'Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters’ Elif Shafak and Armenians

French Ambassador to Turkey Laurent Bili presented Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters to Elif Shafak just before I left home for my summer holiday.  As soon as I settled in Didyma for my short stay, I visited a bookstore and bought a copy of the Turkish translation of the Bastard in Istanbul which was actually published in Turkey in 2006 but I hadn’t read then. I also visited Shafak’s web site. The Turkish author born in Strasbourg (France), lived in Madrid (Spain) as a teenager, has later come to Turkey and completed her studies in international relations in one of the eminent universities of Turkey. Further she has got a PhD in political science and taught at another worthwhile university in Istanbul.

I must say I am rather puzzled. Is there a very high wall between Shafak’s academic identity and writer identity so that she has not utilized her knowledge on Eastern Question in Bastard in Istanbul? Is it possible that she does not know scholarly works of academicians, such as Bernard Lewis, Justin McCarthy, Stanford J. Shaw, Norman Stone and many others? What about documents available in archives of several countries such as Russia, Austria, Armenia? The only character in the novel who owns the Turkish thesis that Armenian deportation / relocation (tehcir) was not a genocide but an inevitable war emergency, is someone named Anti-nationalist Senarist of Ultra-nationalist Films. And the poor guy gets stuck when he is accused of telling the official history, in other words accused of lying. The label is readily there, “denying Armenian genocide allegations is defense of official Turkish history and only ultranationalists do that”. God save anyone from falling into such a mistake! Who wants to be labelled as an ultranationalist at such a period where being nationalist is damned! One wonders if Shafak could not create a more knowledgeable character who knows the issue in depth and could pose the Turkish thesis more soundly. Perhaps this is the point “the skill of  working on the subconscious of Turkish public” –as highly praised by Ambassador Laurent Bili-- to deserve Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from France comes in! 

At her web site it is stated that Shafak is a feminist. I invite her to discover the 19 young women of Yukarı Kırzı village of Bayburt who preferred to commit suicide throwing themselves into well rather than living under atrocities and assaults of Armenians in 1917. She can easily find out about Eastern Anatolian Muslim women who lost their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons; got raped, tortured and killed during WWI and the War of Independence. The sufferings and losses of Armenians can not be denied. But as Bruce Fein states “Muslims died in even greater numbers (approximately 2.5 million in Eastern Anatolia) from Armenian and Russian massacres and wartime privations as severe as that experienced by relocated Armenians. When Armenians held the opportunity, they massacred Turks without mercy … The war ignited a cycle of violence between both groups, one fighting for revolutionary objectives and the other to retain their homeland intact”. Shafak owes a novel to be dedicated to the memory of Eastern Anatolian women who suffered in hands of Armenians.

Bernard Lewis Speaking on Armenian Allegations (from YouTube)

Armenian Holocaust:My Story blog by Selma Aslan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Gayriticari-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.