Lea Ypi’s prize-winning memoir, Free, detailed the experience of growing up in Albania both before and after communist rule. Her new book, Indignity, reconstructs the life of her grandmother, who arrived in Tirana from Salonica as a young woman and became closely involved with the country’s political life. She currently holds the Ralph Miliband chair in politics and philosophy at the London School of Economics. The Turkish writer Elif Shafak is author of more than 20 books, both nonfiction and fiction, including the Booker-shortlisted novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World and, most recently, There Are Rivers in the Sky. When the pair talked over videocall, Ypi travelling in India and Shafak at home in London, their conversation ranged over the threats of censorship and the rise of populism, the challenges of being writers with multiple identities and the importance of representing complex historical events in their work.
Elif Shafak It’s the age of angst. There’s so much anxiety, east and west, young and old, so many people are anxious right now, it’s quite palpable. And I think in many ways, it’s the golden era for demagoguery, for the populist demagogue to enter the stage and say: “Just leave it with me. I’m going to make things simple for you.”
Lea Ypi What’s striking for me is the contrast between this really rich life that you find in literature and in academia, and the platitudes of politics. In literature there is an experimentation with genres and with cultures and with languages, and so you get this sense of complexity. You have almost the exact opposite happening in the political realm, where it’s all about simplicity. It’s all about being on message, not making it too complex. It has to be short. It has to be very simple, on the verge of banality. And increasingly, it’s also exclusionary. So there is this tendency in contemporary political discourse to say: OK, let’s drive out the migrants – a sense that you can only get a just society if you have homogeneous societies.
ES It’s important to talk about censorship as well. Not just the pressures that come from outside or above, but also from within: self-censorship. How do we overcome that? I come from a land in which words are heavy. Anything you write about, from sexuality to gender to memory to history, can offend the authorities. I had a taste of that when one of my novels, The Bastard of Istanbul, was put on trial: it tells the story of an Armenian American family and a Turkish family through the eyes of women, but it deals with memory, amnesia and the biggest taboo still to this day in Turkey, which is the Armenian genocide. When the novel was published, the prosecutor asked for three years in prison. The words of fictional characters were brought to court as evidence. And during that time, there were people burning EU flags, spitting at my picture, burning my picture, calling me a traitor.
Years later two of my books were investigated for the crime of obscenity: 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World because it has a sex worker in it, and The Gaze because it deals with subjects like child abuse, in a country where we have child brides, which, in my opinion, means child abuse. The reason I mention this is because these are the realities of the societies where we come from. We have to carve a space for ourselves in which we forget about all of that. Because if we start thinking, will people get offended? Will the authorities get upset? Then we cannot produce a single line.
LY What has been important for me about growing up in Albania and then navigating the transition from communism to the post-communist period is that living in a totalitarian society makes you very, very sensitive to propaganda of all kinds, all the time. And so there was never actually this break where first I lived in an unfree world and then I became part of the free world, it was always about remaining vigilant to see where there is censorship and ideological manipulation and propaganda – even coming from places that seem completely innocuous and innocent at first.
You’re always thinking about what is critically missing in a society in which you live: where is the gap in democracy? There is all this praise of freedom, and yet we live with politicians and people who make decisions that are so obviously constraining the freedom of other people everywhere.
We have this expression in Albania: “Istanbul is burning and the old woman is combing her hair.” You worry that in some ways, what you’re doing is completely irrelevant, but you say to yourself: my job is just to be critical and to put pressure and to remember, to try and make people think about how the past shapes the future, how these ideas repeat themselves, and how these political conflicts in the present all have a history and all come from some unresolved trauma in the past.
ES We have so much in common: the subjects, the themes that we deal with, the geographies that we come from, but also the silences that we dig into. I think for both of us, memory is important, not in order to get stuck in the past, but because without remembering we cannot repair.
LY It starts by understanding how every voice out there is always a result of some power relation or other. This was my experience with writing Indignity, which was about my grandmother, and going into the archives. It turned out it was really hard to research a woman who lived in the 1920s and 30s in particular. She lived in Salonica, which was still very much culturally Ottoman when she was growing up. It had just become part of the Greek state, and they completely shaped the discourse of what they wanted to be told and how it was told.
If you’re relying on official authority sources, they all have their own agenda, and by the way in which they construct the archive, by the way they write history, even by the way they shape literary traditions, they always have an agenda that is usually the agenda of the people in power. So how do you challenge that? I think it’s only when literature becomes resistance that it can challenge that, but it needs to explicitly want to do that.
ES I think being a writer is a bit like being a linguistic archaeologist: you have to dig through layers of stories, but also layers of forgettings. Of course, with the Ottoman empire, we’re talking about a multi-ethnic, multilingual, multi-religious empire that lasted for more than 600 years. It’s incredibly complex, and the story changes depending on who is telling it, but also what we are mindful of is who is not allowed to tell the story. That’s what we want to get at.
So the way, for instance, Ottoman history is being taught in schools, and I went to Turkish schools: there’s a void, and that empty space is almost always filled by ultra-nationalistic, sometimes ultra-religious, imperial nostalgia that talks about what a great empire we were. Wherever we went, we brought justice and civilisation. The moment you start asking: OK, what about the stories of women? What was the Ottoman empire like for a prostitute, for a concubine in the harem, for a peasant woman who had no access to power or authority? Then there’s a huge silence. Or the moment you start asking about minorities, maybe a Jewish miller, a Kurdish peasant, an Arab farmer, a Greek sailor. What was the Ottoman empire like for them? Or an Armenian silversmith? Again, big silence.
But if I may quickly add this, I don’t like it when writers try to preach or teach or lecture, and I think that’s something that we need to be very careful about.
LY Literature has this democratic function only because it doesn’t preach. If it were to preach, it would lose it. If you were to tell the reader: “This is how you should see the world, this is what’s right, and this is what’s wrong”, then you become authoritarian.
And then, actually, literature loses this power that it has to continue with the reader. I don’t think the book is finished when the writer writes it: it continues to write itself in its reception, in the way people discuss it, in the way its themes feed into societal and cultural debates more broadly.
When Free came out, people kept sending me this photo of [Turkish president] Erdoğan with the book during a summit to discuss the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace treaty. It’s kind of unpleasant at one level, because you see this book, and you know how you wrote it, and you know what you wanted to write, and it was all about freedom, and then suddenly you see these very authoritarian characters with it. In every society some politicians appropriate art of all kinds but my inclination is to just say: “Yeah, but that’s also part of the book’s story.”
It’s a place of ambiguity, and I also have an ambiguous attitude to it; I don’t like the fact that I’m the writer who writes about Albania, or about communism, or what it’s like to live in totalitarianism and then in capitalism. What makes it special for me, and I’m sure this is the same for you, is that it’s a small place from which you can really reconstruct the world. Albania is a country that was under the Ottoman empire, but my home city, Durrës, was a Roman city. It has one of the largest amphitheatres in the Balkans. It was before that a Hellenic city. After that, it was a centre for Byzantium. It was occupied by Venice. So in this 100 sq metres in the centre of the city, you have millennia of European history.
I always laugh when I hear discussions about joining the EU, because I think, when have we not been touched by the EU? When were we ever left alone by Europe?
ES It’s a heavy experience to be a Turkish novelist, and for a female novelist, I think it’s a bit heavier, because you need to deal with additional layers of misogyny and patriarchy. I don’t want to paint a completely bleak picture, but I also want to be truthful: you are slapped on one cheek, and there’s always that hurt, but simultaneously kissed on the other cheek, because readers read. Stories do matter, particularly in countries where democracy is diminishing: if a country is going backwards, ironically literature and the arts become all the more important. So there’s this very divided existence.
LY I don’t know if it’s a depressing sign of the times that we have all these really interesting debates in the world of culture, which are not really reflected in anything going on in political world, where it’s actually, if anything, the opposite, where you have simplicity and reduction and exclusion. How is it possible that we’re not yet managing to find a way of bridging the two?
ES I cannot ever forget the fact that I’m an immigrant in the UK. But equally, I’m someone who genuinely believes in multiple belongings. So of course, being Turkish is a big part of my work and who I am, but Britain also gave me so much. The English language gave me so much, and I’ve been writing in this language for more than 20 years now. How can I deny that it gave me a sense of home? But I would like to think of myself as a citizen of humanity, as a citizen of the world, which is something that has been belittled so much in this time of populist demagoguery. We’ve been told that if you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere, and that’s something that I want to challenge. I think that is wrong. We are living in a very complex era. We have massive global challenges ahead of us, and everything from the climate crisis to the possibility of another pandemic to deepening and widening inequalities, shows how deeply interconnected we are. Interview by Alex Clark.
Indignity: A Life reimagined by Lea Ypi is published by Allen Lane on 4th September. There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak is published by Viking.
