Unrelenting Humor

The main power of Elif Shafak in The Bastard of Istanbul lies in her unique and omnipresent humor.  From the funny titles of the chapters (Cinnamon, Garbanzo Beans, Vanilla, Roasted Hazelnuts), to the hilarious names of the cats (Pasha the Third, Sultan the Fifth), facetious nicknames of characters (The Dipsomaniac Cartoonist, The Closeted Gay Columnist), to the abundance of witty lines: (the namesake of the novel calls her mom auntie, “Asya auntifies her mom to keep her at a distance. ‘What an unpardonable injustice on the part of Allah to create a daughter far less beautiful than her own mother, ’” the humor rarely lets up.

The story’s scope is vast. It is heavily populated, spans continents and centuries. The Kazanci family, composed of seven women: four sisters, their mother, their grandmother and Asya, the illegitimate daughter of one of the sisters, live in one household in Istanbul. The only brother of the four sisters, Mustafa, lives in Arizona. He is married to an American divorcee, who has a daughter, Armanoush, from her first marriage to an Armenian man who lives in San Francisco with his extended Armenian family.

Complicated? Hang in tight.

Asya, a nineteen-year-old nihilist rebellious young woman, is full of anger towards her smothering caring extended family in general, and her mother in particular, for not telling her who her father is. Armanoush, who’s been very close with her Armenian paternal grandmother, a survivor of the Armenian genocide in Turkey, wants to see the house her grandmother was born in, and find out more about the details of her family’s past. So she picks up and goes to Istanbul and stays with her step-father, Mustafa’s family.

Asya is under strict instructions from her whole family to be nice to Armanoush, her step-cousin. She grudgingly obeys. But it takes no time for the two girls, of approximately the same age, to strike a deep friendship despite their diametrically opposite temperaments. One thing follows another, and gradually light is shed on historical events, dark secrets are revealed, and unexpected developments occur.

Elif Shafak talks about the Armenian Genocide in The Bastard of Istanbul. Because of that she was prosecuted in 2006 for “insulting Turkishness”, a charge that might have landed her in prison for three years. But the charges were eventually dropped.

The novel explores various attitudes about the historical deportations and massacre of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915. The Armenian view is that it was a genocide and the government of Turkey has to apologize and pay restitutions. The Turkish views differ. Some have no idea and are not interested. Some claim that Armenians killed Turks too, so Turkey has nothing to apologize for. Some say whatever happened in the past is not our fault. Let’s move on to the future. And others say we have to examine the issue and resolve it before we can move on.

Alongside these conflicting political views, Shafak also explores the similarities between the two cultures. The family relationships and gatherings, the overbearing aunts and grandparents, and the cuisines of the Turkish Kazancis in Istanbul are practically interchangeable with those of the Armenian  Chakhmakhchians in San Francisco.

There’s no shortage of mesmerizing and beautiful, but not always positive, descriptions of Istanbul. “…it is densely dark in Istanbul. Whether along the grimy, narrow streets snaking the oldest quarters, in the modern apartment buildings cramming the newly built districts, or throughout the fancy suburbs, people are fast asleep. All but some. Some Istanbulites have, as usual, awakened earlier than others. The imams…the simit vendors…the bakers…most of them get only a few hours of sleep…the cleaning ladies…of all ages, get up early to take at least two or three different buses to arrive at the houses of the well-off, where they will scrub, clean, and polish all day long…It is dawn now. The city is a gummy, almost gelatinous entity at this moment, an amorphous shape half-liquid, half-solid.”

Something that could be confusing for the uninitiated is the plethora of unfamiliar Turkish and Armenian names. However, Shafak’s characters are recognizable by their distinct and often colorful personalities. For example it’s impossible to confuse Asya’s four aunts: the tattoo-artist in high heels and miniskirt, Auntie Zeliha, the didactic high-school history teacher, Auntie Cevriye, the schizophrenic Auntie Feride who “had a problem with making eye-contact. She was more comfortable talking to objects…she addressed her words to Zeliha’s plate,” and the headscarf-wearing Auntie Banu, the fortune teller who carries two djinns on her shoulders, good one on the right, bad one on the left.

But what is constant and delightful throughout this densely populated novel full of heavy themes is Shafak’s unrelenting humor. Even at funerals and abortions.

Delicious Descriptions of Everything Indian

Let me start with a disclaimer: I like books written by authors from India, or books about India. That’s why I chose to read The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters. And it did not disappoint. It was funny, sad, touching, descriptive, with a good plot and colourful characters.

Sita, a Punjabi woman who’s emigrated to London, is on her deathbed. She calls her three daughters and makes them promise they’ll take a trip to India together to scatter her ashes in a holy river. The sisters are as different as can be, and have never been close. Sita knows this, and gives them a detailed itinerary, hoping to bring them together and make their relationship closer.

Rajni, the eldest by over a decade, is a married school principal and the mother of a university student. She is the one who takes this pilgrimage most seriously and while the other two sisters try to skip parts or do extra activities in India, Rajni tries to boss them into keeping to the letter of mom’s itinerary.

Jezmeen, the middle sister, is a struggling actress. In contrast to her two sisters, who are very much by the book, she is wild and impulsive. “Jezmeen took a long shower, letting the steam clear her blocked sinuses. She stepped out feeling instantly better –hangover turnaround was a skill that many people underestimated.”

Shirina, the youngest, who having been born and educated in London, has intentionally opted into an arranged marriage with a traditional Indian guy from a rich family in Melbourne Australia, lives with her husband and mother-in-law in a mansion and cowtows to their demands, is quiet and submissive.

From the first day the tension among the sisters comes alive, and soon it turns into bickering, arguments, finger-pointing and blaming. At times two of the sisters gossip about the third one in her absence. They accuse each other for mishaps and harsh experiences of their past. Sometimes they simply can’t stand each other and think the trip was a mistake.

During the seven arduous days of their journey the author, Kalli Kaur Jaswal, gradually reveals their life circumstances before they left for this trip, the tragedies that befell them immediately before boarding their planes to India, and the internal inferno each one is in, trying very hard not to reveal it to others, lashing out instead, at the slightest provocation. But the proximity and the circumstances don’t give them a choice and they’re let into each others’ spheres.

Jaswal explores what it means to be a woman from an Indian heritage, no matter where you live. Even the educated and the rich have a hard time liberating themselves of the bondage of ancient traditions imposed on them through the brainwashing by family, male-dominated culture and the wider world. She also portrays the various difficulties of a woman traveling in India and by extension, most of the eastern part of the planet.

There’s a lot of humour too, in the situations the sisters find themselves and the way they handle them, their relationships with other people, the clash of cultures both internally and externally, the misunderstandings and the misreadings of each other, and the pseudonyms rickshaw drivers in India assume.

There are delicious descriptions of scenes from different parts of India. “Everytime the rickshaw turned, Shirina feared a dangerous teetering and tipping and she wondered what would happen if they got into an accident here. If their bags popped free from the ropes that constrained them, their belongings mixing with the grime and dog droppings on the ground…Traffic wouldn’t stop for them –it would continue running flattening everything they had… They veered into a lane clogged with vehicles and shops jammed together. A young man on a rusty bicycle shot in front of them, making the rickshaw driver curse loudly.”

If you enjoy books by women for women, and/or books set in India, you will definitely like this one.

Who Gets the Money and How?

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu, economist from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and James A. Robinson, political scientist from University of Chicago, is a non- fiction book, which is well-researched, reasonably argued and painstakingly analytical. It’s informative, educating and thought provoking.

The authors try to prove that the reason some nations are wealthy and others are poor is not because of their geography, climate, natural resources, culture, or religion, but because of their political and economic institutions.

Nations that are rich, have a central government, respect the rule of law and are able to create “inclusive” political and economic institutions, which allow power and income to be shared by a large group of their citizens, provide incentives for people to try hard, bring in innovations, hire others and trade both internally and with other nations. The rich nations usually have democratic governments.

Conversely nations that don’t have a central government, don’t respect individual’s rights to property, and set up “extractive” political and economic institutions, –institutions that exploit people and don’t let them reap the reward of their efforts— leave no reason for their people to work hard or to try new equipment, practices or trade partners. These nations end up poor, at times despite their rich natural resources. They are usually nations which are run by authoritarian regimes, dictators or oligarchs.

To prove their theory the authors use a multitude of examples from centuries ago to the present, spanning all continents. Their examples include the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Incas, Aztecs, Mayas, Cuba, Venezuela, Columbia, Chile, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, The Congo, Sierra Leone, Egypt, Somalia, Ethiopia, Spain, Portugal, England, France, ancient Rome, Turkey, Russia, China, Vietnam, Korea and others.

The authors analyze each ruler or period in a civilization or country either to prove their theory or to refute other theories about wealth distribution among nations. After the first 10-20 case studies, I must admit, the examples started going right over my head. When at about the middle of the book they said, “As we discussed in chapter 4…”, I was lucky if I remembered a fraction of that discussion!

However, this does not mean that I didn’t understand what the argument was or how they went about proving it.

When it comes to proving the authors’ theory, I don’t have the background or the knowledge to agree or disagree with them. Their arguments, supported by their examples sound reasonable.

But at times the arguments sound repetitive and at times there’s information overload. Plus, I don’t know of any other examples that might disprove their theory.

And I have to confess that when it comes to supporting their arguments by comparing various nations, and how they dealt with certain circumstances in different epochs, my lack of historical and economic expertise stops me from vouching for the strength of the proof.

Having thus disqualified myself as a knowledgeable critic for this book, I have to say all of this doesn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy the book. On the contrary, it was an eye-opener for me. I learnt a whole lot about concepts, events, people, countries and political practices I didn’t know anything about. Most importantly this learning experience has changed my perspective. I look at the current events, leaders, conflicts, laws, policies and their probable motives in a different light.

If you like learning about stuff you don’t know much about, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty has a lot to teach you about history, governance, politics, economy and distribution of power and wealth.