Had you gone looking for Elif Shafak as she wrote her most recent novel, you might have found her in a house by the Thames, listening to heavy metal.
“I don’t like silence much,” says the British-Turkish author of 20 books to date. “I love writing with the kind of music that I love on repeat. I can listen to the same song 70, 80 times. Usually, I listen to melodic death metal. I like metal core, industrial metal. Also Scandinavian, more Viking tones.”
While writing her most recent novel, There Are Rivers in the Sky, these tones were complemented by the water’s changing moods outside.
“I lived for 2½ months in a river house, literally on the river. The small garden would be flooded with every high tide. I wanted to spend some time there and observe the movement of the river […] to understand the rhythms of the water.”
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Readers of There Are Rivers in the Sky will feel these aquatic rhythms as they proceed. The work, which spans almost 500 pages, and traverses continents and generations, found its origin in “a single drop of water”.
‘In my books I like to look at historical facts, but with keen awareness that history is full of silences’
“I wanted to honour water,” Shafak says. “The land where I come from, the Middle East, is experiencing water scarcity in such an acute and alarming way. I think water is the story of our times. When we talk about the climate crisis, basically we’re talking about a freshwater crisis.”
Beginning in ancient Mesopotamia, with a raindrop that heralds a flood, the book branches into everything from mudlarking, to lost rivers, to the debate over ownership of artefacts, to genocide, to organ harvesting. But that same drop of water constantly reappears (it is a snowflake, a cloud, a river, a teardrop), unifying the story’s many elements and pointing to the interdependence and connectedness of life on Earth.
“It’s my way of saying: don’t take water for granted,” says Shafak. “We shouldn’t. Even a drop of water.”
Thinking about the dimensions of a water molecule – two hydrogen atoms bonded to a single oxygen atom – helped Shafak to structure her novel. There are three main characters: Zaleekah, a hydrologist, living on a houseboat on the Thames, in 2018; Narin, a Yazidi girl, living by the Tigris, in 2014; and Arthur, a man from Victorian London who, like that oxygen atom, links them all. He is born to poverty by the Thames in 1840 and Arthur’s extraordinary mind elevates him into a pioneering Assyriologist, and eventually leads him to the Ottoman Empire in search of a missing piece of an ancient poem: The Epic of Gilgamesh.
“I love the Epic of Gilgamesh,” says Shafak. “It’s an amazing story. The oldest piece of literature in the world, and we discard it. The mythologies of the Middle East are usually ignored. The Middle East in general is regarded as a backward territory, always associated with violence, problems, conflicts. People don’t realise that this was the beginning of civilisation. And it produced the most beautiful works of art, creativity, architecture.”
The figure of Arthur is based on the real-life Assyriologist, George Smith, the first man to translate the Epic, parts of which are housed in the British Museum. The book brings up nuanced questions around what should be done with displaced artefacts in museums around the world.
Elif Shafak says that as a writer from a ‘wounded democracy’, she has never had the luxury of being apolitical
“I think we need to talk about colonial archaeology, and I’m very critical of institutional colonialism,” says Shafak. “[But] while we do that, we should also pay attention to the stories of individual archaeologists, many of whom, with genuine passion and love, tried to do something that was very close to their hearts.”
She thinks it’s important to have these conversations “calmly, without trying to sweep it under the carpet”.
“I think it is a complicated discussion, especially if you focus on Nineveh [in present-day Iraq], which I tried to do, because of Isis’s destruction. So, we can also talk about those layers. But one thing we almost never do is recognise that these cultural artefacts also belong to the minorities in the regions where they come from. To me, this is a very crucial distinction.”
The book, in part, tells of the plight of the Yazidi people, in both the 19th century and in 2014, when Islamic State militants launched a genocide against them. Shafak points out that this was “yet another genocide in a long series of massacres throughout history, but it happened in front of the eyes of the world. We were all watching it.”
She listened to harrowing testimonies from survivors, some of which made their way into the book.
“In my books I like to look at historical facts, but with keen awareness that history is full of silences. Most of the history that we learn at school, especially in countries like Turkey is ‘his’ story. So, if you’re interested in the stories of women, if you’re interested in the stories of minorities, there are massive silences. I’m not saying literature is the answer to that, but literature can make us aware of where the silences are.”
In her public life, Shafak is a devoted feminist and advocate for minorities, migrants, those who do not have a voice. She describes herself as a “citizen of humanity” and a “citizen of the world”. In part, she owes her outlook to a nomadic life. Born in Strasbourg, she moved to Ankara aged five, following her parents’ separation. Her grandmother cared for her, while her mother went to university (and eventually became a diplomat). Shafak spent her teenage years at international school in Madrid, going back and forth to Jordan and Germany to visit her mother. She has spent time living and teaching in the US and now lives in London.
“I do find it important to be able to talk about multiple belongings,” she says. “Of course, being Turkish is a big part of who I am. And it has shaped my fiction. And I feel very connected to the people, the culture […] but at the same time I feel connected to other places as well.”
Shafak’s debut novel, Pinhan, was published in 1998, when she was just 26. Her early books were written in Turkish, using a hybrid prose style that disgruntled some readers because of its mix of the new, standardised Turkish with the old Ottoman language.
“In Turkey, broadly speaking, if you’re ultra-conservative, then you should have an interest in old words; if you are more forward-looking, you should be using new words. Whereas, as an author, I always said: we need both old words and new words. […] Language is not static. It cannot be dictated from above. […] Many people weren’t expecting a young liberal woman to embrace old words or to even know old words. But my point is, I love language. I love languages plural. For me, language is not an instrument like a pencil I use and put aside. I enter that space. I inhale that space.”
Since 2004, Shafak has been writing in English, and finds the “cognitive distance” of another language useful.
[ The ‘hidden’ Armenians of TurkeyOpens in new window ]
“It pushes you to look closer at details. Maybe words that native speakers might take for granted, you start to think about them more closely. […] It’s like taking a step back. When you want to see a painting better, you don’t always go forward, you take a step back.”
‘When I’m inside a novel, that becomes my world, that becomes my reality. I try to stay in that zone as much as I can, as deep as I can’
In her work, and in her activism, Shafak is unafraid of large topics – she’s written on everything from honour killings, to sex work, religion, generational trauma and more. She says that as a writer from a “wounded democracy”, she has never had the luxury of being apolitical.
“You do not have the luxury of saying, you know what, I’m only going to talk about my fiction. I don’t want to talk about what’s happening outside the window.”
Indeed, Shafak understands the intersection between art and politics better than most. In 2006, under article 301 of Turkish law, she stood trial for “insulting Turkishness”. A character in her novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, had referred to the “genocide” of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire. For this, Shafak faced three years in prison.
“I was pregnant at the time, and so, throughout the pregnancy, this trial went on and there were groups on the streets burning EU flags and spitting on my pictures, burning my pictures.”
It wasn’t until the day before she gave birth to her daughter that she was acquitted. A terrifying ordeal, no doubt, but rather than cowering in fear, Shafak continued to write and speak resolutely about issues that were important to her. In 2019, the year she released the Booker-nominated 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World, she was investigated by Turkish prosecutors for “crimes of obscenity”, owing to depictions of things like sexual harassment and child abuse in her fiction.
“I would not be telling the truth if I say I wasn’t affected at all, I was affected. I found it very unsettling, very unnerving,” she says.
“I think a part of me was very scarred and bruised by the experience. But on the other hand, I’ve also received lots of love and beautiful letters. Turkey is a very complicated country.”
She is constantly aware that anything she writes, tweets, shares could be taken out of context and used against her.
[ Fiction in translation: When bad choices make good storiesOpens in new window ]
“But I think the thing that helps me is when I write, I feel so free. When I’m inside a novel, that becomes my world, that becomes my reality. I try to stay in that zone as much as I can, as deep as I can. Only when the book is done, and I give it to my editor, then I start to have anxiety attacks. But by then it’s too late. The book is born. It has a life of its own and I should respect that. So, I think I love the freedom of the art of storytelling.”
There Are Rivers in the Sky is published by Viking on August 8th
