pain. If that pain is Rwanda, feel that pain. Many times novelists can be very selfish. The novel especially is a very, very dangerous genre because you create characters and you might end up thinking that you can, you know, create everything because you’re the master, you think, right? You can end up being very much self-centered. So it just facinates me to see the dilemma between the Sufi tradition, which advises to be nothing and no one, and this other tradition that I am very much attached to but which is also very self-absorbed and self-centered. So I have those two sides in me.

But the difficulty is when I was in Istanbul, there is this expectation: if you are a novelist you are expected to go to your house, sit down, and write. Just do your thing. If you are an academic, just chose your field, become an expert, and do your thing. Especially my field—political science, international relations—you have to specialize. Chose a region. Chose the Balkans and become an expert in the Balkans. You are not expected to have any interest in other departments, let alone art. So it’s a very much rigidly drawn map and I felt very suffocated by that because I have multiple interests. For me it’s like a cycle. This conversation that we have today is going to perhaps have an affect on me tomorrow, right? Maybe I’m going to remember something and put it in the book. So everything is very much interconnected in the way I percieve.

That said, the relationship between knowledge and intuition is fascinating for me. I think that very much influences the quality of fiction. But when I say knowledge you don’t have to put knowledge in blocks into a book, but what is left behind. When you read a book it’s, you know, the gist of the book, what is left behind. It somehow penetrates, in the way you talk, your mimics, gestures, it’s always there. For me it was more interrelated, more interconnected than the structures in Turkey allowed. That said, here it’s much easier. I am a professor now in Near Eastern Studies. So I teach courses like Gender Issues in the Middle East. I teach another course on literature, Exile and Imagination. So we look at authors from all over the world, all around the world who have lived in exile because of different reasons. I’ve always been interested in cultural history, religious history, especially political philosophy. It doesn’t match, you know. There is no one-to-one correspondence like, the langauge of political philosophy is the language of precision. It’s more like, it doesn’t like ambivalence that much. Or the language of academia, I should say. But I guess I have both in me. When writing becomes very much self-centered, very much self-absorbed, I can kind of escape to this other, sit there and breathe, and then come back. I believe honestly we need to take a step outside as often as we can, look at ourselves, listen to our language from a different angle, from a different place, and then come back. Otherwise there is this danger of repeating yourself. A loop in that sense is dangerous.

A:

You talk about how you feel close to your characters when you’re writing a novel. And I was struck by how in this novel certain things about the characters are left unexplained. Like for instance, the fact that Gail has this direction towards death. And the fact that Omer has this inexplicable rage.

E:

Honestly, that was one of the most difficult things to convey because there is a certain expectation, especially in literary circles, and not only literary circles but the culture in which we grow up, that everything has to have a reason. There has to be a reason. You have to find that reason. It’s also the tradition of—or the society of, as Foucault would say I guess,—therapy. The whole idea that you have therapy, you find the reason why you are like that, and once you have found the reason you will kind of shed tears, cry over it, and then we’ll be okay. Yes, sometimes it is like that. But sometimes not. Sometimes some things are just question marks. You should be ready to face that, too. And I realize, I mean, I guess many people would be more comfortable if I had attributed a very concrete, and sad reason for, let’s say, Gail’s sadness, like a childhood abuse or something. That would make sense: okay this happened to her, that’s why. Sometimes stories are like that, but sometimes they’re not like that. And I know that, I’ve seen it in myself, in other people. Sometimes things don’t have very concrete reasons behind them and I think the artist should be open to that idea. So it was a deliberate choice on my part not to give a reason.

A:

It’s also interesting that they, Gail and Omer, both have this sadness and they are eventually drawn together.

E:

Yes, you’re right. That’s one of the things they have in common. But I mean, I observe that so often in life. Sometimes we do things, we feel angry without really knowing why we feel angry. There is this interesting saying which I like very much: we don’t make decisions, decisions make us. And we like to think that we make decisions, we are this englightenned people; that as rational human beings we kind of determine our fate. First we make a choice, then we put it into practice. Not always. I mean, sometimes you do things without really knowing why you are doing it. Then you stop, and with hindsight, you know, retrospectively, you look behind and say, okay I did that probably because of this reason. So you attribute a rational explanation to your own behavior, you rationalize, and then internalize that explanation, and that explanation becomes the very reason. It’s very complicated because it wasn’t the reason at the time. So that’s something I’ve observed.

I mean, why I came to this country? Honestly, I don’t know. But because this question has been asked of me by many people, and I ask it of myself, I have to find reasons, and I can’t find very rational reasons, you know? Well, the easiest I can say is I came on this fellowship and then I enjoyed teaching here, okay, which is true, it’s not a lie. But was this the real reason? Maybe it was an animal instinct, you know? We don’t talk positively about this animal side in us, but there is an animal side. And sometimes it just wants to come out; you just want to do it. It’s not a very noble, sophisticated, rational thing. So for instance, I guess, as an author, there was so much attention. In Istanbul I was somebody. Then I came to this country and I was nobody. I had nothing translated into English yet at the time and my book wasn’t published in English either. If you’re a painter, you can bring your paintings with you. If you’re a documentary-maker, you bring your documentaries along. But when you’re an author and you leave your mother tongue behind, you become nobody. It was facinating for me and, at the same time, challenging to become nobody so quickly.

A:

It’s almost like Omer asks himself the same questions. Why did I come here for a PhD?

E:

Yeah, and then you ask yourself, why am I doing this to myself? Because in many ways life would be more comfortable if I had stayed. So what is this thing that you can’t control, what is this animal instinct that tells you to go, go, go? I mean, if you have a better job, it’s understandable, right? If you have a better circumstances, understandable, but sometimes you do things without having any guarantee, and that was my case. I mean, I left my job. As an author you have your readership. Things like that. And I am very much attached to Istanbul. Istanbul is a fascinating force for me. It feeds me. So it’s not something that I can easily leave behind. But then why do you do it? I guess, honestly, I believe part of the answer is maybe you will never know. It will be ambivalent.

http://otium.uchicago.edu/articles/shafak_q+a.html