Father novelists

Sunday, March 13, 2005

Opinion by Elif ŞAFAK

  The entire family of fruits is simply fascinating. There are some fruits that right away tell you what is inside them, buried deep underneath. Take grapes, for instance; you look at it and you know instantaneously that the outside and the inside is more or less the same. There are no big surprises when you are eating grapes. But then there are some other fruits that look one thing on the outside, and a completely different thing inside. Take watermelons, for instance. There is no way of telling what is inside a watermelon by just glancing at the outside. Turkish patriarchy resembles the second model. On the surface this society is so modern and women have been “given” the legal, social, and economic rights for emancipation, starting with the right to elect and be elected. Comparatively speaking this society s gender relations have been like no other country in the Muslim Middle East. The watermelon looks green and firm on the outside. But take a step forward. Cut the watermelon in half and take a look inside. Surprise! It is not green but red; it is not firm but mushy. Inside you will find a patriarchal society which profoundly, systematically adores its paternal figures. I cannot help but wonder: Is this society, despite its history and age, still that symbolic orphan that the Ottoman male elite had wanted to turn it into, a boy in need of a father? I don t know if the reason why I am asking this question is because I, unlike the overwhelming majority of my peers during my childhood in Ankara, have been raised by a proud, progressive single mother. But here is the question: Where does Turkish society s systematic need for symbolic fathers come from? Father politicians, father TV anchormen, and father coaches… Why do we first create and then deify them? More than all other fathers in all other spheres, it is the tradition of and the need for Father Novelists that interests and bugs me most.Novels can present an excellent venue to read and study not only fiction but also the gist of the society in which they were written. As Serif Mardin argued, evaluating the venture of Turkish modernization by concentrating on its novels and novellas can provide us with a deeper insight into the issues until now pushed to the margins of mainstream academia. Broadly speaking literature, all around the world, among all forms of art, has retained a privileged position in projects of culture-building. Literature promoted the collective internalization of norms, conventions, and symbols. Nevertheless, the significance of literature s constitutive role becomes all the more visible in countries like Turkey, in those cases of belated modernity where rather than the civil society it was the state -- THE STATE -- that played the main role in the process of social transformation. Herein literature was not one of the many constitutive forces, but the constitutive force of the nation-building process. Likewise, as Jale Parla indicates, Turkish modernization made its epistemological break through literature in general and novels in particular, rather than through any other cultural, intellectual or artistic channel of expression. Early Turkish novelists were almost all male, coming from wealthy or influential families, and either educated in the West or with Western teachers, and deeply affiliated with Western culture, which does not mean that they did not want to retain their cultural difference as they interpreted it. Moreover, they were almost all employed in a branch of the state apparatus. They were in other words state employees. And that should give us an idea about their limits. More significantly perhaps, early Turkish novelists wrote fiction with a mission in mind: a task to guide their readers in an era of great upheavals. A mission to educate the masses and to show them right from wrong. Rarely did they place a character in a novel haphazardly or because the story demanded so. Instead, every single character in these novels was deliberately located so as to represent something larger. Every character is a representative of an identity or community or ideology. That is why there have been more typologies than personalities in a large number of Turkish novels. Thus the characters these novelists created, the stories they conveyed and the language they used were all deliberately chosen as parts of a broader project of modernization. The genre of the novel has been seen as a primarily cerebral activity, some sort of a cultural engineering in which the novelist was assumed to be above: above its plot, above its characters, above the book and finally above its readers. Ever since then this trend keeps coming with us. We like to see novelists as primarily father novelists. What happens if you are a female novelist? Now that is a problem. Fortunately there is a solution, actually there are two solutions. Two magic potions you can resort to depending on what suits you best.You can age as quickly as you can and jump from the category of “young” to the category of “old woman” for the latter, unlike the former are respected. (It is no coincidence that women in the Middle East age more quickly than women in the West.)Or you can stay at the age you are but de-feminize yourself. That too is a good way to earn society s respect. Don t look feminine, don t act feminine. De-sexualize de-feminize yourself as much as possible so that when the readers look at you they don t see a woman anymore but something closer to a father intellectual. That too is a strategy widely practiced among intellectual Turkish women. I propose another method: let s not age before our age, let s not de-feminize our bodies or souls. Instead let s confront this deeply-rooted need in our culture for paternal figures. Let s crack this watermelon…