I’m in love with words as much as I adore stories. This is the reason why I love James Joyce’s Ulysses which barely has any story line. Not much happens in the hundreds of pages of that inimitable classic of modern literary fiction. For hours, I luxuriated in Shafak’s lush prose. In an unaccustomed way, I stayed up late to read the last third of the novel. It is a veritable page-turner. Shafak loves the very sound of words. This probably explains the alliterative monikers of three out of the protagonist’s loyal quintet of friends – Sabotage Sinan, Nostalgia Nalan and Hollywood Humeyrah and much more.
The novel begins where the remarkable life of Tequila Leila ends with the surreal drama of a freshly released soul looking down on its body, reflecting on the circumstances surrounding its separation from its former vessel, hoping that it would be found and taken away from the trash can in which it has been dumped, and treated with honour.
Like her death, her birth is full of drama. She starts life as a baby who refuses to announce its intent to live. A baby who refuses to cry. She grows up in religious, traditional, and superstitious family. Her father, zealous but non-violent always scares her with eternal damnation. She’s buffeted by shame and an all-consuming self-reproach in a suffocating religious atmosphere. She is raped by her own uncle. A grim reminder of the fact that the commonest culprits in cases of rape are close relatives and friends. She, the victim, is blamed by a distorted sense of honour. She even gets called a whore by her own father. She mercifully miscarries the pregnancy from the rape. Her family conspires to cover up the incestuous scandal by marrying her off to a cousin. She’s pulled out of school. She runs away. She escapes from a religious people who can’t see the lie and deception in their own lives. She wants to escape from an all-knowing, but judgmental and punishing deity, a god who created the Yazidis and cursed them. Uneducated, unskilled, she is soon inveigled into becoming a commercial sex worker in faraway Istanbul.
The levitating soul recalls its life in the few minutes after dying in episodes triggered by a distinctive smell or sound interlarded with the stories of her friends. Shafak unfurls the lives of the quintet that becomes Leila’s family after deserting her parents and moving to Istanbul. Each, a vivid character almost jumping out of the page.
Now, this is a deeply political book. It is an artistic extension of the writer’s social and political activism. And why not? Achebe has already told us that all writing is political. The book subtly challenges the prevalent bigotry of society that allows prostitution and condemns its purveyors. Can prostitutes exist without clients? The society is the clientele. It takes two to tango. How people hate prostitutes so much without sparing a thought for the demand side of the equation is deceitful. Imagine the father in this story who sends an escort to his son to cure him of his homosexuality. And his son, a homosexual, who has a good heart, a good conscience. The dregs of society, the rejects, the outcasts are as human as the rest of us. And they are capable of true loyalty and genuine love.
The novel also depicts how identities from the ethnic, social, and geographic periphery – Armenian, Kurdish, Arab, Greek, Circassian, Jewish, Yazidi, transgender individuals, prostitutes, pimps – meld into the very fibre of what it means to be Turkish. How all these weave into a tapestry with patterns that are recognizably Turkish and subvert essentialist notions of Turkish nationalism. Humeyrah from Mardin in the Kurdish and from Arab-dominated south-eastern corner. Leila and Sinan from Van in the eastern watershed between Kurdistan and Armenia, mainly Kurdish but stippled with Armenian and Persian elements. Nalan from the heart of Anatolia. Zainab122 from the Levant, Jameelah newly arrived from Africa.
The novel is also philosophical. It subtly invokes existentialism. It carries the placard of secularism. Through the tongues of her characters, Shafak reminds us that fate makes sense only with faith, not by human logic. The ways of God are beyond scrutiny because they are beyond reason. Zainab122, who seems to have gotten the worst outcome in the grand lottery of life is content and happy because she has faith. Nalan makes a snide comment about the motives of religious people doing good. It’s not altruistic. It is for their own good. She is ironically correct. Even the Qur’an uses transactional words to encourage the doing of good – commerce, trade (tijarah), buying and selling (ishtiraa’, bay’), exchange (tabdeel). The concept of heavenly reward ensures that the actions of believers cannot be wholly selfless. But is it only agnostics or atheists that can truly give out of the genuine goodness of their hearts? Behavioural science is ambivalent. Believers give for the reward they expect from God. You give to save your soul. You give in exchange for everlasting bliss in heaven. Nalan, cynical and pessimistic, cannot understand a God who created her different and punishes her for it. The author says she’s an atheist, but she sounds more agnostic than atheistic. Even in the thoughts of Zainab, the one imbued with hopeful piety and faith, God’s wisdom is questioned – why did he allow himself to be widely misunderstood?
The author’s fascination with the city of Istanbul stands out. Much of the story is a labour of love for the history-choked city, and her ability to see the city in a historical panorama and know every bit of the ulcerated stinking innards of the beautiful city; her disquisition on the evolution of the nomenclature of Hairy Kafka Street; and her attentive description of Galata Tower and the bridge across the Bosphorus. Construction workers dying and conjuring the image of a megalopolis guzzling humans as it grows to the glory of humanity is enthralling. In this story, Istanbul is not just Istanbul the setting, but Istanbul the character. It is that character that intrudes into every description, conversation, and event, almost rivalling Leila, the protagonist.
Even though Ankara at the geographical centre of the country is the nation’s political capital, Istanbul, the most foreign part of the country, located at the periphery is the very heartbeat of the Turkish nation. It has all the elements thrown into it.
When Leila is murdered half-way through, I wondered what would remain in the story. Would the pace change to that of a whodunnit? This was a tantalizing prospect. But she gives away the killers and the circumstances surrounding the murder too easily. No Agatha Christie-like suspense.
Instead, she answers some of the questions one had about the other characters such as Sabotage Sinan, Leila’s childhood friend. Apparently, the feckless guy has been suffering from unrequited love. Unrequited because it is undeclared. A faint heart never won a fair lady. His life is a cautionary tale that is familiar enough. How academically brilliant people become professional mediocre because they lack grit and courage. These are qualities needed to rise to the top that are more important than sheer brilliance. I wish he had the pluck of Nostalgia Nalan.
Ah, Nalan. The strongest character of them all. I can see her in my mind’s eye. I can hear her irreverent remarks. I can hear him sing. Nalan who abandons his bride to escape to Istanbul to fulfil his biological destiny and live as a trans woman. It’s a miracle that Nalan does not commit suicide from the humiliation and rejection he suffers at home and in self-exile. Nalan, the one who leads the timid pack on the quest to save their friend from the Cemetery of the Companionless.
The story points up the deeply religious and even superstitious core of the Turkish society that lies beneath the sternly secular and Western crust of the nation: a house with oriental rooms behind a Europe-facing façade.
Up to the actual death of Leila, the narrative proceeds in a gallop flying on the wings of the most felicitous expressions invoking smells, sounds and vivid colour. Thereafter, having lost some momentum, it saunters to an unknowable end. But even this less energetic part is not entirely devoid of beauty. The supple prose is redemptive. It is infused with the recall of bitter-sweet memories.
The magical prose continues.
Look at the sheer lyrical beauty of these passages towards the end:
Leila descended into the void. She dropped over two hundred feet, fast and straight. Beneath her the sea shimmered blue and bright like an Olympic pool. As she fell down, a few folds of her shroud came undone, floating around and above her, like the pigeons her mother had raised on the roof. Except these were free. There were no cages to confine them. Into the water she plummeted. Away from this madness.
Leila feared she might land on the head of a lonely fisherman in a rowboat. Or a homesick sailor taking in the view as his ship glided under the bridge. Or a chef preparing breakfast for his employers on the deck of a luxury yacht. That’d be just her luck. But none of these things happened. Instead she dropped down amidst the chatter of the seagulls, the swish of the wind. The sun was rising over the horizon; the grid of houses and streets on the opposite shore seemed aflame.
Above her was a clear sky, beaming an apology for the storm of the previous night. Below her were the crests of waves, the flecks of white spattered as though from a painter’s brush. Far away on all sides, cluttered and chaotic, hurt and hurtful, but beautiful as always, was the old city herself.
Even the unexpected Epilogue that seemed initially like applying a bias to the decorative end of a lace is saved by the language, its dreamlike wistful quality:
Far in the distance, beyond the roofs and domes, was the sea, shimmering like glass, and deep in the water, somewhere and everywhere, was Leila – a thousand little Leilas stuck to fish fins and seaweed, laughing from inside clam shells.
Istanbul was a liquid city. Nothing was permanent here. Nothing felt settled. It all must have begun thousands of years ago when the ice sheets melted, the sea levels rose, the floodwaters surged, and all known ways of life were destroyed. The pessimists were the first to flee the area, probably; the optimists would have chosen to wait and see how things would turn out. Nalan thought that one of the endless tragedies of human history was that pessimists were better at surviving than optimists,
which meant that, logically speaking, humanity carried the genes of people who did not believe in humanity.
When the floods arrived, they burst in from all sides, drowning everything in their path – animals, plants, humans. In this way the Black Sea was formed, and the Golden Horn, and the Bosphorus, and the Sea of Marmara. As the waters flowed all around, together they created a patch of dry land, on which someday a mighty metropolis was built.
About Muhammad Shakir Balogun
Muhammad Shakir Balogun is a medical doctor and epidemiologist who likes to travel, read, and review books. His social and political commentaries have been published in newspapers, online magazines, and on his Facebook page. His most recent book review was published in Brittle Paper in January, 2023. He has published poems and share travel writing and book reviews at www.muhammadshakirbalogun.com
