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Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak: Istanbul, city of dreams and nightmares | Art and design | The Guardian

Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak: Istanbul, city

of dreams and nightmares
As his Museum of Innocence comes to Britain, the Nobel prizewinner takes his fellow author Elif
Shafak on a tour of his cabinet of curiosities. They talk about what Istanbul means to them and
the collective amnesia of a country where writers can be jailed for a tweet
Elif Shafak
Wednesday 27 January 2016 12.56GMT

stanbul is the name of a city and the name of an illusion. In reality, there is no such
thing as Istanbul. There are only Istanbuls competing, clashing and somehow
coexisting within the same congested space. That is one of the themes I want to talk
about with Orhan Pamuk, the winner of the Nobel prize for literature. The loss of
plurality and nuance. The increasing dominance of an ideology of sameness throughout
our motherland.
Turkey is a country of easy forgettings. Everything is written in water, except the works
of the great architects, such as Sinan, which are written in stone; and the lines of the
great poets, such as Nazim Hikmet, which are learnt by heart. Istanbul is a city of
collective amnesia. As you walk the streets of London, you come across countless
plaques commemorating the people composers, novelists, politicians who lived in
those buildings. Memory is kept alive, through statues, signs and books, too.
Not so in Istanbul. And where there is such lamentably poor memory, it is easier for the
states selective memory to survive unquestioned. A subjective way of reading the past,
introduced from above, means the majority view triumphs over individuality and
diversity. Hence all the jingoistic rhetoric in Turkey about our noble Ottoman
ancestors. These imperial dreams have encouraged a disastrous neo-Ottoman foreign
policy in the Middle East, a dangerous fusion of nationalism and Islamism.
We meet at Somerset House in London, where Pamuks Museum of Innocence is making
an appearance. Pamuk is excited and slightly nervous, a sign of how much he cares
about his brainchild. The museum has grown simultaneously with the novel of the same
name: a story of lost love about an (already engaged) wealthy socialite called Kemal and
his obsessive love for his cousin twice removed, a beautiful shopgirl called Fsun. It
features an array of everyday items from wedding invitations and newspaper cuttings,
to tin spoons and salt shakers that chronicle the couples ill-fated romance, while also
telling the story of the two families, and the city of Istanbul itself.
We talk about the city we call home. Pamuk was born and raised in Istanbul, the son of
an upper-class Niantai family, a sense of continuity central to his life. My connection
has been more complicated. Born in Strasbourg, raised by a single mother in Ankara,
Madrid, Cologne, Amman, and then a newcomer in Istanbul, I have led a nomadic life,
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Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak: Istanbul, city of dreams and nightmares | Art and design | The Guardian

insider and outsider. As a result, the way we perceive the city differs radically. Where he
sees melancholy, an underlying persistent sorrow for the times lost, I see volatility an
erratic urban energy that could go in any direction, dizzying, stimulating and exhausting
all at once. But we start with common ground: how the past, far from being a bygone era,
is still alive in Turkey.
There are significant challenges about bringing the exhibition to London. For the tourists
who visit the museum in Istanbul every year, finding its location among the labyrinthine
streets of the city is part of the experience. The poor, worn-out and unkempt
appearance of these neighbourhoods during the 10 to 15 years before I opened my
museum sometimes depressed me, says Pamuk. With the help of the museum, he
wanted to give these areas a poetic aura.
Even without those shabby streets of Istanbul, the exhibition in Somerset House is an
exquisite discovery. It is beautifully put together in two rooms that, though small, retain
the warmth and charm of the original. Every little cabinet is a window into the soul of
Istanbul, every piece is chosen carefully and is clearly a work of love. And love is the
keyword in the entire project. Not only Kemals love for Fsun, but also Pamuks
unwavering dedication to and passion for literature.
Museums and novels have much in common. They share, says Pamuk, a desire to show
what is special about the ordinary and to help people to see things differently.
Annually, around 30,000 people visit his museum, mostly foreigners. The majority have
not read the book, he adds, although the two are organically linked. He describes the
entire project as a Proustian endeavour: instead of the madeleine, he uses everyday
objects to trigger memory. Through bric-a-brac, visitors are introduced not only to the
world of Kemal and therefore the world of the author behind the text but also to the
cultural history of Turkey, and the drastic transformations the country has gone
through.
The London exhibition also boasts Grant Gees documentary, Innocence of Memories, a
powerful examination of Istanbuls endless conflicts with its skyscrapers, construction
projects, gentrification and insatiable greed.
Pamuk and I tiptoe around politics. These days, anyone who dares to say anything
critical is labelled as a betrayer and an enemy of the nation. We both know what it
feels like to have to live with bodyguards because of what you have said in an interview
or written in a novel. Every poet, writer, journalist or academic in Turkey understands
that because of a book, an article, a tweet or even a retweet one can get lynched in
social media, demonised in mainstream media, put on trial or even imprisoned. As a
result, there is widespread self-censorship, like a shadow that looms in the background,
our constant companion.
In the name of westernisation, a new identity was generated by the modernist elite
throughout the republican era. They longed for a tabula rasa, a clean slate on which to
write the nations future. That negative approach to the past, ironically, made it easier
for a conservative new elite when they took hold of things after 2002 to bring forth
their own distorted version of the past. One of the endless ironies of Turkey is how
conservatives, unlike conservatives in other countries, have been less interested in
preserving the past than in actively destroying it.
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Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak: Istanbul, city of dreams and nightmares | Art and design | The Guardian

Pamuk thinks the AKP, the ruling Justice and Development party, wants to represent
itself and the people as both Islamic and modern. They have done this successfully in
business, diplomacy and politics, he says. In architecture, however, look at what they
have done the mosques are one-to-one bad imitations of classical Ottoman
architecture.
Turkish society is highly patriarchal, sexist and homophobic. The literary world might
seem to be different at first glance; in truth, it is anything but. The novel, as a genre,
arrived in Turkey at the end of the Ottoman empire, mostly from continental Europe.
The early authors initiated a literary tradition that still survives today: the Father
Novelists. I ask Pamuk what he thinks about the gender politics in literature, and how
they might be reflected in Kemals gaze. Since Ottoman times we have seen, over and
again, male novelists treating women as the Muse, almost static, to be observed and
fetishised, an almost frozen existence, beautiful to look at but devoid of intelligence or
creativity. Pamuk smiles and says: Hey, Elif, I understand what you mean, but Im a
male Turkish novelist, what can I do?
In the end, regardless of gender, being a Turkish novelist means being sentenced to
lifelong loneliness. True, writers are solitary creatures all over the world, but in deeply
polarised, extremely politicised and easily incensed places such as Turkey, a novelist is a
public figure either to be hated or loved. And from love to hatred it is a very short step
indeed.
Where freedom of speech is curbed and imagination censored, literature is,
paradoxically, even more important, art all the more needed. Stories matter in Turkey.
Every word written in The Museum of Innocence, every object in this exhibition, makes
a positive difference in a fast-flowing river of amnesia and change. The Museum of
Innocence will enrich your understanding of Turkey of what it is and what it has lost.
The Museum of Innocence at Somerset House, London, runs until 3 April
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