I think as writers we need to be two things all our lives. We need to be good readers, and we must read from across the board fiction and nonfiction, east, West, north and south, not only eurocentric literature.
And secondly, we need to be very good listeners.
And by that I mean we need to listen to what people are saying, but also with what kind of emotions they're saying what they're saying. That means we have to pay attention to the gaps between the words, those little silences, those buried emotions matter a lot.
To me as a writer.
Obviously, I am someone who adores getting the chance to sit and chat with an author, but I've got to say talking with Elif Shaffolk might be a particular tonic. I first got the interviewer a few years ago for an event at Adelaide Writer's WAK. She was on a screen, appearing remotely, but her warmth and ability to draw the audience in her mix of seriousness and generosity that she radiated when she talked made for a completely captivating event. Part of it is about how much her readers love
her books. She's written more than twenty of them at this stage, and they range across folklore and trauma, across a passion for human rights and a reverence for story. It plays up particularly acutely for me and what I think is my favorite of her novels, the twenty nineteen book Ten Minutes, thirty eight Seconds In This Strange World. It's an incredibly powerful story of a murdered sex worker, but has this kind of rare beauty as she contemplates her life in her final moments as the sun rises
above Istanbul. It was shortlisted for the Book of Prize the year it came out, and the thing that really strikes you when you hear her talk is how much Eliv Chafe cares about writing, not just about her own writing, but about writing as this transformative art form, one that
enables us to build connections and empathy. She's a self described citizen of the world following several decades as a professor of political science, women's and cultural studies, and she's become this notable public intellectual and human rights activist, espousing
the importance of literature and speech. At the Book of Prize ceremony in twenty twenty two, she spoke particularly powerfully in reference to the attack on someone Rushti in New York earlier that year, she said the literary imagination is
one of our last remaining democratic spaces. And she has a new book just hit the bookshops, And once again, Elif Shafak is using the democratic space she has created with her singular literary imagination to tie together our past and our future, our politics, and our humanity in singular and indelible ways. I'm Michael Williams, and this is read this to show about the books we love and the
stories behind Elif Shaffak's latest novel. There are Rivers in the sky stretches across millennia following a single drop of water. Much as she did with the connective tissue of Trees in her last novel, Elif explores the long memory of the natural world alongside the relentless forgetting of civilizations. Her drop of water is present at the building of a great library, witnessing the saving of the Epic of Gilgamesh
from destruction for blasphemy. Much later, in nineteenth century Constantinople it lands on Arthur, who's just arrived on an official mission to find a missing section of the epic that depicts a pre biblical flood and in its third and final incarnation, the drop of water is the last in a bottle carried by twenty first century Yazidis who are
fleeing from violent persecution into the mountains of Irak. As. With so much of Elif's fiction, there are these multiple narratives converging to tell this larger story about connection and about climate, and she explained when we sat down for our conversation, it.
Is a story of three characters who seem to be completely different at first glance, and two rivers, the River Thames and the River Tigris in the Middle East, and then one ancient poem, which is the Epic of Gilgamesh.
So three two one.
But everything in this seemingly complex structure is actually based on a single small drop of water. It is water that connects everything. And I think the moment we forget how connected we are, we only need to look at the journey of water, because it's the ultimate immigrant in a way, and it connects us and the water that flows in the River Thames and the River Tigris, or the water in our glass, the water inside us, the tears that we shed, they're all the same water circulating.
So it is a book that to connect seemingly different pieces and destinies, but I genuinely believe as human beings we are all deeply interconnected.
A cape.
Part of that interconnection in this book centers around a text, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and I wanted to ask whether you remember when you first came across that book.
I do roughly remember because I was in Turkey. I was a student in Turkey. But to be honest, that introduction was incredibly limited. All you know is just as it was an ancient poem and there was a hero in it, and that hero had some adventures and journeys.
That's about it. Really.
It took me years and years to dive deep. And then many years later I revisited the epic, but this time with a completely different eyes. And then the third reading, which was the real reading. That one really really changed me because what I found in the Epic was a story that is quite relevant to our times, that is universally important. It is almost timeless. It's a story that does not have a hero in a traditional sense. If anything, it has an anti hero because Gilgemus is a terrible
person at the beginning of the story. You cannot like him, but through losses, grief, journeys, friendship, but also failure. By the time he comes back, he has not achieved anything. He has failed in everything. Through all of that, he changes and he becomes a wiser person. But also it's a story about climate crisis, about the search for youth immortality, you know, how do we deal with aging process? And I think it's a story about power, how power corrupts
so in so many ways. I find it a very very important and almost urgent and universal story.
Does seem to me that as your work has developed from book to book, your love for your fascination with the natural world is something that has become increasingly to the fore that it's there even in your earliest works.
But it seems to me, particularly in the last two or three, the ways in which we might better understand our human relationships if we were more open to understanding the relationship between elements of the natural world is a kind of recurring theme for you, and I'd love you to share with us how that passion, how that kind of focus came about for you.
That is so correct.
I think I'm also very interested in eco feminism, the kind of feminism that connects the thoughts. There are several threads that come together when we talk about nature and literature, And you're right, my interest in nature is increasing as I get older and also older as a writer as well.
But I think basically what I would like to we.
Mind, myself and everyone is that we tend to think we are above the nature, that we are superior to everything else, because we think we're very clever as human beings, and we have turned ourselves into consumers of nature.
That is our basic.
Relationship with the things around us, and that is a completely wrong and destructive relationship. We're destroying an entire ecosystem, and as we do this, we're destroying ourselves. So a different way of thinking which is actually not new but quite ancient, and many indigenous tribes, many ancient spiritual systems knew this. They were telling us that we are not above nature, but just a small part of a very
delicate ecosystem. And you need to respect the trees, you need to respect the earth, you need to respect water. So we need to rewire our brains and rewire our relationship with nature. I believe that is an important part of my work.
What do you see is the relationship between that work and that subject, that area, and the business of literature itself, because it seems to me there's something very fraud about applying words to natural phenomenon, to natural ideas, to ancient concepts, where they run the risk of feeling inadequate or incapable of capturing the kind of richness of the natural world. And I know in your career there was a point at which you made the shift from writing your books
in Turkish first to writing them in English first. And I've heard you talk about the way in which you can dream in multiple languages, But do you commune with nature in the same way in English and in Turkish? Does one language find the rhythms more readily for you?
That is such a brilliant question. And you made me think more deep there. Thank you.
I think I need to go back to my childhood. I was raised by a grandmother in Turkey. It was very spiritual, you know, in her own way. She was not religious, but she was spiritual. And in her own world, my grandmother was an oral storyteller. In her world, the mountains would speak, the trees would whisper, you know, water would say things, and that was okay, that was not madness. There are these kinds of stories in Anatolia, in the Balkans,
in the Middle East. I have never forgotten that, and it paints me that oral culture in general is looked down upon it because it's regarded as not intellectual enough. And sometimes I've heard people say things like, oh, it's just you know, tales by ignorant housewives.
I've heard these things.
So there's a part of me that wants to also take the wisdom because there are so many pockets of wisdom within oral culture.
That we need to tap into.
So I want to bring those pockets of wisdom and connect them with riten culture, or in other words, I would love my writing, to the best of my ability, bridge oral culture and written culture, because even when we talk about seemingly irrational things such as superstitions, there's a reason why those superstitions are there. You know, they reflect our most basic fears as human beings. There's something existential there.
So I do pay attention to different ways of storytelling, not only to the European canon of the novel, as much as I love it, I am also connected to different types of storytelling, much more cyclical, much more oral storytelling, you know, with regards to language. It's a big, big question for me, because language is a huge passion. I do not see it as an instrument that I use and then put aside. I think languages shape us. We
breathe them, and you know, we dream in them. But at the same time as you can hear in my and in my mispronunciation, I am not a native speaker in English. This is an acquired language for me. I'm an immigrant not only in England in the UK, but also inside English language, and as a result of which I will always experience this immigrant anxiety. There is a gap between the mind and the tongue. The mind always
runs faster, so you're as immigrants. You're always aware of the things that you're not able to say instead of the things that you are able to say. But I love it. I love writing in English. It gave me an existential freedom, perhaps an additional sense of freedom. Being a Turkish writer is sometimes very heavy, and being a
Turkish novelist, female novelist can be heavier. So when I write in English, I find another cognitive distance, and that distance helps me to feel lighter and with that lifeess I can maybe delve into more difficult subjects with a little bit more hutzvah, you know.
So that's my relationship.
Of course, my relationship with Turkish is more emotional, with English more intellectual. But in a nutshell, all I can tell is still to this day, if my writing has melancholy, sorrow, longing, sadness, I find these things much easier to express in Turkish.
But when it comes to.
Humor, which I love, irony and satire are much easier in English.
I just want to pick up on making the point about recognizing the oral traditions beyond just that kind of European traditions of literature. And it seems to me that perhaps a writer of Turkish heritage is singularly well placed for that multiplicity of influence. But of course modern Turkey is very uneasy with that duality. Does that represent a kind of additional thing to navigate?
That is so true?
I mean, Turkey in so many ways is a place of in between them. It's a very liquid city. It's constantly becoming shifting, it hasn't settled yet, even though it's a very very old city. And that liquid world is something that always makes me think more carefully about memory, identity, heritage, ancestors. What does it mean to be from the east or from the West. I think for a long time with good intentions, no doubt, but many people in media and
academia adopted a very dualistic approach. They thought that some countries were quite solid and safe and steady, and that was the Western world. And they also thought that in those solid countries, democracy had been achieved, women's rights had been achieved, LGBTQ rights had been already achieved, so you didn't have to worry at all about the future of democracy. But it was the liquid countries over there outside the Western world that had to worry about such things.
Now fast forwards, in the year twenty.
Twenty four, we do know that there's no such thing as solid countries versus liquid countries, and we're all living in liquid times. And even in those countries that seem so solid, actually things can go backwards, and it can happen very fast, So we all need to worry about the future of our democracies.
After the break, Elif reveals the Virginia Wolf novel, which she returns to again and again.
We'll be right back.
The Financial Times called the Elif Shafak, one of Turkey's most important writers. But back in two thousand and six her book The Bastard of Istanbul, Soryerlift prosecuted for the crime of insulting Turkishness. Those She has later acquitted and has received a lot of support from Turkish readers. Elf and her family were forced into voluntary exile in twenty thirteen. They're now based in London. This sense of displacement runs through all of her work, and it's especially present in
There Are Rivers in the Sky. How do you manage to scaffold the extent to which grief and anger, at the nature of loss and exile they inform your work, but they don't overwhelm your work. And I'm interested in whether that's a discipline you have to apply, whether you have to say, I see that's there, and I'm going to leave that at the door, or I'm going to make that the focus here because it's in everything you write, but it's handled with such grace.
That's an amazing question. Stranger to anger, depression, anxiety. I think we need to talk about these things also mental health. How do we struggle with difficult emotions, exile, not being able to go back, it makes it harder. At the same time, I have found a home in the UK in the English language as well. And at the same time, I see myself as a citizen of humanity, as a citizen of the world. So I'm someone who very much believes in multiple belongings. That said, like everyone I believe
who cares about what's happening in the world. There are days when I feel so sad. There are days I feel an almost existential fatigue. All of that is human, and I think we should not be ashamed of our emotions or feelings. Feelings are not a sign of weakness, just the opposite. They are a source of energy. The question is not whether we feel angry or not. The question is what do we do with our anger? Can
you turn it into something much more positive. The only thing that worries because it's only one emotion that really really troubles me, and that is the lack of all emotions, which is numbless. The moment we become numb, you know, if I stop caring about your story, if you stop caring about my story, or about what's happening elsewhere in Afghanistan, in Gaza, in Sudan, in Ukraine and everywhere around the world. I think that is a very dangerous world, you know.
I like that you were talking before about liquid and solid countries, and I think coming back to the role that water plays in this book and that idea about fluidity. I know a book that is incredibly important to you as a reader and that you return to throughout your life is Virginia Wolfs Orlando. And I know that that's a book that you think of as a liquid book.
That is so true because.
Because it is, it's a water like book, and it's constantly evolving, shifting until reading Orlando, and I've read it multiple times throughout more life, but the first time I read it really struck me. Until then, I did not know you could write a novel without any constraints, you could fly that high so bravely, with such a sense of freedom. And I think it's a book that I associate with a sense of freedom. Can you travel through time? Can a character live more than just a mortal life?
Can a story go beyond boundaries of geography, time, gender, culture? She dared to do all of that and more so. It is an important book for me. But in general, I think novels have shown me so much. I love the broad canvas of a novel and the way it connects the seemingly small with the seemingly big, the wa it connects us versus them to such an extent that we realize there is no such a thing. There's no
such thing as the other. So it does dismantle dualities, and especially in these times when everything is to dualistic, we need to go back to.
Fiction with a book like There Are Rivers in the Sky, which is so kind of rich and layered and texted. How do you get the relationship right between if I can use your metaphor the solid and the liquid, the solidity of research and your sense of responsibility to real stories, real historical moments, real bits of knowledge that you want to impart on the one hand, and on the other hand, that sense that Virginia Wolf sense of possibility, of openness,
of things moving fluidly from one state to another. How do you get that tension right.
It's a massive challenge, especially as you go back in time time and you tap into the forgotten stories and the silent stories of minorities such as the YZD minority in the Middle East. This is one of the most vulnerable and persecuted minorities across the world, of course, in twenty fourteen, the entire world, So the Zd genocide in the hands of ISIS extremists. But we should also know that it wasn't the first time that the Azids had
been persecuted. The Azd lore talks about seventy two massacres at least, So how do you approach such a beautiful culture but also with respect, with dignity, but without forgetting that you're a novelist and you need to fly and you need to let your imagination free. I'm always aware of those of those challenges. The second challenge, especially in this case, was that the Yzidi culture is mostly transferred from generation to generation, not through written culture, but through
oral storytelling, so songs, ballads, folk tales. This is very important, a very important part. So I had to do a lot of listening, lots of interviews, especially with the z the elders. At the same time, there's a story of water in my book, so there's a scientific research.
It was insane, to be honest.
The amount of books that I had to read and the range of books that I had to read for this novel, which also includes of course a very deep research about the epic of Gilgamesh, the ancient Akkadian rites and rituals.
But I love learning.
I've stayed in academia for a long time, and from political science to cultural history, but also to cookbooks. I love reading across the board. But there comes a moment when I know I have to let my intuition guide me.
Are you someone who goes back to books, stories and rediscovers them as you yourself have grown, as you yourself have changed as a reader.
I come from a country that has a very very rich history and a very complex history, but that does not necessarily translate into a strong memory. I think in so many ways we are My motherland is a society of collective amnesia. So when we talk about the past, there are lots of silences and gaps, and I think literature is drawn to those silences. Personally, as a writer, I don't see myself only as a storyteller, but maybe as a silence teller as well. You know, I'm drawn
to those silences. So the meaning of the past changes depending on who is telling the story and who is not allowed to tell the story. The moment you start asking questions about where were the women. Where were the minorities or men who are not in positions of power, men from maybe poorer background, more disadvantage backgrounds. Suddenly there's a huge silence in history books. So I think literature can take a closer look at those silences.
As a parent with your kids, how do you decide what stories to share with them and when at what point the stories that matter to you get threaded into their lives and their understanding of the world.
I've always been interested in how, especially in immigrant families or any family that has experienced some kind of displacement complex history, there are generational differences. Now I'm not talking about my family in this instant, but I'm thinking about many immigrant families that have experienced some kind of trauma on for instance, either side of the Atlantic. What stayed with me is when you talk to the elderly, the
people have experienced the biggest challenges. They don't talk about the past much, which doesn't mean they have forgotten the past, of course they haven't, but they don't know how to talk about these things, so it stays in their chest and they don't know how to express those emotions. The second generation immigrants, they're usually not interested in that in the past as much, understandably because they have to be
forward looking, future oriented. It's almost like tabola rasa. You need to build a new life, which leaves the youngest in these families. The third or fourth generations today are the ones who are asking the biggest, sharpest, deepest questions about their ancestors, stories and heritage, and they want to know the family silences, not only the family stories. I've always been interested in that as a novelist. Now come
to my experience personally, I try to talk more. I'm aware that family silences can shape people, but at the same time, I cannot claim that I'm doing such a great job because it's one thing to talk about these issues intellectually, it's another thing to apply it in your life. But I think always communication is a better way, even when you talk about difficult subjects such as exile, you know,
not being able to go back and so on. And many young people are actually more welcoming of the idea of having multiple belongings if we just let them be. But because of politics, because of the world we're living in, because we're constantly pushing them into boxes of us versus them, we're not allowing them to celebrate their own multiplicity. You know, we have to always remember what World Woodman so beautifully said,
We do contain multitudes as human beings. So whether it's the immigrant experience or any other experience, we all have actually multiplicity inside.
Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you so much. This was such a joy. It's such a pleasure.
Elif Shaffack's latest novel, There Are Rivers in the Sky, is available at all good bookstores. Now, before we go, I wanted to tell you what I've been reading this week, and I was a big fan of Veronica Gorri's memoir Black and Blue, that came out a few years ago as a story about her time working as a police officer and her fight for justice after her time in
the police force as an aboriginal woman. She's brought out a new book called When Cops Are Criminals, which is a powerful indictment of the criminal behavior of police officers and a call for systemic reform. It's a really terrific collection of essays and I recommend it highly. You can find it and all the other books we've mentioned today
at your Face I read Independent bookstore. That's it for this week, should as always write, review, subscribe, follow that list seems to be getting bigger, But do all those things next week. I'm read this. I speak with writer, professor, social commentator Roxanne Gay ahead of her, straight into her, and she shares the very specific horror that comes from reading your old book.
Every time you read a book back, you start to see tics like in my novel and Untamed State Mirey.
Who's the protagonist.
She exhales cigarette smokes so much, and I'm clearly using it as this device to show that she's sad or she's pensive.
And when I read through the novel, I was like, my god, she exhales too much.
Fortunately, I don't take myself so seriously that I can't laugh at like my tips and quirks, and you know, I just always think.
Oh man, that's imprint forever. But then I I'll tell myself, I'm going to do better next.
Time read this. This is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing and original compositions by Zalton Fetcher. Thanks for listening.
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