Now streaming: A Wknd interview with Turkish-British author Elif Shafak
A drop of water. A fig tree. A dying brain: The Booker-shortlisted writer enjoys playing with narrative devices. Her new book is There Are Rivers in the Sky.
Elif Shafak doesn’t like it when writers preach to their readers. The job should entail asking questions, she says.
The Turkish-British author’s new book certainly poses some urgent ones.
There Are Rivers in the Sky follows four characters: An ancient Assyrian king; a baby born by the Thames in Victorian England; a Turkish girl growing up along the Tigris, amid the rise of ISIS, in 2014; and a London divorcee living in a houseboat on the Thames, in 2018.
What connects them is a drop of water. It only takes a drop to see beyond our differences as human beings, she says.
“The Thames, Euphrates, Tigris and Mississippi are treated as different cultures, but actually it’s the same water. It’s the same drops that have been circulating in our rivers and in our bodies. So the tears that we shed might be the same drops that once fell on the head of King Ashurbanipal thousands of years ago.”
The same drop of water — picked partly for its symbolism amid the climate emergency — can highlight human arrogance too; “our audacity, as a race, to become consumers of nature,” as she puts it.
If the drop is the device this time, each of her 12 previous novels has used an unusual one.
Her 2019 book, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, offered musings on death and life, from the mind of a Turkish prostitute, as her brain wound down in the moments after she was killed and thrown in a dumpster. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
The Forty Rules of Love (2009) explored love, spirituality and belonging through two parallel stories set across seven centuries. One of these followed the Persian poet Rumi and his companion Shams Tabrizi.
The Island of Missing Trees (2021), a tale about love in a time of civil war, is set in Cyprus and London, and told in the form of the recollections of a fig tree.
Shafak says she loves to “commute” between cultures, using a range of storytelling techniques: magic realism, Turkish folklore, Persian verse, Cypriot history.
While she sees the value of the linear Western tenets of novel-writing, she also sees how the West often snubs other formats, she adds, and so she embraces the circular and cyclical.
“I feel an emotional connection to people who have been pushed to the margins, silenced, othered. There is a part of me that always wants to explore the erased memories and the silences in mainstream narratives,” she says. “I have unusual narrators, but I also have seemingly ordinary characters who are capable of the extraordinary. Just like life itself. So this is not really a literary device or technique that I employ. It is how stories come to me.”
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Shafak is no stranger to silences and the feeling of being othered.
As much as she loves words and the stories they build, she has learnt to thrive in silences. “The gaps in which I mine my stories often relate to the things we can’t easily talk about,” she says.
She was raised by her mother, diplomat Safak Atayman, now in her 70s; and her grandmother. She shared a strained relationship with her estranged father, psychologist Nuri Bilgin.
When she found that he had been a good father to his two sons with his second wife, “it made me feel like the other child… the forgotten child,” she says. “Even though near the end of his life, until he passed away six years ago, we made efforts to spend more time with each other.”
When Shafak was 10, her mother moved with her to Spain, and she was the only Turkish child in her school. She was “extremely introverted”, and a victim of bullying.
Now, her work seeks to build bridges — between East and West; known and unknown; reality and make-believe.
“One of the questions the new book raises, in my opinion, relates to collective memory. Who owns the past?” says Shafak, 52.
Asking this question, in our time, instantly challenges the colonial narrative. In the book, she questions the institutionalised hijacking of establishments such as the British Museum. “But I also appreciate the love and dedication of individual archaeologists,” she says.
One of the central characters in her book is an archaeologist.
The story of the Assyrian king is based on Ashurbanipal, who built one of the earliest known libraries in the ancient world, in Mesopotamia, in the 7th century BCE.
He too lined its shelves with found objects from another time. He fell in love with one of these, the Epic of Gilgamesh, a chronicle of kings written in Mesopotamia between 2100 and 1200 BCE.
He is believed to have died while on a quest for missing pages of the epic.
“I understand that kind of passion,” Shafak says.
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Why storytelling at all?
The limitations of reality can be overcome through literature, Shafak says.
“We contain multitudes, as the poet Walt Whitman said. I think that one reason we don’t really celebrate those multitudes is the bitter politics in the world. Literature has the ability to rehumanise those who have been dehumanised, allowing us to connect with someone who seems very different from us at first glance, and that is really important to me.”
But there’s more to it too. In her state of perennial homelessness, storytelling offers permanent refuge.
“Questions of belonging, home and exile are very important to me. They cannot be solved in one day, with one decision. There is a melancholy to exile,” she says. “I think for me home is and always was storyland… and stories, a sort of portable homeland.”
With her book now out, released last week, her foot is off the pedal for the moment.
In these lulls between works, “I read. I listen. I observe. I absorb. I do book events, literary festivals. I become a more ‘social’ human being,” Shafak says. “But then the pendulum swings back and I go back to my solitude, and that is where I write.”
