C
OSMOPOLITANISM,
I
DENTITY
F
ORMATION AND
S
UFISM
IN
E
LIF
S
HAFAK’S
N
OVELS
Hacer Uğur
10038906
Thesis rMA Literary Studies
Supervisor: prof. dr. Esther Peeren
Second Reader: dr. Leonie Schmidt
University of Amsterdam
Graduate School of Humanities
Contents
INTRODUCTION
:
I
dentity
Formation,
C
osmopolitanism,
H
ospitality and
M
odernity……….. 3
Identity Formation as Performance/Performativity……….5
Cosmopolitanism and Hospitality………6
Modernity: Chatterjee and Chakrabarty………... 9
Chapter Outline………...10
C
HAPTER 1: The Ideas Of Hospitality and Cosmopolitanism in The Bastard of
Istanbul
and The Flea Palace ………..
121.1 Hospitality in The Bastard of Istanbul ………...12
1.2 Cosmopolitanism vs. Cosmopolitanisation………15
1.3 The Ashure Metaphor in The Flea Palace……….16
1.4 Conversation, Tolerance, Hospitality and Cosmopolitanism………..19
1.5 Conclusion………23
C
HAPTER 2:Cosmopolitan Belonging as a Counter-Alternative for National
Belonging in The Saint of Incipient Insanities………...
252.1 Cultural Identity: Performance and Performativity in The Saint of Incipient Insanities………27
2.2 Cosmopolitan Being and Belonging as a Counter-Alternative to National or Cultural Belonging in The Saint of Incipient Insanities………....34
2.3 The Alphabet Soup and Chocolate Metaphor………39
2.4. Conclusion………....42
C
HAPTER 3:Sufism as an Alternative Tool for a Cosmopolitan Understanding in
The Forty Rules of Love………...
453.1 The Rumi Phenomenon ………....45
3.2 Looking to the Past for Strategies to Cope with Modernity in The Forty Rules of Love……….50
3.3 Cosmopolitanism and The Forty Rules of Love………...51
3.4 Conclusion……….61
CONCLUSION……….63
Introduction
Identity Formation, Cosmopolitanism and Modernity
In an age defined by globalization, angst and the associated economies of fear and hatred play a substantial role in our perceptions of the ‘Other’. These perceptions or, more precisely, preconceptions lead to our wish to limit our welcoming of others. In “Migrating from Terror: The Postcolonial Novel after September 11” Margaret Scanlan points out that since September 11 public terror generated by “violent revolutionaries” has increased and has been “manipulated by politicians, the press and novelists” (266). She expresses her discomfort with repeated references to “Islamic terrorists” or “Islamo-fascists,” which, she argues, “have justified many acts of discrimination” and have been further reinforced by popular films and television programs that present “Islam as a religion of violent fanatics” (Scanlan 266-67). Scanlan is particularly uneasy about the way in which post 9/11 novels by prominent American novelists such as Don DeLillo, John Updike and Sherman Alexie have fallen short in terms of creating “a context large enough to include ordinary Muslims, people with differing political and religious perspectives” (267).1 According to her, novelists should be concerned to “turn to traditional
strengths of fiction,” such as its capacity to “voice silenced thoughts” and to “require readers to practice empathy by reading a first-person narrative” (Scanlan 267).
It can be inferred from Scanlan’s statements that she shares Kwame Anthony Appiah’s contention that cultural productions play an essential role in the constitution of conversations between different ways of life:
Conversations across boundaries of identity – whether national, religious, or something else – begin with the sort of imaginative engagement you get when you read a novel or watch a movie or attend to a work of art that speaks from some place other than your own. So I’m using the word “conversation” not only for literal talk but also as a metaphor for engagement with the experience and the ideas of others. And I stress the role of the imagination here because the encounters, properly conducted, are valuable in themselves. Conversation doesn’t have to lead to consensus about anything, especially not values; it’s enough that it helps people get used to one another. (Appiah 85)
In her article, Scanlan analyses three novels – The Inheritance of Loss (2006) by Kiran Desai, The
Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) by Mohsin Hamid and In the Country of Men (2007) by Hisham
Matar – that offer a post-colonial perspective on the war on terror. While the war on terror depends on stark polarities, the novels discussed “internalize a conflict in ordinary people between their cultural and religious heritage and western values and amenities” (Scanlan 266). They also tease apart the identities fused by the war on terror, such as the migrant and the terrorist, the Muslim and the fanatic, or the American and the right-wing neocolonialist (Scanlan 277). In this way, Desai, Matar and Hamid not only “replace the lethal polarities of public rhetoric with the hesitations, qualifications, and complexities of lived experience,” but also “put the artifice of fiction to the service of a modestly progressive hope” (277).
In recent years, a number of studies dealing with the way post 9/11 novels have represented the war on terror or have contested or affirmed its discourses have appeared. This existing scholarship, however, dominantly focuses on novels written by Anglophone Pakistani, Arab or Indian novelists. While these novels and the analyses conducted of them are of great significance, looking at the works of a Turkish author can provide new insights. Like the aforementioned novels analyzed by Scanlan, the works of Elif Shafak – one of Turkey’s most acclaimed contemporary authors2 – try to establish the type of “conversations across boundaries
of identity” discussed by Appiah, with the aim of challenging negative and prejudicial attitudes towards otherness. They do this by focusing on the many tensions and conflicts between different groups within Turkish society, as well as on the way Turkish people, especially Muslims, are perceived abroad. In this study, I will close read four of Shafak’s novels – The Flea Palace (2004), The Bastard of Istanbul (2007), The Saint of Incipient Insanities (2004) and The Forty Rules of Love (2010)3 – paying specific attention to how they portray processes of identity formation and the
role the notion of cosmopolitanism plays in how identities are shaped and reshaped through encounters with others. I argue that Shafak’s novels function as cultural narratives that facilitate the understanding of the impact of globalization on contemporary Turkish and Muslim identity and ask what contributions they make to the discussion of cosmopolitanism as a way of acknowledging differences in a respectful, unbiased way. I also ask what Shafak’s novels say about how encounters with others should be mediated in a globalized, cosmopolitanized world. Finally, I look at the way in which Sufism – as portrayed in The Forty Rules of Love – contributes to scholarly discussions about the concept of modernity. I argue that the kind of imagined
2 Elif Shafak is the most widely read female writer in Turkey. Her novels have been translated into more
than forty languages and she has been awarded the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. She has also been longlisted for the Orange Prize, The Baileys Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Award, and shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and RSL Ondaatje Prize. In 2017, she sat on the judging panel for Man Booker International Prize (information taken from the About the Author section in Three Daughters
of Eve and http://www.elifsafak.com.tr/biography/ ).
modernity this novel presents is not national or exclusive, but cosmopolitan and inclusive. In the remainder of this introduction, I will first discuss notions of identity formation as performance and performativity, then notions of cosmopolitanism and alternative modernity, and finally provide a chapter outline.
Identity Formation as Performance/Performativity
The notion of identity formation is central to all of Shafak’s novels, but particularly to The Saint
of Incipient Insanities (2004), which I will discuss in the second chapter of this study. The novel
revolves around several graduate students in the United States from diverse countries, including the US, Turkey, Spain and Morocco. The characters suffer from not being treated as individuals but as representatives of the particular cultures they come from. While trying to adapt to their new environment, they come across several everyday problems that lead to a certain feeling of solidarity among them despite their ostensibly irreconcilable upbringings. Their interactions with each other and with the outer world are at the heart of the novel.
I will use the theories of performance and performativity by B. J. Biddle and Judith Butler to explore whether there is a notion of self that can be utterly isolated from the national context in which it was formed by analyzing the two main characters Gail and Ömer, who resent the idea of not being seen as individuals free from any socio-cultural attachments. Against Gail and Ömer’s desire to develop identities not dependent on their background, in “Recent Developments in Role Theory,” Biddle points to “the fact that human beings behave in ways that are different and predictable depending on their respective social identities and the situation” (68). He further proclaims that:
If performances in the theater were differentiated and predictable because actors were constrained to perform "parts" for which "scripts" were written, then it seemed reasonable to believe that social behaviors in other contexts were also associated with parts and scripts understood by social actors. (68)
According to Biddle, then, people are obliged to perform parts in real life “for which ‘scripts’ were written.” To put it differently, identities are shaped through people’s participation in a particular culture or cultures. This statement of Biddle’s resonates with Judith Butler’s idea of performativity, which denotes the inculcation of particular norms through the repetition, over time, of behavior that accords with these norms. Performing parts in real life is, however, not exactly the same as performing in the theatre, according to Butler. In “On Judith Butler and
Performativity,” Sarah Salih points out that with her notion of performativity Butler is “not claiming that gender is a performance” and that it is necessary to distinguish the two. According to Salih, Butler “emphasizes the importance of this distinction, arguing that, whereas performance presupposes a preexisting subject, performativity contests the very notion of the subject” (56). Butler’s notion of performativity then, is not the same as Biddle’s conviction that people perform in real life just like in the theatre, as it emphasizes the involuntary and painful process the performing in real life entails. In other words, while an actor in a theatre has the power to decide whether to act out a particular written script, people in real life do not have this freedom of choice but have to adhere to particular ‘scripts’ in order to be socially accepted. In an interview with Liz Kotz, Butler expresses this as follows:
My whole point was that the very formation of subjects, the very formation of persons, presupposes gender in a certain way—that gender is not to be chosen and that ‘performativity’ is not radical choice and it’s not voluntarism [...] Performativity has to do with repetition, very often the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms to force them to resignify. This is not freedom, but a question of how to work the trap that one is inevitably in. (84)
Gail’s attempt in Shafak’s novel to refuse to conform to an imposed identity and instead to voluntarily take on an identity from the ‘Other,’ in order to achieve a cosmopolitan understanding, then, is, according to Butler’s model, doomed to fail. The Saint of Incipient Insanities confirms Butler’s assertion that detaching oneself from one’s national identity in order to achieve a cosmopolitan culture on a global level is not feasible. The novel ultimately challenges Gail’s ideas rather than confirming them by emphasizing that the characters are unavoidably caught in a trap and have to learn to cope with it. The issue at play is not that the characters are different and belong to certain groups, but that they need to be respected despite their differences. The novel is ultimately about the sense of non-belonging shared by the characters, which is overcome by their creating new forms of belonging based on acknowledging that they all carry a cultural and personal history with them, and on accepting each other despite these differences.
Cosmopolitanism and Hospitality
We’ll mess things up, we’ll blur the lines. We’ll bring irreconcilable ideas and unlikely people together. […] on and on, until we grasp categories for what they really are: figments of our imagination. The faces we see in the mirrors are not really ours. Just reflections. We can find our true selves only in the faces of the Other. The absolutists, they venerate purity, we hybridity. They wish to reduce everyone down to a single identity. We strive for the opposite: to multiply
everyone into a hundred belongings, a thousand beating hearts. If I am a human, I should be big enough to feel for people everywhere. (Shafak 2016: 267)
These words belong to A. Z. Azur, a character in Elif Shafak’s lastest novel Three Daughters of Eve (2016). The novel is comprised of two plotlines and moves back and forth between 1980 and 2016. Azur, a professor at the University of Oxford, tries to “assemble a miniature Babel” out of his students by deliberately choosing students holding irreconcilable ideas for his seminar on God (224). Like in her other novels, Shafak emphasizes the importance of conversations between people with conflicting viewpoints.
Significantly, Azur's ideas resemble those of contemporary thinkers on cosmopolitanism. One of the most prominent current thinkers of cosmopolitanism, Kwame Anthony Appiah, in his influential book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006) lists the characteristics a cosmopolitan needs to embody:
One distinctively cosmopolitan commitment is to pluralism. Cosmopolitans think that there are many values worth living by and that you cannot live by all of them. So we hope and expect that different people and different societies will embody different values. […] Another aspect of cosmopolitanism is what philosophers call fallibilism—the sense that our knowledge is imperfect, provisional, subject to revision in the face of new evidence. (144)
It can be inferred from this that hoping and expecting “that different people and different societies will embody different values” also entails the practice of respect and tolerance. There exist varying understandings of the notion of tolerance, however. Jacques Derrida, for instance, states in “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides – A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida” that if one is being hospitable because one is being tolerant, it is because one wants “to retain power and maintain the control over the limits of my 'home,' my sovereignty, my 'I can' (my territory, my house, my language, my culture, my religion, and so on)” (127-128). Thus, Derrida considers tolerance as a form of conditional hospitality, which is most frequently practiced by individuals, families, cities or states, and which does not amount to true or absolute hospitality. Here, tolerance is a “condescending concession” by the mighty who tell the weak from a superior position: “you are not insufferable, I am letting you be, but do not forget that this is my home” (Derrida and Borradori 127).
Tzvetan Todorov, in The Fear of Barbarians (2010), also highlights the negative side of tolerance when he differentiates empire from cosmopolitanism. He states that there is an empire when “the different ingredients in the whole are not treated equally,” so that the “dominant
culture tolerates minority cultures, but does not admit them on the same level as itself” (183). In contrast, a cosmopolitan approach accepts differences and plurality among subjects, and “gives them a common framework and the status of equality of rights” (Todorov 184).
For Appiah, a cosmopolitan understanding of tolerance involves “interacting on terms of respect with those who see the world differently” (145). True cosmopolitanism involves the respecting of all kinds of differences and partialities. Cosmopolitanism is not an easy task, however; in a sense, it embodies “the challenge” rather than “the solution” (Appiah XIII). The difficulty of cosmopolitanism is also stressed by Ulrich Beck in “Cosmopolitan Society and its Enemies.” In this article, Beck asserts that cosmopolitanism entails sharp contrasts an individual has to learn to find ways to cope and live with in today’s globalized world as a result of cosmopolitanization.4 The characters in Shafak’s novels are trying to live and cope with these
internal clashes. Some of the main characters in her novels go so far as to deny any local attachments. The fact that locals are transformed as a result of cosmopolitanization, however, does not mean that all locality should be denied. On the contrary, as Beck notes:
In relation to the concept of "globality" […] cosmopolitanism means: rooted cosmopolitanism, having "roots" and "wings" at the same time. In other words, it rejects the dominant opposition between cosmopolitans and locals as well: there is no cosmopolitanism without localism. (19) Beck’s claim is shared by Appiah, who states that the kind of cosmopolitanism that should be defended is a partial one: “We need take sides neither with the nationalist who abandons all foreigners nor with the hard-core cosmopolitan who regards her friends and fellow citizens with icy impartiality” (XIV-XV).
One way of coping with the sense of non-belonging globalization can produce is to stick to your national identity, whereas the other is to form new ways of belonging that do not depend on cultural proximity. In Shafak’s novels, the impulse to stick to your national identity is presented as damaging and most of her main characters are people who strive to establish challenging relationships with those from other cultures. As noted, the character of Gail in The
Saint of Incipient Insanities takes this to the extreme, as she proposes to deny all local attachments,
while seeking to take on the identities of others. This proves to be highly problematic in that it
4 Cosmopolitanization, according to Beck, means globalization within nation-state societies. As a
consequence of cultural globalization, local people transform and no longer necessarily share the same cultural values with their fellow citizens. I discuss cosmopolitanization in more detail in the first and second chapters of this study.
fails to acknowledge both the fact that identity formation is a process of inculcation that occurs over time and the importance of a sense of “belonging,” which also only develops over time.
In his article “‘Belonging’ in the Cosmopolitan Imaginary,” Craig Calhoun is critical of the type of cosmopolitanism pursued by Gail. He emphasizes the value of social solidarity and states that “much of the new liberal cosmopolitan thought proceeds as though belonging is a matter of social constraints from which individuals ideally ought to escape, or temptations to favoritism they ought to resist” (535). He holds that “it is important not to think that valuing humanity as a whole eliminates […] the need for valuing various more intermediary solidarities” (Calhoun 550). While agreeing with liberal cosmopolitans’ refusal to rely on tacit nationalism, he problematizes the way in which these cosmopolitans “offer no strong account of social solidarity or of the role of culture in constituting human life” (Calhoun 535). For Calhoun, the notion of ‘belonging’ is highly significant, as “social relationships might be as basic as individuals,” and “individuals exist only in cultural milieux – even if usually in several at the same time” (535). Shafak’s novels, too, imply that social solidarity is an essential part of our lives. Thus, in The Saint
of Incipient Insanities, not being able to feel solidarity in any attachment, Gail cannot cope with the
sense of non–belonging and ends up committing suicide.
Modernity: Chatterjee and Chakrabarty
In the third chapter of this study, I rely on the concept of modernity in order to explore what kind of alternative modernities are imagined in Shafak's work. In his speech titled “Our Modernity,” Partha Chatterjee proposes to reject the enforced uncritical application of a singular Western modernity in India by past regimes (14). He suggests that the previously colonized nations should look to the past in order to actively participate in constructing alternative modernities. He states that “this sense of attachment [to the past] is the driving force of our modernity” and should not be considered “backwardlooking, as a sign of resistance to change” (20). He holds the opinion that “it is our attachment to the past which gives birth to the feeling that the present needs to be changed, that it is our task to change it” (20). Following Chatterjee’s logic, in the third chapter, I explore how The Forty Rules of Love offers an alternative modernity which is inclusive. In this novel, looking back to the past is not an act of pure nostalgic longing but rather a strategic move of looking to the past, specifically for the teachings of Sufism, in order to come up with an alternative cosmopolitan understanding.
The challenge remains, however, that it is extremely difficult to imagine a national or local kind of modernity which will not be exclusive of certain people. After all, some people’s imagined modernity may not be desirable for others. This problematic nature of becoming
modern is addressed by Dipesh Chakrabarty. In his introduction to Habitations of Modernity: Essays
in the Wake of Subaltern Studies, he problematizes “the violent and undemocratic steps that the
process of becoming modern” entails (XXIV). He also stresses the problematic nature of the term “modernity” itself by asking, “if modernity is to be a definable, delimited concept, we must identify some people or practices or concepts as non-modern” (XIX).
According to Chakrabarty, it is important to “envision or document ways of being modern that will speak to that which is shared across the world as well as to that which belongs to human cultural diversity” (XXI). Thus, imagined modernities, including the “alternative modernities” proposed by Chatterjee, should be concerned with being inclusive. As I will show, the need to imagine a modernity that will address everyone without being exclusive is powerfully asserted by The Forty Rules of Love. The novel criticizes the modernities imagined by people from various backgrounds and offers a universal alternative modernity (instead of a national or local one) which does not require a forced transformation at the expense of one’s beliefs or norms.
Chapter Outline
This study is comprised of three chapters that focus on how Shafak’s novels deal with different aspects of cosmopolitanism. In the first chapter, I analyze the way cosmopolitanism and conditional hospitality are practiced in The Bastard of Istanbul (2007) and The Flea Palace (2004), which portray a moment of longing for understanding and communication between different groups in the contemporary Turkish context. The problems among the different characters in both novels arise because of disconnections that result directly from a lack of communication. In my analysis, I ask why, in these novels, cosmopolitan belonging seems to be preferred over other sorts of belongings.
In the second chapter, I explore how cosmopolitan belonging is portrayed in The Saint of
Incipient Insanities (2004). The characters in this novel, which is mainly set in the United States,
share a sense of non-belonging which brings them together. I investigate how cosmopolitan being and belonging are constructed by the novel as alternatives to conventional belongings such as national, cultural or religious ones. The characters feel detached from both their native culture and the American culture they are living in. The conversations between them and the novel's positive outcome demonstrate that dialogue “between people from different ways of life,” as asserted by Appiah, is a productive model of cosmopolitanism (XIX). In my analysis, I focus on how the novel approaches representational identity and how it propagates cosmopolitan belonging as an alternative for national or cultural belonging. My main contention is that the novel is not about non-belonging – as Shafak has asserted in an interview – but actually posits
the notion of cosmopolitan belonging as a solution to the sense of non-belonging (which is always only a sense, as there is no such thing as not belonging to anything with identity being an irreducibly social construct). Most of the characters in the novel successfully combat their feelings of non-belonging by creating a new sense of belonging based on their shared incompetence or unwillingness to comply with their own particular cultural collectivities. At the same time, through the character of Gail (and, to some extent, Ömer), The Saint of Incipient
Insanities also warns against an overly radical cosmopolitanism that would cut all ties with the
local and that would view identity as an individual choice that can be made in the moment. In the third and final chapter, I show what kinds of alternative modernities to a singular Western modernity are imagined in The Forty Rules of Love (2010), how these alternative modernities are addressed, and how this novel, too, proposes cosmopolitanism as desirable. My main focus is on the way, in the novel, Sufism is constructed as a means to achieve national and cross-cultural solidarity. I argue that Sufism, which is an Islamic mystical tradition, has much in common with the cosmopolitan ideals developed by Appiah. Shafak’s novel has been criticized by Elena Furlanetto and Muhammed Hüküm for instrumentalizing the East (and the teachings of Rumi) according to the needs of the West. Although I partly agree with their criticism, I nevertheless propose that the novel, by validating Sufist ideas, provides a valuable model for a global cosmopolitan tolerance that includes both the West and the East. I hold that Sufism has the potential to offer an alternative modernity that is aligned with cosmopolitanism. Through my close reading of The Forty Rules of Love, I demonstrate how Sufism can act as an alternative tool to work towards the ideal of living peacefully in a world full of strangers.
Chapter 1
The Ideas of Hospitality and Cosmopolitanism in
The Bastard of
Istanbul
and
The Flea Palace
In 2013, the Taksim Gezi Park protests started out as a sit-in by a group of people who were against the preparations for changing an Istanbul public park into a museum area or mall and turned later on into a widespread reaction after the police interfered with pepper gas. Within a short time, the protests’ aim became more than saving a park and everyone who had resentments and felt that their voice was not being heard, joined the protests. Ultimately, protests turned into Anti-Government demonstrations that expanded to many other cities. Those protests brought to light the fact that some groups of people felt marginalized in Turkey. In an article in The Guardian she wrote after the Gezi Park protests in Turkey, Elif Shafak states that 50% of the population who did not vote for the AKP government felt alienated, distanced and, at times, belittled.5
Turkey, having historically been on the mental border between the East and the West, has a long history of dealing with influences from both sides and there have always been people in Turkish society who felt marginalized because of this. Considering this recent saddening upheaval, I want to examine the cultural, religious and political tensions between people in Turkish society by analyzing two of Shafak’s novels: The Bastard of Istanbul (2007) and The Flea
Palace (2004). In both of the novels in question, local people no longer share the same cultural
values with their fellow citizens in the age of globalization. This alteration is a consequence of cultural contamination, which follows directly from the fact that people are subjected to an ongoing cultural transformation as a result of the constant flow of objects, people, and imaginations (Appadurai). As a result, a lack of effective interaction occurs among locals in spite of their spatial proximity. To address the tensions that arise from this in Turkey, in this chapter I will use the concept of hospitality (as developed by Derrida) and that of cosmopolitanism (as discussed in the introduction). I will begin by looking at the role Derrida’s notion of conditional hospitality plays in The Bastard of Istanbul and The Flea Palace. Subsequently, I will examine to what extent the characters and their interactions approximate true cosmopolitanism. This will facilitate the constitution of an awareness of the pitfalls of “limited” cosmopolitanism.
1.1 Hospitality in The Bastard of Istanbul
In The Bastard of Istanbul, the regulars of a café named after the Czech author Milan Kundera have a conversation about their uneasiness within Turkish society. They do not feel welcome in a country where they do not fit into the frame of the principal groups. Although they are locals, they are belittled into feeling like guests in their land of origin. In what follows, I will examine the experience of this marginalized group of people in The Bastard of Istanbul.
In “Hostipitality,” Derrida talks about the aporia of hospitality. True hospitality is unconditional hospitality where you are open to accepting anyone without any limits. However, in order for hospitality to be possible, there needs to be a door. At the same time, if there exists a door there can be no hospitality because then someone has the keys to the door and is thus in control of the conditions of hospitality (Derrida 14). Besides that, it is practically impossible to be unconditionally hospitable because of the potential threat posed by the guest. The impossibility of unconditional hospitality, however, is not a negative thing; on the contrary, it helps the constitution of conditional hospitality to happen, as Derrida stresses in a dialogue with Borradori: “without at least the thought of this pure and unconditional hospitality … we would have no concept of hospitality in general” (129
).
Derrida’s concept of hospitality is generally applied to the relationship between states, cities, and houses as hosts and outsiders as guests. In Mireille Rosello’s Postcolonial Hospitality: The
Immigrant as Guest, European countries are the hosts while immigrants, expats, refugees, and even
second-generation children of migrants are guests. While exploring this kind of hospitality relation is of the utmost importance, I contend that the Derridean concept of hospitality is not only limited to the relationship between Western countries and non-western immigrants. This theoretical framework is also applicable to the relationship between locals who are hosts in the sense that they are nationals, but who are transformed into a new kind of stranger or guest by the constant motion of objects, people, imaginations etc. which define the politics of the contemporary world (Appadurai 45). The abovementioned participants in the Gezi Park protests could also be seen as people who no longer feel at home or in control of what is happening in their home as they feel uneasy about not being sufficiently represented and heard by politicians. Likewise, in The Bastard of Istanbul, the gatherers at the café in Istanbul express their resentment at being alienated because of not fitting into the dominant groups that indulge in the comfort of being represented.
In the conversation in the café named after Milan Kundera6 the character referred to as
the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist says:
Western politicians presume there is a cultural gap between Eastern Civilization and Western Civilization. If it were that simple! The real civilization gap is between the Turks and the Turks. We are a bunch of cultured urbanities surrounded by hill-billies and bumpkins on all sides. They have conquered the whole city. The streets belong to them, the plazas belong to them, the ferries belong to them. Every open area is theirs. Perhaps in a few years this café will be the only place left for us. Our last liberated zone. We rush here everyday to seek refuge from them. Oh yes,
them! God save me from my own people! (81, emphasis in the original)
In this passage, it becomes clear that the people in the Istanbul café feel estranged from and uneasy within Turkish society. It is of significant interest that the speaker differentiates himself from a “them” defined as “the Turks.”7 At first, it is not clear to whom the speaker refers but
later on the opposition is clarified in terms of one between cultured urbanites and backward people from rural areas. The visitors of the Café Kundera believe that nothing belongs to them save this Café they visit on a regular basis. The speaker indicates that they seek refuge from their own people. The gatherers are not called by their first names but instead described according to their features by the third-person narrator as the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist, the Exceptionally Untalented Poet, the Closeted Gay Columnist, and the Nonnationalist Scenarist of Ultranationalist Movies. These characters call themselves “cultured urbanities” and are afraid of experiencing a traumatic encounter with their own culture. They reflect an alternative to the nationalists, secularists, and conservatives that constitute the majority in Turkish society, different in terms of their professions, ideologies and sexual preferences. They believe that they are stuck in between “secular modernists”8 who are “so proud of the regime they constructed”
6 The narrator points out that “How and why it (the café) was named after the famous author, nobody
knew for sure” and that “a lack of knowledge magnified by the fact that there was nothing, literally nothing inside the place reminiscent of either Milan Kundera or anyone of his novels” (76). However, the regular visitors of the café have a lot in common with the Czech writer, who moved to France as an exile at the age of 46 and resided there from then on. “He was stripped of Czechoslovak citizenship in 1979” and “has been a French citizen since 1981.” It is also of particular interest that he considers himself a French writer (Wikipedia).
7 The italicized “the” is an indication of contempt by the speaker. It most probably implies that he does
not consider the two dominant groups as real Turks, instead claiming this status for himself and his friends at the Café.
8 This refers to the Kemalists, who constitute the majority of voters for the CHP (Republican People’s
and “conventional traditionalists”9 who are “infatuated with the Ottoman past”. The first have
half of the state of Turkey and the army on their side, and the latter the other half of the state and the general public, leading the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist to ask: “What is left for us?” (81).
1.2 Cosmopolitanism vs. Cosmopolitanisation
It is clear that the characters congregating at the Café feel stuck between the dominant groups in Turkey, which have the authority of being represented. They do not belong to either of these groups and thus feel alienated. That they feel suppressed by the dominant culture becomes clear from the fact that, while the cartoonist talks about his ideas, he "throws the windows a sidelong look, as if afraid that a throng of folks might ram them with their clubs and cannonballs” (81). They no longer feel home in the Café, which is perceived as open to invasion — making them the unwanted guests and the invaders the hosts who determine who can be where — precisely because it is a cosmopolitan space (although cosmopolitanism is limited here to an urban professional elite). Accordingly, Ulrich Beck states in “The Cosmopolitan Society and its Enemies”: “To feel oneself as part of a cosmopolitan community and to declare one’s position publicly can be turned into its opposite by others’ violent ethnic definitions of what is alien” (36). In other words, there is a danger posed by one’s fellow citizens as a result of not conforming to the accepted norms of a society, as the above-quoted passage from the novel also indicates.
In his article, Beck makes a distinction between cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitanization. The latter refers to globalization within national societies (25-26). Globalization from within national societies is “the other side of deterritorialization […] loosening and transforming the ties of culture to place,” according to Beck. To put it differently, local people no longer necessarily share the same cultural values with their fellow citizens in the globalized world. They transform by adapting the cultural norms of different people around the globe as a consequence of globalization (as a result of television, mobile phones and the internet making it possible to see other ways of life) (31). Cosmopolitanization leads to the drifting apart of people within a society and results in their becoming strangers to the dominant local culture. Subsequently, cultural contamination takes place. In “Cosmopolitan Contaminations,” Jeroen de Kloet points out that cultural purity will no longer be possible in a global world which is in constant movement due to cultural flows. He introduces terms like “pollution” and “impurity” “as possible ways to rethink culture in a time of globalization.” This kind of transformation by
9 This refers to the majority of voters for the AKP (Justice and Development Party) and MHP
way of “cultural contamination” is what the visitors of Café Kundera have undergone. While they become increasingly “polluted” and thus gradually transform into strangers to their own culture, at the same time they want to be respected as Turks.
This relates back to Derrida’s concept of hospitality, defined in “Hostipitality” as “the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory” (4). In this instance, the visitors of Café Kundera are of Turkish origin — and thus actually not foreigners in the conventional sense — but still feel alienated as they feel that they do not fit into the frame of the dominant groups of people in Turkish society. They find refuge in Café Kundera where “no one forced you to change since human beings were thought to be essentially imperfect and uncorrectable” (87). For Asya,10 one of the main characters in the novel, this Café
is a sanctuary, as at home “she always had to correct her ways, striving for a perfection that was beyond her comprehension” (87). Indeed, Café Kundera for its visitors is a place where they can escape the imposition of societal norms. In the café, there are pictures from many distant countries, but these are either Western countries or exotic places, none of them are spaces in between, like Turkey. From time to time, “they would pick a frame, depending on the angle of the table where they sat and on where exactly they wished to be zoomed on that specific day,” and would take off “to that faraway land, craving to be somewhere in there, anywhere but here” (77).11 They no longer feel at home and long to be somewhere else rather than in their country of
origin. More specifically, they do not feel happy in their country anymore and no longer have any attachment to what is supposed to be their “home”. Yet at the same time, they want to claim Turkey for themselves, representing Istanbul as a city overrun by “rural hillbillies” who should have stayed away. There is thus an underlying claim to Turkey as a cosmopolitan realm that would welcome people precisely like them.
The Bastard of Istanbul, then, illustrates the possibility of hosts becoming guests in their
own “home” through cosmopolitanization (inner globalization). This prospect brings to the foreground the need to also be tolerant of those who have become strangers in their own country, which is also central to The Flea Palace, as I will show in the following section.
1.3 The Ashure Metaphor in The Flea Palace
10 The "bastard" in the novel’s title refers to Asya as she is an illegitimate child. However, it could also
refer to Asya as an unruly cosmopolitan girl, very different from a conventional Turkish girl.
11 These passages imply that the visitors of the Café Kundera have an illusionary picture of Eastern and
Western countries in their heads. Thinking that Turkey is one of the few countries that is in between, they assume that they would be happier and more accepted in either of these places than in their own country, whereas they have no way of knowing whether this would actually be the case.
In The Flea Palace, the stories of residents of Bonbon Palace are being told one by one by the omniscient narrator, Me, who resides in Flat Number 7. The residents all have their unique and flawed life stories and come from diverse ethnic, religious, socio-cultural and political backgrounds. Due to their spatial proximity, however, ultimately a kind of (limited) cosmopolitan understanding ensues. The differences between the residents of the flats are reflected by the architectural structure of Bonbon Palace. The stories differ from each other conspicuously, and so do the lodgers of the apartment. As the narrator points out: “The most striking characteristic of the building was that no two storeys were alike, having been constructed […] as if to compensate for their lack of balconies on the façade, the flats at the entrance had much larger windows than the rest” (63). He goes on to state: “So striking were the differences that one could not help but think the residents of the building shared the same space without living in the same place” (63). This statement stresses that while the lodgers of Bonbon Palace are close to each other in terms of spatial proximity, they live in their own separate worlds. This remoteness despite the physical closeness is further hinted at by the history of the building. The narrator recounts that in the place of Bonbon Palace there were once two ancient cemeteries, one belonging to Muslims and the other to Armenians. “On the six foot wall separating the two cemeteries, rusty nails, jagged fragments of glass and, in spite of the fear of bad luck, broken mirror pieces had been scattered upright to prevent people trespassing from one to the other” (19). This historical information points out the institutionalization of separation despite proximity.
The same goes for the modern-day residents of Bonbon Palace, who come from diverse ethnic, religious, socio-cultural and political backgrounds. Only the Russian HisWifeNadia and the half Turkish, half Kurdish Sidar are ethnically different in the apartment. Nonetheless, the fact that the others are all Turks does not change the fact that they differ in many respects, as an outcome of the aforementioned process of cosmopolitanization defined by Beck. Despite the characters’ closeness in terms of space, they are indifferent to each other. The only place where some of them (or more specifically some of the women lodgers of the building) come together is the beauty salon of the hairdresser twins Cemal and Celal in Flat Number 4. This disinterestedness, however, changes a little bit over the course of the novel. In spite of their huge age difference, Madam Auntie of Flat Number Ten becomes friends with Su, the 11-year-old daughter of Hygiene Tijen, who resides in Flat Number 9. Likewise, the academician Me (the narrator) from Flat Number 7 and The Blue Mistress from Flat Number 8 enter into a relationship despite their socio-cultural differences. The twins Cemal and Celal, who are frustrated because of their huge differences, also come to terms with their dissatisfaction and
ultimately all the residents of Bonbon Palace are brought together by way of an apartment meeting made up by Cemal (329).
The cosmopolitan interaction among the lodgers of Bonbon Palace is configured by the novel’s metaphorical use of the ashure dish. HisWifeNadia, a Russian former academic who is married to Metin Chetinceviz from Flat Number 6, cooks ashure and while she does so, contemplates its legend:
The ashure in the legend was the epitome of a triumph deemed unachievable. All the creatures boarding Noah's ship in pairs to escape doomsday had cooked it together at a time when they could no longer endure the journey when they were surrounded on four sides with water and were in danger of extinction given an empty pantry and with a long way still to go. Each animal had handed over its leftovers and hence this amazing concoction had emerged by mixing things that would otherwise never match. Though there was not much doubt as to what modern-day
ashure was composed of, still the components of this dessert weren’t entirely evident, and extra
ingredients things could be added into it any time. It was precisely this lack of a fixed recipe that made ashure so unlike other desserts. Neither the ingredients were restricted nor the measurements fixed. As such, it ultimately resembled a cosmopolitan city where foreigners would not be excluded and latecomers could swiftly mix with the natives. (198-9)
Here, it is made clear that ashure “was the epitome of a triumph deemed unachievable.” In the legend, the voyagers on Noah’s ship all give whatever they have and, as a result, ashure comes into existence. “Each ingredient in the cauldron” retained “its distinctiveness within that common zest,” just like the workers in the Tower of Babel. HisWifeNadia writes in a letter to her aunt: “The fig in the ashure, for instance, though subjected to so many processes and boiled for so long, still preserved its own flavor. As they boiled there on the stove, all the ingredients prattled on in unison but each in its own language” (200). Nevertheless, in the modern day,
ashure no longer welcomes novelty but has fixed ingredients, as HisWifeNadia recognizes. Being
a stranger in Istanbul, HisWifeNadia is very interested in cooking ashure. However, each time she tries to make the dish something goes wrong. As the narrator puts it: "There was either too much or too little sugar or some ingredient missing altogether and if not these, even when everything was mixed in properly, something would go wrong in the cooking phase" (198).
The fact that she cannot cook ashure as good as she, or more precisely, her husband Metin Chetinceviz wants it to be, can be related to the impossibility of “unconditional hospitality.” As people only show hospitality conditionally, so does the dish (as it is consumed presently) merely welcome quite limited ingredients. Thus, the narrator states: “Whatever the
legend of Noah’s Arc and the adventure behind it, when it came to putting the teachings into practice, ashure turned out to be a highly unadventurous food” as “it did not welcome innovations” (200). Among the characteristics of ashure, the one that mostly attracts HisWifeNadia is that “neither the ingredients were restricted nor the measurements fixed” (198), so it “resembled a cosmopolitan city where foreigners would not be excluded and latecomers could swiftly mix with the natives” (199). However, in the present day, the way people consume it only allows for specific ingredients, making it non-cosmopolitan. It is also relevant that, despite the fact that she has never cooked ashure in her life, HisWifeNadia’s aunt arrives at the same conclusion, telling her niece in her letters that “just as one could not modify the verses of the Bible as one pleased, it was better not to play with ingredients freely either” (199). This reveals a shared idea of the limited nature of hospitality.
The novel’s use of the ashure metaphor and particularly the fact that HisWifeNadia fails to meet her (and her husband’s) expectations on each of her attempts highlights the challenging nature of the constitution of a cosmopolitan society where everyone can live together in unison “preserving their own flavor”. As a result of the widely accepted taste that defines the welcomed ingredients of ashure, modern-day ashure is only conditionally hospitable: not everything is accepted into the dish. Despite this, HisWifeNadia longs for a cosmopolitan environment, as does Shafak.
1.4 Conversation, Tolerance, Hospitality and Cosmopolitanism
In her novels, Shafak is deeply engaged in constructing a cosmopolitan way of life. In a news column, she expresses her yearning for the “multilingual, multiethnic, multireligious” Ottoman past which embodied an “astonishingly, gracefully intense and vivid cosmopolitan culture” (2006a). According to Shafak, there is an inclination to be with people who resemble us. Consequently, the biggest obstacle to this ideal world is the reluctance of societies to acknowledge otherness. As Shafak points out in The Happiness of Blond People: A Personal Meditation
on the Dangers of Identity,
Perhaps we gaze too much and too often at our own reflections, in the sense that we generally, if not solely, interact with people who think like us, vote like us, talk like us and are like us. If asked whether we have anything against those outside our cultural cocoons, the chances are that we will firmly and sincerely say no. Of course, we are not biased. Of course, we have nothing against
them. On the contrary, we relish some degree of multiethnic diversity […] All of this enriches our
Here, Shafak critiques our tendency not to socialize with people who are different from us. Instead, we “form comfort zones based on similarity,” which results in our holding “macro-opinions about ‘Others’, whom, in fact, we know so little about” (24).
In The Flea Palace, accordingly, the clients of the hairdressers Cemal and Celal gossip about the residents of the flat without really knowing them. What is more, such “macro-opinions” eventually lead to a sense of superiority which proves to be highly problematic. It is this type of a sense of superiority that also seems to be at play for the visitors of the café in The
Bastard of Istanbul. They, too, do not want to engage with them, i.e. “the uncultured Turks from
rural areas”. Both novels suggest that it is of crucial importance to recognize that nobody can be considered better than others. Terry Eagleton states that “no nation has a monopoly on justice and humanity, fairness and compassion” (151). Likewise, no person is the perfect embodiment of these virtues. As Oscar Wilde also says: “Everyone may not be good, but there is always something good in everyone. Never judge anyone shortly because every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.”12 Everyone has an inclination to bad deeds, as everyone also has
goodness in them. What is most crucial is the acknowledgment of the fact that all human beings are in essence imperfect. In the following, I will look at some examples from The Flea Palace where the longing for perfection is denounced by the characters.
The Blue Mistress of Flat Number 8, who is an uneducated but religiously well informed (which is considered weird by others) mistress of an olive oil merchant, contemplates that:
Those who unreservedly believed in their own goodness and the superiority of their morality were doomed to failure far more than the bad for they were so smug in their completeness. There were no leaky roofs in the edifices of their personalities, no crumbling floorboards, neither a hole to be filled, nor a notch to be fixed. The Blue Mistress had found them incomplete in their gorged fullness but being unable to express this, she had gradually recoiled from the good, distancing herself step by step from their learned codes and credo of goodness. (178)
In the given example, The Blue Mistress criticizes those who consider themselves flawlessly good, and takes a distance from them as she senses the faulty nature of such arrogance. Likewise, Madam Auntie who resides in Flat Number 10 in Bonbon Palace tells Su, the 11-year-old
12 http://www.thequotepedia.com/everyone-may-not-be-good-but-theres-always-something-good-in- everyone-never-judge-anyone-shortly-because-every-saint-has-a-past-and-every-sinner-has-a-future-oscar-wilde/.
daughter of her neighbors across the hall not to pay attention to her classmates who call her “Licesu” because of the lice she had recently:
Everyone gets lice as a child and not only as a child. People get lice when they grow up as well. How can you know who has lice and who does not? Can you see lice with the naked eye? Everyone claims to be clean as a whistle but believe me they too have lice somewhere in them! (132)
Madam Auntie clearly shares the idea that no one is perfect with The Blue Mistress. She does not join the gossiping taking place in the hairdressing salon either. On the contrary, she intervenes at times in the conversations in order to suggest understanding for the people about whom the denizens are talking.
The problem Shafak’s novels focus on is that people do not truly try to understand or tolerate each other because they do not engage in genuine conversation: “When people stop talking, genuinely talking, to each other, they become more prone to making judgments” (2011: 24). Thus, in the above-mentioned examples, there is a lack of communication among people who share the same space. Their lack of conversation, which results in their not knowing each other and not having any real bonds, eventually leads to judgmental behavior.
The visitors of Café Kundera, for example, fall into the error of exhibiting the same ostracizing behavior they passionately complain about when they regard themselves as “cultured urbanites” suppressed by “rural hillbillies.” This viewpoint does not comply with the true cosmopolitanism proposed by of course. Accordingly, Appiah. In his terms, the gatherers of the café are the kind of cosmopolitans who “regard [their] friends and fellow citizens with icy impartiality” (XIV-IV). True cosmopolitanism, in contrast, involves the respecting of all kinds of differences and partialities. As with absolute hospitality, however, the question is whether true cosmopolitanism could ever exist in practice, as it would entail respecting those who would reject and persecute cosmopolitans.
In Of Hospitality, in the part titled “Foreigner Question: Coming from Abroad/from the Foreigner,” Derrida talks about Socrates defending himself against accusations of being a sophist. Socrates does not know the language of the judges and demands to be treated as a foreigner. A foreigner has some rights and Socrates is aware of this, so he says: “Now if I were really a foreigner, you would naturally excuse me if I spoke in the accent and dialect in which I have been brought up” (19). This passage is of importance because here Socrates complains about not even being treated as well as a foreigner. More specifically, he suggests that one should also be tolerant of non-foreigners who have become strangers in their own country. Although
tolerance seems to be a helpful concept, as I pointed out in the introduction to this study, it also has drawbacks, as pointed out by Derrida when he notes that tolerance can manifest as a “condescending concession” on the part of the mighty, who tell the weak from their superior position: “you are not insufferable, I am letting you be, but do not forget that this is my home” (127). This kind of hospitality is exactly the one which is exercised by the dominant groups with regard to the “impure” locals in The Bastard of Istanbul. At the same time, however, the “impure” locals in question, the visitors of the café, also make an exclusive claim to Istanbul that would only welcome “cultured urbanites” like themselves and not the “rural hillbillies” who run the country.
As noted in the introduction, Todorov, in The Fear of Barbarians, also highlights the negative side of tolerance as well. In addition, he carefully delineates the difference between cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, arguing that cosmopolitanism not only entails granting equal rights to all different groups in a society, but also “imposes a regulation of differences” (184). The ashure metaphor precisely illustrates this type of cosmopolitanism in which all ingredients are included and accepted with their unique flavors.
Appiah’s warning about the limits of cosmopolitanism is relevant here. While he states that cosmopolitanism, in the sense of being a citizen of the world, is a positive development, he questions how far it can be taken (14). He states that cosmopolitanism should not be seen as some exalted attainment, but as beginning with the simple idea that, in the global community as in national communities, we need to develop habits of coexistence: conversation in its older meaning of living together, association (17). This can be connected to Eagleton’s definition of common culture. For Eagleton, a common culture in a more radical sense of the term is not one in which everyone believes in the same thing, but one in which everyone has equal status in cooperatively determining a way of life in common. A culture which results from the active participation of all its members is likely to be more mixed and uneven than a uniform culture which admits new members only on its own terms (Eagleton 153). Eagleton’s proposal of common culture encourages conversation leading to improving habits of coexistence. To work towards this, we should make sure that we have a substantial relationship with our fellow citizens.
While this remains not quite feasible in a culture like that of Turkey – and pretty much everywhere – where there are vast differences between what different groups consider desirable and not, I believe that even the idea of this kind of common culture would be beneficial. The imaginary apartment meeting in The Flea Palace can serve as a model of this kind of positive cooperation. All the residents of Bonbon Palace come together and express their ideas in the
story made up by Cemal; the apartment manager Hadji Hadji13 lists some new rules, one of them
covering the prohibition of dogs in the building, among other animals like horses and donkeys. Upon being asked by Sidar, who owns a dog, why dogs are not allowed, the manager responds that “according to our religion dogs are reprehensible” (334). The manager changes his mind, however, when Sidar states that this does not apply to his dog as his dog is not Turkish but Swiss, and the Blue Mistress adds that “the ‘Seven Sleepers’ in heaven had dogs as well” (334-35). Although this is an imaginary meeting – which would be difficult, if not impossible, to stage in reality, especially on a much larger scale than a single apartment building – it exemplifies the significance of conversation for the constitution of fruitful habits of coexistence. At the end of
The Flea Palace, the narrator Me responds to his arrogant girlfriend Ethel, who looks down on the
residents of Bonbon Palace, by groaning “God knows, the apartment building I formerly lived in was probably no different, but back then I didn’t have a clue.” He continues to state that now “the only difference is that I’m not indifferent to the neighbors at Bonbon Palace” (404-5). In other words, the narrator has developed some kind of attachment to his neighbors, regardless of their socio-cultural, ethnical, religious and political differences from himself.
1.5 Conclusion
In this chapter, I have analyzed the way conditional hospitality is practiced in Shafak’s novels The
Bastard of Istanbul and The Flea Palace. Shafak presents Turkish society as a culture which has not
achieved true cosmopolitanism (an ideal involving the acceptance of multifarious personalities and conflicting viewpoints). For Shafak, it is of the utmost importance to acknowledge differences and to socialize with people who share the same space. This is, of course, not to say that we only have duties towards those we happen to be close to in terms of spatial proximity. As Appiah rightfully points out, “the one thought that cosmopolitans share is that no local loyalty can ever justify forgetting that each human being has responsibilities to every other” (15). However, as Appiah also states: “Society and human fellowship will be best served if we confer the most kindness on those with whom we are most closely associated. A creed that disdains the partialities of kinfolk and community may have a past, but it has no future” (16). In both of the novels discussed, a longing is expressed for more understanding and communication between people in the Turkish cultural context. The problems among locals in both novels arise because of a disconnection which follows directly from a lack of communication. As such, the novels
13 Muslims who perform the pilgrimage to Mecca are called Hadji. The repetition of the name is because
suggest that while it is crucial to show hospitality to the “external” other, it is equally important to demonstrate the same amount of hospitality and tolerance to the “internal” other.
Chapter 2
Cosmopolitan Belonging as a Counter-Alternative for National
Belonging in
The Saint of Incipient Insanities
I saw a crow running about with a stork I marveled long and investigated their case, In order that I might find the clue
As to what it was that they had in common ... When amazed and bewildered, I approached them, Then indeed I saw that both of them were lame.
Mathnawi, Book II
The above quoted anecdote is included in the preface of Elif Shafak’s novel The Saint of Incipient
Insanities (2004). It is a story from Rumi’s Mathnawi titled “The Cause of a Bird’s Flying and
Feeding with a Bird That Is Not of Its Own Kind.” It has a special place in The Saint of Incipient
Insanities, which contains sections titled The Crow, The Stork, Birds of a Feather and Destroying
Your Plumage. The main characters in the novel, like the limping birds observed by the sage in the anecdote, have fallen behind their own flocks. Despite their differences, however, they enjoy each other’s company based on their shared inability or reluctance to comply with their own kind.
Shafak told Myriam J. A. Chancy in an interview that The Saint of Incipient Insanities is “fundamentally a story of belonging” (65). Shafak might associate the novel with non-belonging because of its main characters’ experience of a sense of non-non-belonging. But the characters in the novel come to terms with their sense of non-belonging by seeking new kinds of belonging. The reason they connect to each other is not their cultural proximity but a mutual sense of a lack of attachment to their national, religious, or ethnic background. What brings them together is this shared sense of non-belonging. Together, the characters constitute a cosmopolitan community. As such, in this chapter, I read The Saint of Incipient Insanities as a novel about “cosmopolitan belonging” rather than about “non-belonging.”
The central characters in The Saint of Incipient Insanities resent the national, ethnic and religious labels ascribed to them. Rather than remaining within their particular collectivities, they prefer to partake in multicultural interactions. The novel recounts the story of Ömer, Piyu and Abed, who are foreign graduate students in the United States respectively from Turkey, Spain
and Morocco. They share a small apartment in post 9/11 Boston and try to adjust to their new life in their own ways. The everyday problems they come across while trying to adapt to their new environment generate a certain feeling of solidarity among them despite their seemingly irreconcilable upbringings. Their interactions with each other and with the outer world are at the heart of the novel. The three protagonists resent the fact that they are not identified as individuals but rather as representatives of the respective groups they come from. They want to be seen as individuals and treated as such. Ironically, though, even if they deny that they belong to a particular culture, they still are attached to their respective cultures in an unconscious way.
Another central character, Gail, a half Jewish and half protestant American who becomes Ömer’s wife, suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder and manic depression; she constantly changes her name as she does not want to be assigned a fixed identity. She is critical about the fact that people have to stick to the identity they are born with, proposing that “rather than taking pride in being born what you have been born, try being instead what you have not been born" (145). This changing of identities by simply changing one’s name, however, is rendered problematic in the novel.
The Saint of Incipient Insanities demonstrates how the way we see others shapes those who
are subjected to our gaze. The characters in the novel are at once subjects and objects of this shaping way of seeing, which is often biased. The reason for the biased perceptions highlighted in the novel is the lack of knowledge on the part of the subject of the gaze about its object. To counter the bias of the gaze, Shafak’s novel brings together characters with conflicting viewpoints and puts them into conversation with each other. Over the course of time, as a result of this dialogue, the characters start to recognize their prejudices about their respective “Others” and adjust their gaze accordingly.
In this chapter, I will show how the novel proposes a sense of cosmopolitan belonging by giving readers access to various points of views. As such, it provides readers with the chance to empathize with characters from backgrounds radically different than their own (with whom in everyday life they most probably would not have the opportunity or even the desire to socialize). Put in a slightly different way, the novel can be seen as an attempt to trigger self-reflection and to broaden horizons, thereby making readers move beyond cultural classifications and stereotypes, and towards a cosmopolitan understanding.
In the course of my analysis, I will ask how feasible Gail’s suggestion to “stop identifying ourselves […] with the identities given to us” is. I will also explore what benefits and pitfalls are demonstrated in Shafak’s novel with regard to this wish to detach from assigned cultural identities, and how a cosmopolitan being and belonging is constructed by the novel as an
