Global angst

Sunday, August 6, 2006

Opinion by Elif ŞAFAK

Elif ŞAFAK"Can you go out? Can you walk on the streets without fear of assassination or an assault from Turkish nationalists?" asked the Belgian journalist at the end of the line as he was conducting a phone interview with me over the weekend. "Are you safe in Turkey?"

  Am I safe in Turkey…? I wanted to ask him back: Tell me please, are you safe in Belgium? And once at it, I wanted to keep asking: Are we safe on this planet…?Can each and every one of us, wherever we might have put down our roots, effortlessly and assertively answer that question affirmatively and claim that yes indeed, we are safe and sound, and so are our children? I don t think so. In the post 9/11 world, in a world where the number of those who believe in a "clash of civilizations" increases day by day, no one is safe anymore. This holds equally true for someone living in a nice, quite suburb in the United States as someone living in Israel or Lebanon today. This is not to deny the fact that some parts of the world are far more dangerous and less peaceful than some others but when it comes to personal safety, who can guarantee to be safe in this or that particular place at this or that particular moment? This is what the world we are living in has granted us: abiding ambiguity and angst.And "abiding ambiguity and angst" happens to be precisely what the ultra-nationalists in Turkey thrive upon. It is this motley cluster of people that fervently opposes Turkey s EU membership and churns out a set of knee-jerk reactions against any progressive development towards an open society. These were the ones who were most perceptibly alarmed about a radical change in the conventional vested interests within the Turkish nation-state, and in their fear of losing leverage, managed to produce more politics of angst and fear. The ultranationalists oppose Turkey s EU membership and manufacture fear. They keep filing complaints against anyone whose words they might find "offensive." They wait outside courtrooms chanting provocative slogans and, sometimes, using violence. They choose their targets deliberately, knowing whom to attack when. To this day they have assaulted more than 50 people -- writers, journalists, human rights activists, editors and publishers. In almost all cases the targets of the ultranationalists were Turkish citizens, although European Parliament member Joost Lagendijk too has been prosecuted due to their efforts.In this turbulent framework there is nothing "new" about my trial. It is yet another case in a long series of Article 301 trials. Yet at the same time, my trial happens to be a bit unusual, if not absurd. This time, it is a novel that is being charged with insulting Turkishness. The fictional Armenian characters in my latest novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, are blamed for defaming and belittling Turkishness. " As much as I believe in their vivacity, my Armenian fictional characters cannot go to court to be tried under Article 301. Instead of them, my Turkish publisher, and I, will be there when the time comes. It will be a long legal battle from then on, and certainly a hassle and cause of stress. But, we Turkish writers are not pitiful or forlorn victims unable to go out into the street for fear of nationalist assault. After all, we do know, perhaps not intellectually but intuitively, that a similar clash of opinions between the progressive-minded and the close-minded xenophobes is under way almost everywhere and the world is not a safe planet anymore.

*The full version of this article by Elif Şafak was published in Open Democracy.