Elif Shafak’s most recent novel, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World is built around the dying thoughts of Leila, a sex worker, in the time after her heart has stopped beating but her sensory memory remains. Each chapter begins with a taste – sugar, lemon, cardamom coffee, watermelon, spiced goat stew – that takes Leila back to a formative moment in her life, and begins to explain the brutal way in which it is ending. Taken together these memories conjure a city, Istanbul, in all of its contrasting flavours.
The novel – included on the shortlist for this year’s Booker prize – displays all of its author’s lyrical gifts for storytelling, but you guess that the memory device was also born out of an urgent personal necessity: for the past three years Shafak has been unable to return to the country in which she grew up for fear of arrest and prosecution.
She feels the absence keenly. We meet for lunch in Covent Garden, outdoors at the Petersham Nurseries’ West End home La Goccia, and she confesses as she sits down that she is drawn to spaces like this, which remind her of her other home city. “I seek out courtyards,” she says. “Preferably some water, some greenery, sun. I love eating in courtyards, and there are not that many here.”
Shafak, 47, is an open and spirited presence. Though she writes with apparently equal fluency in English and Turkish she says she still feels “her mind runs slightly ahead of her tongue” in her second language, which makes her a very careful listener. She moved to London 10 years ago with her husband and two children after another novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, led to a trial for “insulting Turkishness” (she was eventually acquitted). Her latest novel has been seized along with two earlier books and is being examined by the Turkish authorities for “crimes of obscenity”.
“Because I write about sexual harassment, violence against women, the police have taken my books to the prosecutor’s office,” she says. “They take one sentence, something a character has said, and attribute that to the writer. When you are a woman, the attacks are much more severe. And there is a call from these bots and trolls online to put you in prison. From that the Ministry of Justice claims there is a public demand to investigate …”
Do the attempts to silence her – she was also recently subjected to months of online hate from conservative Islamic groups for having come out as bisexual – have an effect on her?
“I learned to pay attention to the readers and not to the madness,” she says. “Because to be a writer in Turkey is a bit like being kissed on one cheek and slapped on the other.”
If things are bad for novelists, she says, they are worse for journalists. Her husband, Eyüp Can, an ex-newspaper editor, is also on President Erdoğan’s wanted list. “There is a thin line between fact and fiction for us,” she says, “and if you are a novelist from my country, or Nigeria, Brazil, Hungary – the list is getting longer – you don’t have the luxury of saying: ‘I am not going to write about what is happening.’”
She tries to fight those political battles with weapons of nuance and imagination and language. The antidote to authoritarian nationalist politics and religious intolerance, she insists, is not more tribal politics – it is art and writing and music and food, the activities that bring people together, the creativity that mixes cultures. (In that spirit, in the sunshine, in the courtyard, we have ordered a number of plates to share, lemon sole, pork and summer beans, hake and anchovies, fritters made of courgette flowers, a dish that brings back for her more memories of Istanbul.)
Shafak doesn’t cook well, she insists, but she loves food, eating it, reading and writing about it. “People say in my novels there is too much food …” she says, but it is there for a reason – as the best argument against narrow nationalism that we all enjoy every day.
Shafak has given two Ted talks – each watched several million times online – which, like her books, make a powerful argument for plurality, multiplicity, a refusal to be closely defined. The talks were rooted in her own experience of shifting identity. She was born in France in Strasbourg, where her father was studying for a PhD in philosophy. “The first house that I remember,” she says, “was full of leftist students, immigrants reading Althusser, Jean Paul Sartre, smoking Gauloises.”
But then when her parents’ marriage ended her mother brought her back home to a very conservative family in Ankara. “My mother had dropped out of university thinking love would be enough,” she says. “And suddenly she was a divorcee and a single mother.” Usually at that time in Turkey women in that situation would be married off to someone older. It was Shafak’s grandmother who intervened to insist her mother finish her studies; eventually she became a diplomat, which led to more travels.
From her grandmother, Shafak also learned many of the folk tales and oral history that she has woven into her fiction. “Many of those stories were a way of talking about women’s sexuality, celebrating pleasure, delight, wine. And of course in a conservative environment celebrating pleasure is a radical act.”
Having watched at close quarters the ways in which attacks on intellectual freedoms have gone hand in hand with attacks on women and LGBT people in Turkey, she fears those sentiments are spreading, even here. “When I first came to this country I thought British people were very calm when it came to politics. I admired that. I no longer think that is true,” she says.
“These men” – Erdogan and Trump, obviously, but perhaps even the man the Istanbul papers call “Boris the Turk” for his Ottoman heritage – “see politics as a zero sum game,” she says. “The more ruthless you are with minorities, people think that’s strength. But of course it is a sign of weakness.”
She believes that tendency must be understood before it can be overcome. Shafak lived for several years in the US, where she was a professor, first in Boston and later in Arizona. “I used to listen to lots of rightwing radio stations,” she says. “And trying to understand that voice became a habit over the years.” Her YouTube algorithm still believes she is a young American male white supremacist. “I remember Rush Limbaugh saying all the time back then there are ‘four pillars of deceit’ controlled by the liberals: academia, media, government, science. He used to say we have to create our alternatives to them, and this is what you see these men now doing.”
Shafak is often, rightly, described as courageous for her writing – is that how it feels to her?
“No, I am a very anxious person,” she says, “full of panic. But when I am writing a novel I feel more free.” She smiles. “I have met lots of women who have grown up in Turkey who cannot bring themselves to swear in Turkish. But in English they use the F-word all the time. Writing is like that for me.”
I wonder how frustrated she gets, as someone whose life has embraced ambiguity and possibility to hear herself marginalised as a “Turkish writer”, an exotic interloper into the western canon.
“Sometimes when I look at the ways novels are being judged, we are very used to measuring them against the European classics,” she says, “but there are other ways of storytelling, from China, the Middle East. There is not one way of writing a novel. It is a bit like food, there are other cuisines, other traditions, no less rich and no less real.”
By this time we have been eating for a couple of hours. I note the contrast between the delights of the dishes we have shared and the depressing implications of the conversation, not least in the months ahead.
She laughs. “The grimmer things are, the more demoralised you are feeling, the more important it is to make sure you at least sit and have a lovely lunch.”
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World (Viking, £14.99) is out now. To order a copy for £13.19 go to guardianbookshop.com. . Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
