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- [00:00]
A
So, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to this closing night of this year's LSE Literary Festival. We have had a really splendid week of events. Thank you for coming. And I think we've got a really splendid event to bring the festival to a close. My name is George Gaskell. I'm an academic here at the lse and I have the great pleasure of chairing the Literary Festival committee. So for this final event, we are absolutely delighted to welcome back Elif Shafak, a regular participant in our Literary Festival, who's going to be in conversation with the writer Neel Mukherjee and LSE alumna Bidisha, who studied in the Economic History Department. So I'm just going to briefly introduce Bhadisha and then she will introduce the guests to you. So Bidisha is a journalist, a critic, an author, and a broadcaster on radio and television. She specializes in. In human rights, in the arts, in international relations, international affairs and various other interests. I was going to try and characterize a woman's art, but I don't know what one would call that. Popular culture, perhaps. She's a regular critic on Front Row and Saturday Review. She writes in arts magazines and she's published a number of books. Her fifth book, Asylum and Hidden Voices in London, is just out, and she's currently working on a new fiction and making a documentary on complaining for Radio 4. Now, before I hand over to Bidisha, can I remind everyone if they could kindly put their mobile phones and other electronic apparatus onto silent. We have a hashtag for this event, which is LSE LitFest. And after this session, I hope you will stay around and not only procure some of the books which are on offer, which you'll get signed, but also join us for. For a glass of wine or other soft drinks. We have a reception right outside to bring the event to a close, and that will be spirited along by a jazz band which is led by one of my colleagues, Professor Deborah James, in the Anthropology Department. And it's a band called the Functionalists. There's no structure to the music is what. So, without further ado, thank you very much.
- [03:12]
B
Thank you very much for that very, very warm and generous introduction. I should point out here that I got exactly the pass mark on my economic History master's paper. Exactly the pass mark. Let me welcome you to this closing event of the LSE Literary Festival, where we're going to be discussing changing worlds, the foundation of society and also the foundations of literature, which unites time, place and character, which are indivisible from their context of Politics, history and culture and all that. In a world that is changing and moving faster than ever before, we have two of the most perfect novelists to tackle these huge topics. We will talk amongst ourselves for about 45 minutes, but but the last half hour will be reserved for your questions and comments. There'll be roving mics, so you don't need to speak up to be heard. We would say though, please keep your questions and comments as brief as possible. Without further ado, let me go on and introduce our two speakers. On my right we have Neil Mukherjee, whose second novel, the Lives of Others, has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2014 and also the Costa Novel Award. His first novel, Past Continuous, which was published in England as A Life Apart, was joint winner of the Vodafone Crossword Award, India's premier literary award for writing in English for best novel of 2008. In addition, he's also an extremely prolific critic of literature himself. His reviews are wide ranging, perceptive and always generous in a list that he gave of the top 10 novels, although there are many others, as he said about revolutionaries, he wrote, history, as they say, is written by victors. But history also has many cunning corridors. How much time do we need to elapse before all those tricky side passages are revealed? And I take that as a provocation in the hope that we're going to reveal some of those in our discussion tonight. On my far right we have Elev Shafak, Turkey's most read writer and an award winning novelist. She writes in both English and Turkish and has published 13 books, all of them very well loved globally, nine of which are novels, including the Bust of Istanbul, the 40 rules of love and Honor. Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages and her latest novel, the Architect's Apprentice was published in autumn 2014. She's also again a very prolific journalist and commentator, writing extensive, extensively and worldwide about human rights issues in Turkey. She has written I like to think of my writing as a compass. One leg of this compass is solidly based in Istanbul and the culture I grew up with. The other leg of the compass draws a wide circle and travels the whole world. So, as you see, we have the perfect writers for tonight's discussion. Let's go straight into it, Neil, if I can begin with you, but the question is for both of you, how do we tackle the issue of authenticity? You're brought here almost in a sense of elevated spokespersonship and we are trusting you with what you tell us about the changing worlds that you write about as if you bear the burden of representation of the cultures that you're describing.
- [06:42]
C
Do you want to go first? No, no. I have a problem with novelists being asked to parse world events. I don't know why. I mean, we have no special knowledge about anything apart from imaginary things. We're good at lying because that's what fiction does. Somebody once said that fiction is a way of getting to the truth through the road of lies. So we are not the best person to talk about the rise of UKIP or 911 or famine or whatever. We just make up stories. So authenticity can be a real double edged sword, I feel in the sense that because I do not live in the country now that I write about India, I came to this country when I was 22 years old, exactly half a lifetime ago, actually. And this place is my home now in a way which makes me fall between two stools. I'm seen. If I write about England, people may say, what do you know about this country? You came here when you were fully formed. But when I write about India, I'm always beaten up there too. Because Indians are very good with beating up their own writers.
- [07:58]
D
As good as toads.
- [07:59]
C
Yeah, we can have a competition. They hate us.
- [08:04]
B
Why do you think that is? Is it because you have success, which is global?
- [08:09]
C
I don't think I have success, which is global. But no, I think whenever in India I'm asked that question, who do you write for? I think the question they're really trying to ask me is, why do you live in London? So, you know, one tends to, and it's this standard issue of authenticity and territorialism that's going on. How dare you write about us? You don't live in this country. Well, I don't write about India now because I don't live in the country. And I also resist writing about writing journalistic pieces about India now because I don't live in the country. I would have to go there and live for a few years to reacquaint myself with the things that are going on in order to be able to write about it. But what I write about, I hope I know what I write about. So that question about authenticity is actually a question really about territorialism, at least.
- [09:05]
D
What do you think? You know, you said sometimes you feel as if you're falling between two stools. You know, that in between them, I think is an ideal position for a writer. In fact, maybe for an artist, for a creative minded person. It resonates with me, you know, everything you said, big similarities. Turkey, India. But I also believe that being the insider outsider, having some kind of distance enables us perhaps to think differently, to see things differently, and then to express those things differently. Maybe writing in English also gives me that kind of distance. I always notice that distance sometimes is necessary. You know, we tend to think that people who are inside a country, inside a reality, will be the best ones to see it, but not necessarily. It's a good thing to step outside, take a step out, and then come back, you know, with a fresh gaze. So we need to be commuters spiritually, intellectually, as writers. But the question of representation is a big pressure, I think, and it comes from all sides. There is an expectation in the Western world, broadly, of course, it's a very big generalization. But there is an expectation in the literary world, let me put it that way, that whenever something happens in Turkey, and always something happens in Turkey, you get a phone call, you're expecting to comment, which actually I'm fine with. Because I don't think, as writers coming from India, Turkey, Pakistan, Nigeria, I don't think we have the luxury of saying, I'm not interested in politics. I can't say that everything I write about has a political repercussion. But that said, politics is not my main guide. So there's a nuance there. And I'm interested in keeping that nuance, because for me, my main guide is imagination. It's the art of storytelling. I find it very difficult to talk about that nuance, which to me is very vital.
- [10:58]
B
Can I take something that you said earlier, which is recasting the notion of authenticity? What we could say, perhaps, is there is an emotional authenticity to things which isn't necessarily the same as being 100% correct in a representation of a historical event.
- [11:14]
C
Also a kind of linguistic authenticity as well. I mean, you know, I. As I said, I was born in India, I grew up in India. I speak one and a half Indian languages. One of them is my mother tongue. I can read, write, communicate in it. One day I will write in Bengali, I hope so. That gives me a certain kind of authenticity, I think. But you know what you were saying about the insider, outsider. It's a term I liked very much to be always not quite belonging. I think outsiderness is a very good quality to have you see the shape of things better when you're standing outside. Also, you know, I was thinking, there's this wonderful line in Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia where he says, it is the moral responsibility of the writer not to feel at home at home. And I think this is a very important thing that's been my guiding principle, actually, all the time, that the moment you settle into something, perhaps some kind of stasis, some kind of skin settles over a turmoil or ferment, and I think it's the turmoil that ferment, the dynamics that keeps us going. I think once things settle down into comfortable, I think a lot of writing which has taken a wrong turning in Britain, for example, is things have settled, you know, a sort of stability of the late capitalist corporate state. And people have most things that they think they want. There is no. There's no tussling with anything.
- [12:49]
D
I mean, commuting between Istanbul and London. I so deeply feel what you're talking about, that difference between cosmos and chaos. But then Turkey, for instance, is the other extreme. You know, it's a liquid country. Nothing is settled, constantly changing, which can be very exciting for an artist. I mean, Istanbul can be a marvelous place for a photographer, for people who think visually, who are interested in music, sights, sounds. You know, it's just teeming with creativity. However, it can also be very frustrating, very tiring. It's a schizophrenic position because we experience both sides all the time. For instance, in Turkey, I know as a writer that words matter, that stories matter. And when you publish a book, the same copy is being read by five people, six people. It's not an individual item. People share it in the family. They send it to their aunt, the aunt sends it to her son who is doing his military service. That boy reads it on his loneliest hours. So all of these things are very moving, very humbling to me. But of course, then the pressure is everything is under the shadow of politics. Then you have to shout that art needs autonomy, art needs freedom. You're trying to carve out a space for yourself, which is very hard. One of our greatest poets, Nazim Hikmet, in one of his letters, he was in prison for a long time. He was in exile for a very long time. He wrote a letter to his wife from exile, and there's a line that stuck with me. He says, my country, I missed you so much. I love you so much, and I'm so angry at you. That mixed feeling, you know, anger. I know why he's angry. I know why he's frustrated, and at the same time, he can't help loving it. We have those mixed feelings all the time as writers and poets from Turkey.
- [14:44]
B
And if I'm going to put this to Neel in just a moment, because you said something very Very proud, promising, which was that you planned to write in an Indian language at some point. I'm going to ask you to hold that thought because in fact, LFU made the shift over from writing in Turkish to writing in English. And even if you're multilingual, for a novelist whose words are her material, wasn't that terrifying or was it actually like opening a door into a new way of working?
- [15:10]
D
You know, it can be terrifying. It can be quite frightening, especially for someone like me, who hasn't grown up bilingual. You know, I started living learning English at the age 10. So to me there will always be, for me, there will always be a gap. My children are making fun of my English. You know, they say, oh, you mean that, you know, because I mispronounce it. So I can see that gap between my tongue and my brain, and that will always be there. That is intimidating. However, it's also very stimulating. Sometimes I think, like, I look at some of my books like the Bastard of Istanbul. Had I written that book in Turkish, maybe it been would have have been a different book, because writing in English somehow gives me a kind of freedom that maybe I don't feel when I'm writing in Turkish. But that said, I also love writing Turkish. So for me it's not an either or choice. I feel attached to each language in a very different way. And I believe it's possible to write in more than one language. Just like we're dreaming in more than one language. You know, why not? The brain always mixes these things, so I really don't want to see them as mutually exclusive things. But there was a lot of reaction in Turkey at the beginning. I was accused of betraying my nation, you know, betraying my culture. How can a writer not write in her mother tongue? I think all of these are the discussions that are relevant to 19th century, to the century of the nation state. This is a different century. The nation state is still very important. It will be important. But then there are other dynamics. There are millions of people like me who have, you know, who have. Who need to learn another language and who can dream in another language. So people like us, we're constantly commuting between languages anyhow.
- [16:50]
C
And being bilingual means you have actually two selves. I think lots of theorists will tell, and anthropologists would tell you, linguistician will tell you that you become a slightly different person when you speak or write in another language or when you think in another language. I mean, you know, some philosophers would even say that, you know, language builds the notion of selfhood.
- [17:17]
B
But why do you feel this urge now to switch over?
- [17:22]
C
Slightly different from Elif's background is that English is an Indian language. It's one of the official. It's One of the 23, if I'm not wrong, 23 official Indian languages. And I grew up bilingual. So the question. And of course, India has a long tradition going back centuries of writing in English. There's a very hallowed. Well, not going back centuries, but, yeah, going back two centuries of writing in English. So it's not difficult for me to find place in that. I mean, it's already there for me. I'm in a room. If I choose to enter it, I can, but. So I chose to exercise. I don't know if I had an option about. I mean, I think I just walked into it nationally writing in English. But now I'm thinking that I should write. I want to write at least one book in Bengali and then I want to translate it into English myself.
- [18:21]
B
But that's a bit like playing chess with yourself.
- [18:24]
C
No, I mean, you know, once again, there are hallowed examples I could give. So Samuel Beckett, for example, wrote in French because he wanted to feel the straitjacket of writing in another language. I mean, you know, he took writing back to zero, so he wanted to feel the limitation of writing in a foreign, foreign language. So. And I feel writing in Bengali will be very difficult because I haven't written formally in that language for so long. I mean, emails, letters, yes. Notes, thinking, yeah, fine, but not a book. So it'll be terrifying, like it was slightly terrifying to be writing in English.
- [19:04]
B
What about this notion of betrayal which Elif mentioned? There is one stream of thought which says why should second or third generation Indians, or first generation Indians, more importantly, actually be writing in basically the colonial language? Why is it that you grow up in India at the age of 11, you've read your Shakespeare and your Brontes and your George Eliot's and people in England are not reading Indian authors.
- [19:30]
C
No, it's because the force field of colonialism went in that other direction. Like, you know, England colonized India, not the other way around. If it had been the other way around, I think England would have been reading Indian writers. No, I mean, it's a debate that is not going to go away.
- [19:46]
B
It does, but it doesn't bother you personally?
- [19:48]
C
It bothers me. It used to bother me more. It bothers me less and less. But I haven't pursued, I hope I haven't pursued a kind of reading or writing in English at the cost of neglecting my Bengali, where some would think that. But perhaps that may be one of the reasons I want to write to Bengali. I want to set some balance, right? I want to give out a signal to people that I'm not as illiterate in Bengali as a thinker.
- [20:19]
B
Elif, you.
- [20:20]
D
I just wanted to follow up on that. Of course, you know, the case of India's connection with the English language is very different than, you know, Turkey, Turkey's past, given that it wasn't colonized in the south, however, we had our own journey, linguistic journey. And the Turkish language, for those of you who are familiar with it, has, I think, lost a lot of its vocabulary because the language has been Turkified. You know, lots of words coming from Arabic origin, Persian origin, have been taken out. So if you're looking at an Ottoman Turkish dictionary that's this thick, a modern Turkish dictionary is this thick, about 55% of of our vocabulary has been just taken out. And I always had a problem with that. So when I'm writing in Turkish, I'm constantly trying to expand the boundaries as much as I can of daily language, daily life. Turkish, I love those old words, trying to put them back into the language. And I love the new ones as well, because I think they can coexist again. Nuances are important in Turkish. I can say yellow, I can say red, but the shades in between, I can't say because they used to come from Persian, and I don't have words for them, so I'm longing for those words. So language is a big passion for me, whether I'm writing in English or Turkish, to me, they're all connected. But in people's eyes, in people's minds, English has a baggage. If you write in English, then you're more easily labeled as the betrayer. If you were writing in Italian or Chinese or Russian, maybe they wouldn't be so. So eager to put that label so quick. Even when I tweet, because I tweet in English and Turkish, let's say I write about gender, violence, about what's happening in Turkey. When I write it in Turkish, it's fine. The moment I write it in English, they start bombarding, saying, why are you writing it in English? We don't want anyone to know. So people. It's amazing. I mean, nation state, the paranoia of the nation state. They think we're a family and if we close our door, nobody will see us. You know, that is the perception of the.
- [22:24]
C
It's a very Indian perception, too. A very sense of great fragility.
- [22:28]
D
Yes.
- [22:30]
C
How are we viewed by the outside.
- [22:32]
D
World fragility and aggressiveness. Yeah, very easily go together.
- [22:36]
B
Could we talk a little bit about expectations? So we were talking backstage about different cliches that one is expected to write about. So after 9 11, there was this whole glut of novels about how I became a terrorist or how I almost became a terrorist, but not quite. And then there'll be lots of things about forced marriage, something to do with the veil, behind the veil, under the veil, above the veil, all of these issues. Do you feel that. That there's an expectation that your next novel, because you've had immense success with the two that you've published, is now we want, I don't know, an Indian family story. Something about women suffering in an abused marriage. You know, this, that and the other.
- [23:14]
C
This drives me crazy. No, it's maddening. I wrote a book about. I was trying to think about certain matters of form, the realist novel form. I was trying to think of a debate started by a Hungarian critic called George Lukac and on his essays on man. And I was trying to restage the debate for modern times. But of course, you know, I am not a white man living in Brooklyn, so I can't think about form. So obviously my book had to be a family saga. And so of course, now I get stereotyped all the time that because I'm Indian, I'm writing either about inequality or about family saga. It just so happens that this book does have inequality, and it's done like what I'm trying to do. I sort of smuggled under the guise of a family saga. But no, I think I want to write a different book each time. So my next book is very different. It's completely different.
- [24:16]
B
We should have to wait for that. But I think that we would love to hear perhaps a page or so from the lives of others.
- [24:23]
C
Inequality. So this book has two narrative strands. One, the larger narrative is a family saga, and it's three generations of an extended family, and that's written in the third person. Now, one of the members of this family saga. I can't laugh when I say it. I can't not laugh when I say it. The young, the oldest, sorry, grandson of the third of the patriarch and the matriarch. He's a Maoist revolutionary. And I hate using the word terrorist because it means nothing. So his first person accounts of going out into the rural countries, going out into rural Bengal in late 60s to militize peasants into armed rebellion. They were called naxalites, actually, because the. The Movement started in a tiny village in North Bengal called Nakshalbari, so Nokshal Naxalite. So I'm just going to read a page from his account. It's a first person account. I had been handed a sickle and shown how to cut the paddy stalks at the base, about 3 inches from the soil. Each of us went to the plot that his host was working. Kanu Mine was a wage laborer on the lowest rung. This, I realized later, had its uses. A number of class enemies could be pointed out to me. Owners of small plots who overworked and underpaid day workers, the subset of yes men of big landlords. Among these the absentee Jodhar's managers who cracked the whip. The plot didn't look big when I saw it, but 20 minutes into disciplining myself to maintain the required inverted U shape that sent my neck and back screaming silently. The field seemed like a sea now, and I had to swim across it. Already I was well behind Kanu and his wife Bijli and the three other munish working with us. They advanced with the choreographed grace and rigor of dancers, leaving me behind, standing alone, the bad student who couldn't master the movements. How did they do it? I knew those tired lines about practice and acclimatization, but didn't their backs and necks and shoulders hurt too? In the beginning, at least, I began to count small blessings. The fact that it was November, the thought of doing this in April was unthinkable. Although my vest was stuck to my skin with sweat and the futwa over it was beginning to show signs of damp too. The sun was not strong enough for my head to be covered, not yet. I bracketed the sickle around the base of a sheaf of stalks and cut, using the towards me motion that they had taught me. The sickle was very sharp and there was no effort involved in the actual cutting. The cut stalks fell over my head. This was the thing I was failing to master. The way the left hand gathered the cut plants into a bundle, the bundle increasing in girth and the hand adjusting to accommodate that as we moved forward, cutting more stalks until you had enough and you turned around and threw the harvested sheaves behind you and moved on. Even that, flinging backward of the sheaves, even that required the mastery of a trick, a particular motion of the hand and wrist so that the stalks all fell with their bases aligned to the bases of the others already harvested, the tips to the tips. Mine fell in a fanned mess. How was I ever going to reach the end of the field. And then I noticed my palms and fingers were a mad crisscross of little cuts from the sharp, dry edges of the rice leaves and stalks. Shame rose in me like bile. Hands that revealed instantly that I hadn't done a day's honest work work in my life. The only thing I could do was ignore the sting, grit my teeth and keep cutting and advancing with all the strength and endurance I had. I wanted to make the cuts worse, deeper, my hands really bloody. It was the only way I would learn how to harvest properly and the only way my hands could stop being the shamefully middle class hands they were now. Change yourself, change the world.
- [28:42]
B
Thank you very, very much. I think that excerpt points up so vividly and perfectly one of the writers to whom many of the reviews have compared you, which is Tolstoy in that vividness and that detail and realism. And I just wanted to take the idea of Tolstoy to Elif Shafak because I wanted to know if, despite this being the 21st century, you think that there is still a passion among readers for that 19th century style, Russian and English realist immersive novel form.
- [29:18]
D
Absolutely. And yes, that was quite unexpected, wasn't it? I mean, many people thought that not only the form would lose its significance, but also the book itself was going to wither away, perish. You know, there were all these gloomy predictions, and I don't think that is what's happening. Of course many things are changing, understandably so, but at the same time, certain things are here, staying with us. And that is that to me is very intriguing because on the one hand, we're constantly living in a very fast moving world, but our need for an inner space is becoming greater and greater. And I don't think that's a coincidence. The novel for me, like, you know, Walter Benjamin said, it is the loneliest form of art. The writer is lonely while he or she is producing the book, but the reader is also alone while he or she is reading it. So it's very much based on solitude. And I tend to think that, you know, many other forms of art, you know, you can consume it, you can share it with other people, but the novel, you need to retreat into that inner space. And I think in that inner space we tend to be, be relatively, you know, speaking a bit more liberal, a bit more open minded, a bit more open hearted. I have many readers in Turkey who are extremely homophobic. And then they come at my book signings, you know, and they say, oh, I love this character and I'M looking at the character they're talking about. It's a gay character. But they say, oh, I love that I, you know, I so associated. Or they're very xenophobic. But then they identify with an Armenian character, with a Jewish character in the book. How does that happen? You know, I've been observing people over the years. I do think that when we are in the company of other people, we become less tolerant, more reactionary. It is not a coincidence that fascism is a mass disease. You know, you have to be in the company of other people. Together, we react. But when we are alone, we're a bit calmer, we're a bit more ready to understand, to empathize. There's more potential there, and the novel is speaking directly to that potential, to that inner, lonely space. And therefore, I don't think the novel is going to wither away anytime soon. If I may add one thing about the subjects, I was very intrigued by what you said a couple of months ago. I was reading an interview, and I think it was the Financial Times with an American author. And they were asking her, why do you always write about love and divorce and heartbreak? And she said, these are the things that we talk about, you know, around the table. I can't think of anyone talking about politics when they're having dinner. So I'm talking with a Pakistani author, with a friend of mine, and she says, that woman is not from Pakistan, she's not from Turkey. We talk about politics, not from the Middle east, all breakfast, lunch, you know, so it's very different.
- [32:03]
C
It's a matrix in which human life unfolds. I think politics. No, Elif, fantastic point. Can I just.
- [32:08]
B
Yes, absolutely.
- [32:09]
C
Do that thing about how the loneliness of the form makes you more liberal, allows you to think about it. I think it's a fantastic point you raised. I want to say that individuals tend to be more liberal when they are reacting with individuals. So you may be a UKIP supporter, but if you read a book about what it is to be an illegal immigrant in this country, you may empathize and sympathize. You're right, absolutely. The sort of movement towards the general always creates a hardening of the stance. But, you know, when people say. When somebody homophobic say, oh, but some of my best friends are gay, that may not be as ridiculous or as contemptible a sentence because it's true that some of their best friends might be gay and. And they feel that homophobia is sort of a mindset of the general type of thinking.
- [33:08]
B
But I have to ask do you think that when someone is reading a novel and they, for the duration of reading, are within someone else's skin, whether that really does change them in the long term? Just because they come up to you at a reading and they go, well, I like this character who politically, I'm completely opposed to in every single way. Is that a fundamental shift or is it just people purely within the context of the imaginative world that you've created?
- [33:32]
C
I think the latter, actually. I can't make large claims for. Yeah, I feel during the duration, but that's still.
- [33:39]
B
That's a thing in itself.
- [33:41]
D
It is a thing. And, you know, there's interesting research. I don't want to over romanticize what we're doing, but to me, this is interesting, you know, because empathy is like a muscle. The more empathize, the bigger it grows. We learn it. Like many things in life, we learn to empathize. So people who read more fiction, the part of their brain.
- [34:01]
C
I read about this too.
- [34:02]
D
It's very interesting that where, you know, empathy operates is much bigger. And I do believe in that. We do learn from novels how to empathize, how to, you know, identify with other people. Of course, then there are other factors that pull that person in the other direction. But nonetheless, I do believe that books and stories can make a change, and they do.
- [34:24]
B
Just before we hear from the Architect's Apprentice, I wanted to put a very small point to you, which Neil had made earlier. It was about subverting expectations and stereotypes. And it seemed to me that this is what you do in the Architect's Apprentice, that you take Orientalist fantasies about Turkey, about the beautiful bejeweled palaces and the stuff and people who work there, this menagerie of animals, the exotic, the harem. And in fact, in fact, as Neil does, you find something in there which is universal and rigorous and psychologically acute. So it almost becomes an in joke. The Orientalism and the cliches are sort of like a thing that you play with.
- [35:03]
D
Yeah, no, I'm so, you know, thank you. You said it so beautifully. It matters so much to me, you know, turning things upside down and trying to see how it seems from the other angle. Trying to show maybe the things that are hidden, you know, not the visible surface. I'm more interested in the things that are unseen at first glance. Also, minorities have always been very important for me, but I use the word minority in the broadest sense possible. It could be ethnic minority, sexual minority, cultural minority, or anyone who, for whatever reason, feels pushed to the periphery and left without A voice throughout the centuries or today in Turkish society. So the underbelly always draws me for some reason. I've always, you know, you know, the word other may sound like a cliche, but the other has always been important for me. So particularly when I was writing about history, it was a constant effort, a deliberate effort to listen to the other. Because when we talk about history in Turkey, we never mention human beings, animals, of course, they never existed. You know, the very few individuals that were mentioned are always sultans, Shahil Islams and maybe a few women in the harem in order to vilify them, but that's it. The rest never mentioned. So, but how did ordinary people live? What did they experience? So these very important questions are never being asked. And in that sense, I think storytellers can bring a lot into the discussion.
- [36:26]
B
I think we'd very, very much like to hear some.
- [36:30]
D
So just, just a few words about this book. It's. One of the central characters is Sinan, who was the greatest architect in the, in the Muslim world, in the Islamic world. But again, not many people in Turkey talk about this. He was born a Christian, most probably he was Armenian. There's a possibility that he could be Greek as well. And interestingly, he remained a Christian until the age 21, which to me is an interesting detail because many bright color Christian boys were converted to Islam around age 6 or 7. Whereas in Sinan's case, his basic formation is in Christianity. Then when he becomes the chief royal architect, he is asked to compete with the dome of Hagia Sophia and make bigger domes for Islam. And this is my interpretation, someone else might interpret it differently, but when you measure Selimiya's dome, depending on how you measure it, it is both bigger and not bigger. And I think, I tend to think he did it deliberately because for Sinan, the dome is a unifying, you know, metaphor rather than an instrument of competition. And he says, in his words, he says under the same dome there's equal place for Jews and Christians and Muslims and Zoroastrians. So he sees the invisible dome above our heads. So this is the voice that you will hear, is the voice of the apprentice of Sinan. It's also the story of a white elephant that's being sent from India as a royal gift to the Ottoman Empire. So the elephant was also an important character in the book. Of all the people God created and Shaitan led astray, only a few have discovered the center of the universe, where there's no good and no evil, no past and no future. No, I And no thou, no war, and no reason for war, just an endless sea of calm. What they found there was so beautiful that they lost their ability to speak. The angels, taking pity on them offered two choices. If they wished to regain their voices, they would have to forget everything they had seen, although a feeling of absence would remain deep in their hearts. If they preferred to remember the beauty, however, their minds would become so befuddled that they would not be able to distinguish the truth from the mirage. So the handful who stumbled upon that secret location, unmarked on any map, returned either with a sense of longing for something they knew not what, or with multiple questions to ask. Those who yearned for completeness would be called the lovers, and those who aspire to knowledge, the learners. That is what Master Sinan used to tell the four of us, his apprentices. He would regard us closely, his head cocked to one side, as if trying to see through our souls. I knew I was being vain, and vanity was unfit for a simple boy such as I. But every time my master would relate this story, I believed he intended his words for me rather than for the others. His stare would linger for a moment too long on my face, as if there was something he expected from me. I would avert my gaze, afraid of disappointing him, afraid of the thing I could not give him, though what that was, I never figured out. I wonder what he saw in my eyes. Had he predicted that I would be second to none with respect to learning, but that I, in my clumsiness, would fail miserably in love? I wish I could look back and say that I have learned to love as much as I love to learn. But if I lie, there could be a cauldron boiling for me in hell tomorrow. And who can assure me tomorrow is not already on my doorstep now that I am as old as an oak tree and still not consigned to the grave? There were six of us. The Master, the apprentices, and the White Elephant. We built everything together. Mosques, bridges, madrasas, caravansarays, almshouses, aqueducts. It was so long, long ago that my mind softens. Even the sharpest features, melting memories into liquid pain. The shapes that float into my head whenever I hark back to those days could well have been drawn later on to ease the guilt of having forgotten their faces. Yet I remember the promises we made and then fail to keep every single one of them. It's strange how faces, solid and visible as they are, evaporate while words made of breath stay. They have slipped away one by one. Why it is that they perished and I survived to this feeble age. Only God and God alone knows. I think about Istanbul every day. People must be walking now across the courtyards of the mosques, not knowing, not seeing. They would rather assume that the buildings around them had been there since the time of Noah. They were not. We raised them. Muslims and Christians, craftsmen and galley slaves, humans and animals, day upon day. But Istanbul is a city of easy forgettings. Things are written in water over there, except the one works of my master, which are written in stone. Beneath one stone, I bury the secret. Much time has gone by, but it must still be there, waiting to be discovered. I wonder if anyone will ever find it. If they do, will they understand this? Nobody knows. But at the bottom of one of the hundreds of buildings that my master built rests hidden the center of the universe.
- [42:15]
B
Thank you. And those are the opening pages of what becomes a sort of astonishing fable. And. Oh, there's a note. What shall I say? Dear Bodisha, please can you remind the audience that there will be a book sale and signing on the ground floor of the building immediately after this lecture. Consider yourselves reminded. An astonishing fable and a glorious adventure. So thank you very much for that. In the 10 minutes we have before we open up to questions from the audience before the book signing and book sale, let's move on. Go on.
- [42:46]
C
Can I pick up on two things?
- [42:48]
B
Please do. But just to bear this in mind, we'll also cover translation in a few moments. It's like a test. It's like a long viber.
- [42:58]
C
That point about the Tolstone novel, the 19th century novel, which. Whether we think it's been exploded and stuff. No, I kind of think, like Henry James, that the house of fiction has many rooms. So. And I think they're not mutually exclusive, really. I think the 19th century form still persists. The Eliot. George Eliot, I think, was one of the greatest novelists ever. And Tolstoy. And at the same time, you know, we have modernist stuff reinvented for our times. The very smart writer Tom McCarthy. I love his work, but I don't see that there is an opposition between these various form. Coexisting.
- [43:42]
D
Coexisting.
- [43:44]
C
And the other point that you were talking about, you know, politics, you know, I recently had to write an introduction for a book which I think as one of the greatest novels ever written. And she starts with an epigraph from an early German romantic called Novalis, the poet and philosopher. And the novel starts with a line by him which says, novels arise out of the shortcomings of history. And I think this Is a wonderful thing that fiction goes somewhere about meditation on history and historical events. That history really cannot go.
- [44:18]
D
Exactly.
- [44:20]
C
We can unpack that thought not as.
- [44:21]
D
Arise out of the short, because we're interested in stories, obviously, but also silences, you know, the things that are not talked about. You want to go there or make that silence visible?
- [44:33]
B
Could we interrogate that point a little bit? Because we are living through this enormous digital revolution which is changing the way we do everything. People get up in the morning, they read the newspaper online. It has been shown that our attention spans are getting shorter, but that strangely enough, we're actually reading and writing more than ever before, but in different forms. And so people within publishing are saying, okay, there is now going to be a fundamental shift in form. We're going to see a return to flash fiction and fragments and fractions and whatever you call them. Given that you are not just working novelists, but you are in the industry yourselves, you go and do readings, you meet many other writers. Do you think that that is actually happening, or are we only at the very beginning of that?
- [45:22]
C
It's difficult to, like, you know, in this, you know, we are going through a time of immense change and the change is so quick. You know, in my lifetime, I've just seen an entire revolution happen and which is also happening. So it's too early to say. It's like Mao Zedong saying, what do you think of democracy? He said, give me. Give me another thousand years and then I'll tell you. I'll tell you what I think of democracy. So I don't know. But at the same time, once again, I feel that a model of coexisting flash fiction maybe, but also Game of Thrones, which is like, you know, vast and it. It's created a whole universe or Harry Potter, which is like book after book with a completely built universe in it. And people seem to have an endless.
- [46:13]
B
Appetite for these things, for these completely immersive worlds where you Absolutely.
- [46:17]
C
So, you know, so fantasy, actually, fantasy and science fiction have always been very good at doing that. Literary fiction, like, we'll have to think of models like Tolstoy and stuff, actually, I mean, by Tolstoy, I mean, you know, Eleanor Catton's luminaries. Yeah.
- [46:32]
B
Big fat books which won the Booker stuff.
- [46:35]
C
So, you know, I can't say that, you know, flash fiction is completely taken over what the industry thinks. I do not know. Industries opaque to me.
- [46:43]
D
Yes, yes. I mean, none of the predictions about the literary world were actualized, have they? I mean, when you look at the Articles that were written 10 years ago, five years ago, very gloomy predictions, but all of them are very linear predictions. And we're not living in linear times. I think one of the characteristics of this century is lots of things, contradictory things are happening at the same time. So what do we see? For instance, people were predicting the book sales were going to go down. Nobody was going to have time for that. Or inside every book, you had to put all those, you know, visual material to make it more readable. Even Kindle sales have suffered a lot now. So it's been to the contrary.
- [47:25]
B
Many big publishers, I can just give it. They've stabilized completely.
- [47:29]
D
Yeah. So when we look at how well bookstores are doing, it's very interesting. For instance, major publishing houses are doing financially well. The independent bookstores, many of them are doing well, much better than people thought they would. But the book, the chains, you know, have suffered a lot, lot. So the good and the bad, the positive and the negative, very different things are happening at the same time. And we don't know how to analyze this very chaotic picture. I tend to think that, you know, some of my rights and friends are very. They have an allergy when they talk about, you know, Internet and everything. We don't have that luxury again, you know, the Internet, for me, it's like the moon. It has a dark side, it has a bright side. I have to see the bright side and be careful about the dark side. Coming from Turkey, I can't be little. So social media, I think in countries where the media has lost its freedom and diversity, the social media has become a very important political platform. Many people, maybe when they do Facebook or Twitter, in England, they write about restaurants and movies. In Turkey, they write about politics again. So also women, interestingly, all throughout the Middle east, women are not visible in the public space. But when you look at Internet, you know, Twitter followers, women almost half again. This to me is important. They have a voice there. I can't belittle it, I can't reject it. But we need to be very careful because there's a lot of hate speech, slander, misinformation is a big, big, big problem to me. You know, that's why some analysts call it the pancake generation, because like when you're making a pancake, you know, it spreads all over the pan, but it's very thin, just like that. We have knowledge about everything. We know a little bit bit about everything, but it doesn't go very deep. And the problem is, because we have a little bit of knowledge, we think we know it. So to me, the real problem is the arrogance, the blindness that comes with that illusion of knowing. How do we deal with that? So it excites me, the fast moving, you know, technologies and all that. But the problem with knowledge, we can't make a distinction between knowledge and information and wisdom anymore. We just lump them together. That's very problematic.
- [49:34]
B
I have one final question, unless you wanted to say something.
- [49:37]
C
I just want to say very quickly, but Elif, do you think we are a kind of generation of amphibians? Like, we'll do both. We'll read Mann's Joseph and His Brothers or Game of Thrones and we'll read all our newspapers online. I haven't read a physical newspaper for 12 years, but I've never read a book on Kindle. I mean, not out of any kind of resistance. It hasn't happened yet. I mean, I read all my friends manuscripts on my iPad.
- [50:01]
D
But I think that is good. That is very good. I mean, I have just the illusion of knowing.
- [50:06]
C
But the children's generation, they may.
- [50:09]
D
Although. Although even my children's generation, when I look at that generation, they love books, books matter to them. So they haven't abandoned the idea of printed book so easily. Maybe the printed book will stay with us for longer than we think.
- [50:23]
B
Now, in about a minute and a half, just to warn you, we're going to open up to questions from the floor because we want to reserve 30 full minutes to hear from people. I just wanted to pick up on something you, Elif, said right at the beginning, which is that this is a new type of globalized person, a globalized writer and globalized reader. And I wanted to ask you briefly about translation and the true globalization of literature. If you go to Germany or France, the numbers of books sold in translation are between 40 and 47%. It's incredibly high in the UK and in London, which we say is incredibly multicultural, multiracial city. And it really is. That figure hovers between something like 2 and 4%, which is incredibly shocking. So German authors, Arabic authors, authors writing in Indian languages, Turkish authors are not really being read. I just wondered if you had something to say about that. What your viewpoint was as multilingual, truly global writers.
- [51:21]
C
This is a very big topic and I'm very exercised by it as well and dismayed. I kind of. I mean, if you look at it historically, the fact that England, with its language, English. English is a killer language, as Boyd Tonkin calls it, actually Spanish.
- [51:37]
B
What do you mean?
- [51:39]
C
It has the effect of subduing and pushing Away to the margins, all other languages. So Anglophone countries, America, so the 19th century was England's because of empire. The 20th century was America's because of colonialism and of a different kind of colonial venture. And the post war dispensation and capitalism and the hegemony of capitalism in the way it just destroyed every other model obtaining. What has happened is when two big nations which dominated world politics on the global stage with the English language, it kind of had the effect. I mean, since we live in the Anglophone world, they feel that they don't need to engage very much with other cultures. I find this terrifying, actually. That and beyond this, I think there is a problem with Anglo culture is that what they want is basically to look at themselves in the mirror rather than make the mirror into a pane of glass and look out into the world. It's problematic for me.
- [52:45]
D
Yeah, absolutely. For me as well. Like you said, when I look at the publishing world In Turkey, 47, around 47% of the books, novels published in Turkey are translated from mostly Western languages. And here the ratio is quite completely different. So it's a one way street. You know, we read Western literature more than Europeans read Turkish literature. But also together with this disproportionate, you know, situation that there's a more dangerous underlying thing. What are the books that make it to the, you know, in mainstream media, in America, in Europe, they're usually books that carry a function. You know, that tendency to me is very problematic as if we expect books from, for instance, if a writer's from Afghanistan, you expect that writer to teach you something about Afghanistan, tell us the truth about Afghanistan, or from Nigeria or from Turkey particularly. Also I think there's a gender dimension when you are a woman writer from the Muslim world. Then again, you know, the veil books.
- [53:48]
B
This is what I'm saying. It has to have a cover with a woman in a veil, still beautiful, looking a little bit sad.
- [53:58]
D
Must be there, of course. So it's not only that we don't read enough and which is very ironic, especially for a city like London, which is so obviously cosmopolitan. But also this tendency to expect some truth from non western authors to me is very problematic.
- [54:15]
B
That brings us full circle. That brings us full circle to our first question, which was about author authenticity. I think it's the perfect point at which to open up the floor immediately. Hands have gone up, so let's go to the third or fourth black jumper there. We'll come forward to you and then we'll sweep backwards after that.
- [54:34]
D
Thank you. Very much. This question is for Elif Hanum. So you talked about enriching your writing with Persian words, Arabic words, or maybe opening up the layer to the richness.
- [54:45]
B
Of the Ottoman language.
- [54:47]
D
And I think through your writing, and I think things in Turkey like Mursershah Museel, this series that has just become wildly popular, shows that there's resonance for this.
- [54:56]
B
But on the other hand, you have.
- [54:57]
D
People like the Prime Minister in Turkey who says, everyone's going to learn Ottoman.
- [55:01]
B
And there's a massive reaction to this. So I'd be really interested to your.
- [55:05]
D
Thoughts as to how you think that could be reconciled and maybe lifting up this layer of this beautiful history and cosmopolitanism that existed during the Ottoman time that people don't know about. And my second mini question, sorry, is.
- [55:18]
B
I'm in the process of writing on.
- [55:21]
D
A very, very similar subject, so I.
- [55:23]
B
Was wondering if I could ask if.
- [55:24]
D
You would mentor me on that, say, I'm so sorry I missed the.
- [55:29]
B
She's writing on a similar topic and would like you to mentor her.
- [55:32]
D
Oh, mentor.
- [55:35]
C
If we ask publicly, she can say.
- [55:41]
D
Well, thank you, I really appreciate both questions and maybe we'll talk more.
- [55:46]
B
You can talk later.
- [55:48]
D
You're so right to be bothered by the then Prime Minister's remarks. The thing about Turkey is, of course, very briefly speaking, we really are a nation who can't read the tombstones of their ancestors. In Istanbul, you pass by many monuments, fountains, you know, historical places. We have no clue what it says. We don't even know the meaning of the streets where we live. You know, you ask those people and they don't even look it up. You know, we not only lost words and our vocabulary, but I think we lost our curiosity for the past. So this is very problematic. Turkey is really a society of collective amnesia and our connection with the past is full of ruptures.
- [56:31]
B
So.
- [56:31]
D
So I do want people to learn more Ottoman, and I want them to be open to Ottoman words. But that doesn't mean. Because in Turkey, everything polarized, everything is politicized. Some people are saying, take the old words and reject the new ones. Again, making the same mistake. Words live longer than us, they're older than us. Who are we to say, take these words out? Where does the arrogance come from? Whether that is done in the name of conservatism or this or that, I don't care. It's the same, same mentality. And that, to me is very frustrating. In Turkey, again and again, like a loop, we're making the same authoritarian mistakes. You can't teach people Ottoman language, top down. You know, you can help, you know, people to understand their culture better, but it should be. It should be more fluid. Change should come always from civil society. Whereas in Turkey, politicians tend to think they can dictate, and that is very, very problematic. Problematic, of course. I'm totally against that style.
- [57:29]
B
Neil, do you want to say.
- [57:30]
C
No, no, no, I'm.
- [57:31]
B
Yeah, we have a second question here, and then we'll.
- [57:33]
D
This question is for Neil. You seem to be so happy and content. How can you possibly be such an excellent writer?
- [57:44]
B
Oh, my God, that's a plant. Right, Great question.
- [57:48]
D
I'm not miserable. How can you be a great writer?
- [57:51]
B
Yeah.
- [57:55]
C
I.
- [57:57]
B
Shame on you.
- [57:58]
C
I don't. I don't know what to say to that. I don't know what to say to that. I'm kind of. I'm kind of taken aback. I'm not a content person. So one has to. I mean, I mean, if I came on stage and swore and shouted and spat, it'd be a really unpleasant experience for all of you. No, no, I think most people would. Most writers would say that they are writers because they have failed at everything else, really. I think most writers tend to be very uneasy in their skins because they're trying to work out a very shifting calculus between themselves and how they relate to the world. I think writing comes from a position of great discomfort and limitation. If you were happy with the world, you wouldn't write, you'd do something else. You'd be a government minister telling people, take out all these words from language. But thank you.
- [58:57]
B
Do you agree, Elif?
- [58:58]
D
Yeah, I agree. Absolutely.
- [58:59]
B
There was a question on the fourth row. Please keep your hand up. And another question two rows back from.
- [59:10]
C
Thank you. A couple of hours ago, Turkey lost a very famous, a world famous author, Yashar Kemay. Would you like to comment on that huge loss? Mehmet the Hawk.
- [59:25]
D
Yes, Mehmet the Hawk.
- [59:27]
C
He died.
- [59:27]
D
He passed away. Yes. Today. Yes, yes, yes, of course.
- [59:32]
C
You should raise a glass to him.
- [59:33]
D
Yes, we should. Yes. I'm so glad you mentioned a couple of hours ago he passed away. He was extremely important for us. We loved him, we respected him, we looked up to him. But not only as a literary figure for me, also as someone who spoke about human rights, as an activist who worked for the coexistence of Kurds and Turks at a time when these things were not easy to talk about, when these things were not mentioned that easily. Today, again, because we're a society of amnesia, we forget these things. But he was accused of being a betrayer. You know, all kinds of labels were attached to him. But, you know, all of that again, forgotten. And many people are trying to turn him into a hero. So he went through so many stages in his life. He had, I mean, huge impacts he had on us. Mehmet Tahok, those entire series of Mehmet Tahok, but also his journalism, his articles, not only his literary work, but also his nonfiction. For me, he was one of the rare people who knew how to balance fiction and nonfiction. All these things that we're talking about, creativity and politics being the conscience of your society. Not forgetting that, trying to see, stick to your ideals, your heart, making your heart speak. So there was no one like him, to be honest.
- [60:59]
B
Thank you for that question. I promised someone in a white top, right in the top row, we're going to make the mic bearer. Oh, sorry. I'm sorry, I forgot about you. So I'm very sorry. After that, we'll go right to the top.
- [61:09]
C
I'm Shahid Syed. My question is as a bilingual reader, because I read in Urdu and read in English and I read fiction, probably read more nonfiction. You are both bilingual writers and you have already mentioned at least one of you that your inspiration can come from both sources, both languages. But my question to both of you is in real sense for the content and the matter of the novel, where actually your inspiration come from your own native language or from English language.
- [61:50]
B
I like your very graceful deferrals.
- [61:53]
C
I will answer this question. Well, I'm only two books old, so I can answer that question for each book. My first book is set in 90s, sorry, 70s and 80s Calcutta, 90s Oxford. And there's a middle strand which is set in late 19th, early 20th century Raj Bengal. That novel, I think came to me in English. This book is my Bengali novel in English. This book was imagined in Bengali. And if you read the dialogue, it's not idiomatic English. It was really thought of in Bengali and then written in a very different English idiom. So I can answer the question very cleanly. This book is entirely set in Bengal and so the inspiration came from that quarter. That won't be the case with my next book, Elif.
- [62:56]
D
My earlier novels were all written in Turkish first. About 10 years, maybe 12 years ago, I started writing in English first. But what I'm doing is so irrational. I find it very difficult to explain because since then, every novel I've written, I wrote it in English first. Then it was translated into Turkish by a professional translator. Then I took it and I rewrote it again. But I have to do this because I can't translate myself. It's a completely different talent. I lack that talent also. I would change the novel so much. So somebody needs to know, contain and draw the limits. Within those limits, I can. I can play. I do this because I love language. You know, it's. To me, it's. It's not a burden. And then you start paying attention to the things that can't be translated directly from one language to another and you start thinking, you know, why is that so? I love that observation that commutes itself.
- [63:51]
B
Did you ever read a Turkish translation of your novel and think, my God, this is absolutely nothing like what I meant at all?
- [63:59]
D
But it is never a one to one translation. I don't believe in a one to one translation. In fiction, of course, you know, it has to be the same story, but the rhythm is different, the poetry is different. And you need to follow that. You need to allow the language guide you instead of trying to stick to, you know, as if it was an historical document. So I dance within those limits. Yeah. Brilliant.
- [64:24]
B
Thank you. Question right at the top.
- [64:27]
D
Thank you. I have a double barrel question, so I apologize in advance for that. It's actually inspired from Neil's passage from his book. I was just curious why middle class? Because you just ended saying he wanted to change his middle class hands, which I thought was really curious and perhaps not very incidental. And the reason I think maybe it might be so. And that's where I actually want to ask a question to Elif as well, because I think in Turkey especially, the middle class is very problematic. And it's not just now, but since the beginning of the Republic. And it's been. Well, the emergence and the expansion of the new middle class especially has made things probably even more intriguing. And I'm just curious for both of you, what do you make of that? If you make anything of that, both within this whole rhetoric of the changing worlds, but also in your books. Thanks.
- [65:22]
C
It's a very good question because the word middle class is very pointedly used in the book. So, okay, a lot of these Maoists revolutionaries in late 60s India, they came from what a Maoist ideologue called Charuma Zumdar, for those who know, called the urban intelligentsia. So it was supposed to be a movement by, for and of the proletariat, the farmers and the wage laborers. The urban intelligentsia would come and help them and then fade away. So Bengal lost a very bright and very idealistic Generation of young women and men in the late 60s who all came from like university going stock and went to the countryside and tried to militize peasants into armed rebellion. And they hated their middle class stature. And they were reading Mao, they were reading the Little Red Book, and they were trying to like, erase their middle class status and become one with the proletariat. They actually like, you know, they kept on repeating to themselves, it's repeated in the book, man's enjoyment to them to be like a fish with other fish in the sea. And they tried to do that, some of them. They tried to go and live like peasants, live like wage laborers in the countryside. It didn't work out for several reasons. But the term middle class in that particular passage I read out, it's a valence of self hatred.
- [67:07]
D
Yeah, self hatred. I mean, Turkey is such a complicated country. I think it just puzzles so many analysts. It's not quite there, it's not quite here. Not a mature democracy, not a typically, maybe, you know, like many other countries throughout the Middle East. But where is it this question of identity is so essential for us and particularly for the middle classes in Turkey throughout the decades, and it has become very problematic, very contentious. Sometimes it produced tension, aggression and resentments, cycles of resentments in Turkey, People who have been hurt, hurt others, and therefore we can never break that chain. And that's one of the things that, you know, worries me. So today the middle class has gone. Not today, but in the last decade has gone through a tremendous trial shift, a tremendous change, but not only in economic, financial terms, but also culturally. For me, the center, periphery duality is very important in order to understand Turkey. You know, who thought they were in the periphery and their desire to come to the center, their desire to rule and then push others to the periphery, what was being done to them, now they're doing to other people again. We can, we can't break that cycle. As a writer, I am interested in the matter, in the question of identity, but I don't believe in identity as a solid brick label that can be attached to us. I wish we could talk about multiple belongings instead, not exclusivist identities. This is very problematic because nationalism is very strong. Religious fundamentalism is very strong. These things are not the same, disappearing anytime soon, unfortunately, they're becoming more and more stronger, all these reactionary ideologies. And also, I think we're very emotional people. We don't like to accept this. Many politicians think, oh, women are emotional, that they themselves are not emotional, but they are very emotional themselves. So the attitude in Turkey is, oh, if Europe doesn't want us, we don't want them anyhow. So that kind of tit for tat, and we will go in the other direction. You know, that kind of macho nationalism.
- [69:16]
B
Very boyish and also very reactive.
- [69:19]
D
Very reactive. Of course, always in reaction to something else that is very typical of the middle classes in Turkey.
- [69:26]
C
Boyish.
- [69:27]
D
Very boyish, yes. It's a very patriarchal society.
- [69:31]
B
Who else? Hands up. Okay, let's come one down and then we'll come right to this middle section.
- [69:39]
D
Thank you.
- [69:39]
C
Thank you for this interesting talk.
- [69:42]
B
We can't hear you very well. Could you talk right into it?
- [69:44]
C
Can you hear me now?
- [69:46]
B
I have a question to both writers.
- [69:48]
D
Actually, and I want to go back.
- [69:50]
C
To the conversation about being an outsider.
- [69:52]
D
And insider of a society. I was wondering if.
- [69:56]
C
I do understand when you say an.
- [69:59]
D
Outsider can actually see things better, but through whose eyes? Through which means do you see it like.
- [70:04]
C
I'm a Turkish woman living in London. Not for a long time, but even.
- [70:09]
D
During this short time, I realized that.
- [70:11]
C
Living abroad, not living in the society.
- [70:14]
D
Makes you somehow underestimate the things that.
- [70:18]
C
Go there, and maybe, like, adds a certain element of optimism to things that go back in your country.
- [70:25]
D
And I was wondering, through whose eyes do you see it?
- [70:27]
C
If you live here, and I know, Elif, you live in both places. But, Neil, as I understood, you live solely in London, and because.
- [70:37]
D
Do you see it through media, through.
- [70:38]
C
Your friends, through your family who live there, through social media, or. That was my question. It's actually a very practical question. Through whose eyes do I see? Which world?
- [70:50]
B
India.
- [70:50]
D
India.
- [70:51]
B
The world that you're the outsider to.
- [70:54]
C
Well, one always sees the world through one's eyes, not someone else's. Right? Those eyes are mediated, sure, certainly. But one of the reasons why I don't write about India now is that I would have to move there for a bit. I think these threads come back very quickly. After all, as I said, I came to this country when I was fully formed, at the age of 22 and a bit. So if I were to write about India now, I think I'd move to India for about six months or a year to get all the threads back, and then I would write. But I haven't actually written about India of a time after I left. So the question of whose eyes do I see the world through? I would say I see the world through my eyes, and I try and represent it as truthfully as I see it. Your question is a question of duality. In the sense that it actually turns around the question of authenticity. Like, would you be prepared to read my book if I set it in India in 2014 if you knew that I lived in London? Or would it be better for you if I wrote the book if you knew that it said in my author bio he moved to India for 5 years to write this book. So, yeah, it turns around the notion of authenticity as well. Elif.
- [72:26]
D
If I may connect your question with an earlier question about where we get our inspiration from. I don't think it's a matter of where we live or for how long, but who do we interact with? What do we read? How do we get our knowledge? Where do we get it from? We need to have more eclectic reading lists, you know, keep our information sources as wide as possible, as open as possible. It is. Otherwise, it's possible to. Let's, for instance, live in Istanbul, but live in a very little bubble, like many people do. In fact, in your own comfort zone. And to be surrounded with people who are very similar to you or to me, and then just, you know, hear their own. Their voices, which are no more than echoes of our own voice, that is not inspiring, that is not intellectually stimulating. I think in order to understand the land better, in order to understand the world better, we need to be connected with people coming from different backgrounds, different views. It is not a coincidence that in terms of philosophy, art, creativity, urban centers, cosmopolitan centers have always been more promising. The places where we meet the stranger. This is how creativity, creative ideas flourish. This is what we've lost in Turkey because it's a very polarized society. Everybody is retreated into their own zone and otherizes the rest of the society. So I sometimes wonder how much of the reality does each camp grasp because they're refusing to talk to each other anymore. One little thing that makes me happy about, you know, literary activities in Turkey. I look at the people who come to my book signings and honestly, they're so different. I have lots of readers who wear headscarves. I have lots of readers who wear miniskirts. Feminists, liberals, mystics. These are people who never break bread together, who never share a word together. But the fact that they read the same book or they watch the same movie to me is very precious in societies with extreme polarization.
- [74:30]
B
Thank you very much. There are some questions down here. Let's go to the fifth row back, some turquoise top, and then we'll come forward to Black Hat. Sorry, I work for MI5. I'm just describing people's outfits.
- [74:45]
D
Hi, I'D like to follow up on what we've just discussed here. And I'm sure everybody who's Turkish knows.
- [74:54]
B
In some situation and some good conversation.
- [74:58]
D
You'Ll be asked who knows best, the person who reads a lot or the person who travels a lot. And I mean, I've been asked this several times when I was a child.
- [75:09]
B
And then when I got a bit older. And I think my answer to that.
- [75:14]
D
Always changed during, you know, going. The phases I went through myself.
- [75:20]
B
And I think, I mean, I'm going.
- [75:22]
D
To come back to you asking what.
- [75:24]
B
You think about it, but for now, now.
- [75:29]
D
I've settled on the idea saying I think it's a bit of both.
- [75:32]
B
And I think thanks to the people.
- [75:34]
D
Who write and that I read, I feel like going to those places as well, because sometimes due to time constraints or financial constraints, I might not travel to Arizona, for example, where some of your books are sad parts of it. So, yeah, I was wondering how you think about this.
- [75:52]
B
Which is best to read a lot or travel a lot? It's true.
- [75:55]
D
We used to get this question so often in Turkey. So who knows more, the reader or the traveler? That was the dilemma.
- [76:01]
C
They both know as much or as little. I don't see any opposition between the two. Or why not both?
- [76:11]
D
Why not both?
- [76:13]
C
I've been noticing this, actually, all our thinking is very Boolean, like 0 or 1. It can be 0.572. Right.
- [76:23]
B
You'Ll go with that one. Okay, so basically your interpretation is the correct one. A little bit of both. Thank you for that. And do you have the microphone? Okay, brilliant. Thank you.
- [76:35]
C
I'd like to pick up on the point you made about Anglophone cultures. And my question is to prizes, particularly the Nobel Prize for literature, create problems for literature and authors from developing countries in the sense that the countries are perceived externally, particularly in the Anglophone world, as having one author only. The examples are obvious. Let's take Mahfuz in Egypt, Nadine Gordon in South Africa, Pamuk in Turkey, Patrick Wach in Australia. And. And I could go on and on. Sorry, say that again. That the country that wins the Nobel Prize in literature is perceived as. Because it is one effort, one author from wins the prize. The country in the external world is seen as having one author only. Right.
- [77:28]
B
Goes back to that question that we were saying, that you suddenly become a.
- [77:31]
C
Voice of Indian or other literature and authors from that country. Well, Yeah, there is something to it, actually. Although with one example that you gave Patrick White, or with Pamuk, actually, I can say things about. We do know of other Turkish writers and other Australian writers. Patrick White. I think of Patrick White as one of the greatest, like of the five greatest writers of the 20th century. According to me, Patrick White would be one. But his reputation, like everything under the moon, it's subject to fickleness and fashion and change. And Patrick White has fallen terribly out of fashion. I'm sorry to have to use that word about literature, but it is true that literary tastes are also a matter of fashion, and nobody reads them anymore. But these things always go in cycles and I think change. But it is true that sometimes one figure may be seen as being either representative of a nation or having a darker interpretation of the representative, that they put other writers in the shade. It's a big tree, and all the little trees under it lack nourishment. Whereas if you go to the country in question, rather than if you change perspective from the Anglophone world, this is true, or Turkey itself, the countries in question, you'd find out that inside there's a far greater pluralism of reading. Like there are many writers who are also considered great and are read, not necessarily that throttle or the stranglehold that a Nobel laureate may have, which is seen to be the case from the outside. Elif, what do you think? Do you think Pamuk's Nobel Prize stopped people from reading you or Tanpinar or, you know, whoever.
- [79:26]
D
It didn't stop. I understand your question, absolutely. But you know, of course, that pluralism there inside the country, pluralism doesn't necessarily mean solidarity or, you know, togetherness. I think as writers, we have, or, you know, particularly novelists, we have inflated egos. And it's not a coincidence that you can't find, especially in Turkey, no two novelists who say nice things about each other. You know, everyone has their own little island, has their own little, you know, number of supporters, which I find very sad, in fact, because culture is a circle, it's a whole, you know, everything is connected. So if they read, if the readers read another author, that means they will also read my book or somewhat someone else's book. It will also help, you know, the circulation of knowledge. But this is not how we reconcile. And this pains me. You know, very broadly speaking, in America, the culture tells you, you know, if someone has written a book, you can do better. This is what they teach their kids. Whereas in Turkey, it's like we're playing musical chairs, as if there's a limited number of, you know, seats. And if somebody is sitting, that means they have taken your position, your seat, and you Become resentful against that person. So these are the things that are also happening inside the homeland, not only in the outside world, but there are big prejudices, biases within that country as well. You know, our attitude towards each other. My Irish friends tell me 1960s Dublin was a bit like that. Yes, smaller world and people had very emotional and politics was very heavy. So in Istanbul we're a bit like that.
- [81:03]
B
You mentioned the bigness of rightly egos in. Is the bigness also a sort of over sensitivity as well? So you cannot stand for someone else to be successful. It's sort of. It boulders.
- [81:15]
D
It comes with the job, doesn't it? I mean, because imagine you are alone in your own little imaginary cocoon. You think you're God. We create characters, we kill those characters. We think we are the center of the universe, you know, and we want to be regarded as such when we leave our house. So this is very dangerous what we're doing, you know, who is going to balance us, that energy as writers? I really think once the novel is over, we need to go out and do something else in order to balance that, you know, accumulation of arrogance.
- [81:49]
C
Two counterexamples. Actually. The Indian literary scene is particularly vicious and particularly toxic about other people's success. And my generation of writers, and I'm part of an incredible generation of writers, I feel the stuff that's coming out from Indian writing in the field of Indian writing in English now is just enthralling. I feel. I feel we kind of have an unspoken pact with each other, that we will look out for each other, break that circle, that drip, drip, drip of poison down the generation and be supportive and helpful. And I know my peers and I, we all try to sort of, you know, be supportive. The Pakistani writers writing in English now, they love each other, they're constantly supporting each other, they're talking about each other. And I think this is a wonderful model of writing.
- [82:38]
D
I think, you know, just one line, if I may.
- [82:41]
B
I'll have to close with this one.
- [82:45]
D
Thing that opened my eyes years ago in Boston, you know, the Iranian diaspora. When I went to me, I went to many of their events. For instance, a political science comes on stage and he says, oh, let me read you a poem from so and so. That poem has been translated by this person. So he honors the work of the translator, of the poet. Then the translator comes and says, I was inspired by this filmmaker. They're more careful about these things, that maybe it's just when you're in the diaspora, when there's an exile. When you can't go back home, maybe you learn to appreciate each other other's works more. But in Turkey, we are not there yet.
- [83:23]
B
I would add just to close that perhaps one is the most critical of the culture. One knows best because we know it. And it's like sort of, it's like your family, you see everything and you're so hurt when it lets you down, but that's because you love it so much. I think we're going to have to end. We're exactly right on time. But there will be a book signing and book selling afterwards and then some drinks and then some jazz. So please, please join us. You've been an amazing audience.