WHEN I get a text message from Elif Shafak that reads “Meet me at Starbucks”, my heart sinks. Not just because of the coffee but because it’s such an un-Turkish place for an encounter in Istanbul with the country’s best-selling female author. I had hoped for something more exotic. A steamy hamam (bath house), perhaps?
Luckily, Starbucks is too busy to accommodate us and Shafak leads me instead to a cafe inside a department store where shoppers whirl around us with dervish-like frenzy. “This is where I write,” she says, settling at the communal table. “Here with the noise, the music, the bustle. I find it stimulating.”
It makes sense. Her writing throbs with vitality on the page. Her stories are social. In her novel The Bastard of Istanbul, published in English three years ago, families and friends eat, argue and love. But they do so mostly in the domestic, private sphere, not in public places. Which is why it’s a surprise to hear that Shafak considers Istanbul a feminine city. In the week I have been here, I have noticed groups of men on street corners talking, men in cafes playing backgammon, men fishing on the Galata bridge. It does not feel like a feminine city to me.
“In old Ottoman poetry, Istanbul is always referred to as ‘she’ – the virgin who has been married a thousand times. Ankara is masculine, geometrical, straight but Istanbul is curvy, round, mysterious, a labyrinth,” insists Shafak, who is a confirmed feminist. “Women are claiming the public space more and more. Secularisation and modernisation have been taken to the furthest point, through the abolition of polygamy and other legislation. Ataturk was good for women but now we have to go further still.”
Noticing groups of young women laughing and talking together, some veiled and some not, I ask about her attitude to the veil. She hesitates. “There are six or seven words for ‘veil’ in our language, so it has a different nuance or emphasis. Its meaning can be religious, cultural or political but you can’t lump all those together. Some women here and abroad get very tense and strident about this question but we need to find a way not to generalise or simplify. Not just about the present but also about the past.