Sunday, October 22, 2006

Opinion by Elif ŞAFAK
The world is your home and you consider yourself a world citizen, in addition to being from whatever nationality and culture. I would like to be and remain a Turkish author and a world citizen all at the same time!

Elif ŞAFAK

Can Turkish writers afford to be apolitical? Shall they remain primarily Turkish and local, or should and could they strive to be universal? Are they bound to write from home and about home and to home all the time? Or is it possible to transcend one s national and religious and social and cultural boundaries via fiction and imagination even to the extent of defying the notion of "homeland"? Can you have a Turkish and Western and Eastern audience in mind, all at the same time? To put it more bluntly, are we Turkish writers "writers" primarily or "Turkish" primarily?

In one of his essays Salman Rushdie asserts that "literature has little or nothing to do with a writer s home address". Disputing this assertion Chinua Achebe claims that he sees his role and the role of all writers for that matter, in terms of writing from home and about home. He clearly has a more solid notion of home. Achebe then adds that writers should thus take part in a "universal conversation" and this will eventually lead to a truly universal civilization. He believes that what the world sorely needs right now is a "Balance of Stories". The stories and silence of some countries and cultures remain pushed to the margins and remain there in the periphery while the stories of some other cultures behold the center of world literature. This unbalanced framework further deepens our ignorance toward many cultures. Yet one question that arises from Achebe s fair assertion is whether writers from the periphery can afford not to write about home all the time, not to fit  into a pregiven identity politics?

And this brings me back to my initial question: can we Turkish writers be both attached to our soil and culture, and yet at the same time, fully detached from national identities in our capacity as world citizens, world writers? How will our nation react to us if and when we manage this dual role? How will those in the Western world who revere a non-Western writer only and only when he or she is different and "foreign", if not exotic, react to that?

"Did you ever say that you were not feeling home in Turkey?" asked a conservative, nationalist journalist to me on TV this past month, in front of millions. His tone was clearly accusatory.  The very fact that this question was raised as a critical remark is yet another sign of Turkey s deep mistrust of its "white Turk writers", as some call us, its "Western oriented writers who criticize the system from within". We are always seen as potential runaways, if not potential traitors. Criticizing a country is not tantamount to hating that country or having no love and affection for it! But unfortunately, this fundamental rule needs to be reminded over and over again.

I told my nationalist critic that I felt a sense of alienation everywhere and anywhere, and this feeling did not disappear wherever I went all throughout my half-nomadic life. I would have liked to add that the positive side of such a profound feeling of estrangement is that when and if you are not fully home anywhere, you can somehow be at home everywhere. The world is your home and you consider yourself a world citizen, in addition to being from whatever nationality and culture. I would like to be and remain a Turkish author and a world citizen all at the same time!

But I suspect this answer did not make my nationalist critic happy.