Novelist Elif Shafak: ‘Writers are the memory keepers’
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Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I'm Laila Raptopoulos. One of my very favorite interviews I've ever done was three years ago on this podcast with the author Elif Shafak. Elif is the celebrated writer of 13 novels and more than 20 books. And what I love about her work is that it makes the past feel very alive and makes the past and the present feel very entwined.

It makes it feel like we're all part of the same history. This was true of her last novel about Cyprus called The Island of Missing Trees, which we talked about last time she was on the show. And it's true of her newest one, too. It's about Mesopotamia, and it's called There Are Rivers in the Sky.

What makes Alif so wonderful to interview is that she's very willing to explore the themes, the politics, and the nuanced questions that her novels bring up, which is very helpful as we all try to figure out how to understand the present in relation to the past. I'm thrilled to say that Alif was kind enough to join me again today. Alif, hi. What a joy to have you. Welcome back to the show. What a joy to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for being here.

I would love to start this conversation with a quote that I loved from your newest book. It's from a character who's a young Yazidi woman. She's learning about her great-grandmother who was kind of a mystic who she's never met. And she thinks this, the world would have been a much more interesting place if everyone was given a chance to meet their ancestors, at least for an hour in their lifetime.

So before we jump into your book, I want to ask you, you're from Turkey. You've lived all over Europe. You're now a British citizen and live in London. There are a lot of parts to your identity. There are a lot of parts to my identity. There are a lot of parts to the identity of many people listening. How do you think about that longing, the longing to meet our ancestors, at least for an hour in our lifetimes? You know, it's some longing to connect to the past.

Well, wouldn't it be great if we only had that chance, right? To connect with that ancestral knowledge and heritage. But I think we don't need to sit down with the actual people. We can dig into stories and silences because they're not only family stories, they're also family silences. And it always amazes me, particularly in those families where

that have experienced some kind of displacement, complexity, immigration. It's interesting to see the first generation, the elderly, respond differently to memory when you compare it with the next generation. So the oldest in these families, they haven't forgotten the past, of course, but they don't necessarily talk about the past. They don't even know how to speak about it. So it sits inside their chests, unspoken, untold.

And then the second generation, I think they're not as interested in the past. Understandably, they need to be forward looking. You know, they need to find their feet. They don't focus their energy on the past. And that leaves the third or the fourth generations, the youngest in these families, who are now asking the biggest questions, perhaps, about ancestral heritage.

the journeys of their grandparents and family stories and silences so all I'm trying to say is I think in every family there's at least one memory keeper and I believe that writers and poets are the memory keepers of their own societies yes yeah yeah um

You know, Alif, you said in our last conversation, you said, and I've heard you say a lot, that the novel is one of our last democratic spaces. I know we always think of nonfiction as a place to learn history and fiction as a place to escape. But your books always remind me that novels are also full of facts and that like actually they are. Novels are memory keepers as well, as you were saying. Yeah, that's like facts based in story just stick in a different way.

I really appreciate that we're talking about this because I think it's a little bit unfortunate that when we talk about fiction, we tend to think in general that it's something completely outside of truth. But actually, fiction brings us closer to truth. It just tells it in its own way.

And because it tells that truth through emotions and stories, I think it brings us even closer to truth. It always makes me sad when I hear some readers, it's usually male readers above a certain age who say this,

With all the good intentions, they say there's so much happening in the world and I want to understand it better. So I read about important stuff. You know, I follow politics and finance and history and philosophy and technology, neuroscience. But I don't have time for fiction. I don't read fiction. But then they say apologetically, my wife reads fiction, my girlfriend reads fiction. Right.

And when I hear that, I really feel sad. I think anything and everything that's part of life can be part of fiction. Fiction has that kind of ability, flexibility and diversity by nature.

So inside fiction, there is politics, there is psychology, there's history, philosophy, but perhaps more importantly, there's emotional intelligence. And I think we need fiction in order to make better sense of this world. Yes, yeah, yeah. I also, you know, I've been really interested in the history of the region that you write about in your novel, and I've been trying to read history books about it, and they're so dry. I like that.

I mean, of course, you learn a lot, but they're dry and they're missing a lot of the humanity, as you were saying, the cultural intelligence in the history. You know, as you kindly mentioned, I come from Turkey. And of course, Turkey is a country with a very long and rich history. But that doesn't necessarily translate into strong memory. In fact, it's quite the opposite. I think we're a society of collective amnesia. Yeah.

And our entire relationship with the past is full of convenient forgettings and ruptures and voids. And so in that regard, I think being a novelist is a bit like being like a linguistic or cultural archaeologist. You need to dig down through layers of stories, but also through layers of silences in order to find those untold stories and perhaps rehumanize those who have been dehumanized. Mm-hmm.

And as a person who's just as a reader, when you want to know about the past, you do want to know how did they get their water? You know, who were their neighbors? Like, what was the gossip like? What was the what was like daily life like? Yeah, absolutely. And those things are so important. They matter. But in order to understand daily life with all it

beauties, complexities, sometimes atrocities as well, we need to pay attention to oral history as much as written history. Because what written culture conveniently forgets, sometimes oral culture remembers.

So when you listen to folk tales, ballads, songs, even superstitions, they might seem completely irrational, but they are the projections of our deepest fears. There's a reason why those superstitions are there. And I really would

love my fiction to the best of my ability to be a bridge builder between written culture and oral culture. I feel very attached to the oral storytelling of Asia Minor, the Balkans, the Middle East, the Levant. And I worry that there's a lot of knowledge and wisdom there that is not necessarily covered by written culture. Right, right, right.

Alif, let's talk about your new book. It's called There Are Rivers in the Sky. We could describe it as a vast epic which follows a few characters across continents and generations and considers how they're all connected through a drop of water. They're also all connected in some ways to this piece of land,

Nineveh, which was an ancient Mesopotamian city where Mosul, Iraq is now and was the home of the world's oldest library, oldest known library under the last Assyrian king. Last time you were on, I said I considered you brave and you said, I don't see myself as brave. I see myself as curious. What were you curious about?

I think I see this book as perhaps as a love letter to water. Today, when we talk about climate crisis, we are primarily talking about freshwater crisis. And I think it's easy to forget this, especially in Europe, especially

Understandably, when we look around, there are so many flash floods and rains, and obviously sea levels are rising across the planet. But the irony is within this abundance, there's a freshwater scarcity.

And those of us coming from the Middle East, I think for us, this is not a theoretical debate. It's an acute reality. Of the most 10 water-stressed nations in the world, seven are in the Middle East and in North Africa. Our rivers are dying. And this is very visible. Like every day, every month, you can see these rivers drying up. Of course, this affects everyone. But I also want to emphasize that women try...

traditionally are water carriers. They bring water to their communities. When there's no water nearby, the distance that a young woman has to walk increases, unfortunately, increasing the potential possibility for gender violence. So all I'm trying to say is actually these things are all connected. Water scarcity, gender violence, racial inequality, regional inequality, and so on.

My novel, the way I see it, it's the story of three characters who seem to be very different at first glance, but are connected in a surprising way. And then two rivers, the River Thames and the River Tigris or Tigris in the Middle East, and one poem, which is the Epic of Gilgamesh. So three rivers.

to one and everything is connected via a tiny drop of water which I did not want to take for granted and I wondered as a writer if I could build an entire novel on something as small seemingly as insignificant but actually crucial as a drop of water yeah yeah

I'm wondering if you can tell me a little bit about the epic of Gilgamesh. It is really prevalent in your novel. Listeners may know it's an epic poem that was found in the library of King Ashurbanipal, the last Assyrian king. It was written in cuneiform on these clay tablets that survived from the second millennium B.C. That's 4,000 years ago. It focuses on this king, Gilgamesh. What was interesting to you about that story?

Yes, I think it's fascinating. So we're talking about the oldest piece of literature known in human history, and it has a lot to say to us today. It is very, very relevant. This is a story, let us not forget, that was transmitted orally across generations before it was written down on clay tablets by scribes. So actually, it's much, much older than we know. This is a story about...

First of all, it's not a typical story in the sense that Gilgamesh himself is not a nice person. He's not a hero in a conventional sense. If anything, you would hate him at the beginning of the story. He does terrible things. And it's only through journeys and friendship and loss and failure that

that he comes back to his starting point, having achieved nothing in life, and yet, and yet a kinder and wiser person. Yeah. One of the characters in your novel is a boy who becomes a man, an incredible character named King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums. He's a young, poor boy in Victorian England around the 1850s to 1870s, and is sort of a savant. He's

the person who starts to decipher the epic of Gilgamesh. He's based on a real person, is that right? Yes, he is a fascinating person. And maybe it's a strange thing for an author to say this, but I really fell in love with this character. So it is loosely based on an actual historical figure called George Smith.

And he was born in the slum tenements of Chelsea at the time. We're talking about Victorian England, born into severe poverty. I genuinely think if he were alive today, we would have respected the neurodivergence of his mind. But of course, at the time, he gets no such support or recognition anymore.

And so he's pulled out of school, no proper education whatsoever. And purely by coincidence, he comes to the British Museum and he sees these broken, shattered tablets brought over from the library of King Ashurbanipal.

And at the time, almost no one can read these tablets to such an extent that some people call the cuneiform chicken scratches. It's illegible. But this boy, this young man, with the power of his visual memory, he starts to piece them together. And little by little, he reads many tablets. And one day he comes across this.

pieces of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Now, it's very interesting that he decodes the flood tablet and this creates a massive, massive division, not only in Victorian England or Europe, but also in America too. Because what he finds in that tablet is a story that goes like this. There's an ark or there's a coracle and this coracle is surrounded with water. There's a deluge and

They're looking for land. They're flying a bird to see if there's a land nearby. You know, all these animals and human beings trapped on board this ark or coracle and so on. Now, the interesting thing is this story, which is very, very similar to Noah's ark in the Old Testament, was actually written down thousands of years before the Old Testament. Mm-hmm.

So the society is divided. Those who are more inclined towards religion, they would say, well, you see, it proves that the Holy Book was right. It really happened. But those who are more scientific minded would say, actually, it shows us that as humanity, we've been telling ourselves the same old stories over and over again. So this very shy, timid, introverted society

George Smith finds himself at the center of this huge debate. He comes to the Middle East in order to find the missing lines in the flat tablet. He loses his life there. And today he's buried between Syria and Turkey in an almost forgotten graveyard. So there was a part of me that wanted to honor the passion and dedication of this extraordinary human being. Yeah, incredible. He's buried in a place that...

another of your characters lives in a hundred and something years later in 2014, Narin. Narin? Yes. Narin, a young Yazidi girl who lives sort of on the banks of the Tigris River. Tell me a little bit about that. I feel like Narin represents the beauty of the oral tradition to me in the way that Arthur represents the value of the written word.

Yeah, I really appreciate this question. And I think you're so right. As we mentioned, there are three main characters and actually each section is written in a different style. So the parts where I talk about Arthur's life or Victorian England is a more Dickensian feeling there. Where I talk about Noreen, it's mostly based on dialogues. Oral culture is more visible. And then the third character is more contemporary fiction based.

Now, the Nareen's story was very important for me. As you know, the Yazidis are one of the most persecuted, targeted minorities in the world throughout the centuries. The Yazidi lore talks about 72 massacres, genocides at least. And the one in 2014 initiated by ISIS fanatics happened in front of the eyes of the world.

But perhaps not many people noticed that what ISIS did, the first thing they did was to kill the water. So they poisoned the wells and they poisoned the fountains, leaving almost no water for the communities to drink. And then the second thing that ISIS extremists did was to kill the elderly. In a community like the Yazidis, in which memory and identity are carried through oral culture,

rather than written culture. If you kill the elderly, what you're doing is you're killing collective memory and you're killing collective identity. This is a very vulnerable community, beautiful community, but very vulnerable where everything is transmitted via stories, ballads, folk tales, riddles, lullabies, and so on. So they deliberately targeted the elderly generation.

And then they killed the man and they kidnapped the women and the children. As we are speaking today, there are still more than 3,000 Yezidi women missing. Unfortunately, they have been turned into sexual slaves and they are kept in ordinary neighborhoods across the region.

Purely by coincidence, while I was writing this novel, one of these young women was saved from a house in Ankara, in the neighborhood where I grew up, my maternal grandmother's house, just three streets away. And it really struck me hard. It made me...

think how is it possible that a human being is kept as a slave, as a captive in an ordinary neighborhood and the people don't know and the people around don't see? How do we become so numb, you know, so disconnected? So in that regard, I think the suffering of the Yazidi communities is

is still not over. And there's a lot of individual and collective healing that needs to take place. But I think this is a very, very important story that not many people have been talking about. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for writing about the Yazidis. You almost never see that culture in fiction. Thank you. Thank you.

I want to ask you about nostalgia, Elif. I have become sort of obsessed with nostalgia because I feel that some nostalgia is good and meaningful, but it can quickly turn bad and nationalist and dangerous. And I've been trying to figure out sort of where that line is. It started to sort of click for me.

when I read this theorist Svetlana Boim, and she said that there are two types of nostalgia. There's reflective nostalgia, which is just a feeling, like sort of a yearning for a time that we think existed where there was more community or a clearer sense of who we were, or maybe a place that didn't fully exist exactly, but there's a yearning to get there. But then there's restorative nostalgia, which is

an actual attempt to return to the past sort of regressive nationalism that we've seen kind of all over the world in recent years. I feel like your work is very open and explores a lot of the former and has no patience for the latter. Is that right? I'm curious how you think about nostalgia. Yeah, what an important and thought-provoking discussion. I think nostalgia is very important.

especially in this moment in time, because we're living in a world in which so much is happening so fast and that creates a lot of anxiety. I think this is the age of angst. Everybody's anxious. Left, right, east, west, you know, old and young. The only difference is some people hide their anxieties better than others. I think that's the main difference. But I worry that in times of anxiety, particularly, you know,

It's a golden age for demagogues who step into the picture and they say, well, leave it to me. I'm going to make things easy and simple and everything is going to be as it used to be, you know. So they use nostalgia for their own purposes.

And that's something that worries me. I think there's also a lot of imperial nostalgia all around the world, particularly if we pay attention to those nation states that were once upon a time empires or part of empires. I'm very cautious, you know,

when it comes to all of those things. I find it very dangerous. Any ideology that divides humanity into us versus them and believes that us is superior to them, it's just not close to my heart. I'm a writer. I'm a storyteller. I think for storytellers, there's no such thing as us versus them. There's no other. The other is my brother. The other is my sister. I am the other. So literature wants to dismantle that duality.

I feel that we're in a confusing time, and as you say, an anxious time, because so much is happening so quickly. And I've been thinking about how our ancestors had...

some sense of reliability, right? Like they knew who they were because it was kind of inextricable from their surroundings. You're from this place and you are what your family name is and this is how we cook and this is how we pray. But in the past, what, maybe 120 years, especially if you're an immigrant or come from immigrants, a lot of our parents and grandparents traded that sense of community for freedom. But

Things are so fractured that it feels sort of like we are left longing for something. And it's probably connection or community or some sense of continuity or something that maybe it feels like

that existed in the past that's harder to get now. So I just, I mean, I don't really know how to think about it. It's a funny puzzle. Like, maybe it's all a trade-off and maybe we're all confused. But I'm kind of curious how you think about the things that we're longing for now.

I think what you said is so important and really deeply resonates with me. Earlier, we mentioned that this is an age of angst. But I think if it were to become an age of apathy, it would be a much more dangerous world to live in. And of course, Hannah Arendt said this

so eloquently, we need to be very careful not to turn into atomized individuals. You know, the moment we become numb, the moment we become indifferent, desensitized and disconnected and stop caring about each other's stories, I think that would be a much more dangerous world to live in. So in many ways, I think this is a crucial moment, perhaps a crossroads to build connections

I really think three levels of connections are so important. One, with each other. I think it's an important time for global solidarity, global sisterhood, connections that go beyond borders.

You know, the second connection that I find so important and you refer to this is the one we have with nature because our entire relationship with nature is broken. We've turned ourselves into fast consumers of everything around us. And the faster we consume, the faster we need to consume.

It is a vicious circle. So that needs to change. And we need to realize that we're only a small part of a very delicate ecosystem. And the third connection that I find very important is within the internal one, whether we call this spiritual or something else, I don't know, definitely not religious, but something perhaps more mystical. We need to rebuild the inner garden because

It's a very anxious time. But the moment we talk about these things, the better we realize that we're not alone. We're not the only ones struggling with these feelings. And I think that's very important. The other thing that I find important, if I may quickly add,

I believe we have to make a distinction between information, knowledge, and wisdom. These are completely different things. For knowledge, we need slow journalism. We need in-depth analysis. We need podcasts in which we can listen to each other. We need books.

And hopefully for wisdom, we have to bring the heart into the conversation. I think wisdom requires emotional intelligence and emotional connections. So we have to change this ratio. Otherwise, too much information is not helping us forward. Yeah, that's beautiful. I think we're starting to get to the answer to my last question.

Last question. But, you know, I asked our listeners for questions as the show is starting to end. I wanted listeners to ask me sort of what's on their mind so I can find the person who could help answer them the best. And one of them came from a listener named Laura, who wrote from Amsterdam. And she asked basically how to move forward with hope and optimism when the

the far right has made gains in a lot of countries, when it feels like everything we do or buy harms the environment, when it's just easy to feel powerless. And I thought that you would be the perfect person to help answer that question. I feel that we're starting to answer it even in these small things, even in slowing down, even in thinking about wisdom. These are sort of optimistic acts. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. And may I say, I really appreciate this question because I think it's something that's on our minds all the time. And it's better to be able to talk about this.

The one thing I would say, though, we need to allow ourselves to sometimes feel down, sometimes feel pessimistic. That is also human. I think all these emotions that we've been talking about, whether it's anger, frustration, confusion, sorrow, melancholy,

And the question is not whether are you angry or are you anxious? Of course, we're angry. Of course, we're anxious. It means that we react. It means we're not disconnected. We follow what's going on in the world. But I think the main question is, what do we do with our anger? There's a beautiful essay by Toni Morrison in which she says, sometimes I feel so angry.

And then the next line of the essay says, then I go and sit down at my desk and I write. It's very simple, but I love it. So maybe one person turns that raw energy into stories. Another person turns it into music. Another one turns it into social activism.

But what do we do with our anger or frustration or anxiety is the main thing. You know, something you said to me during this conversation, maybe it's going to inspire me tomorrow. We need to remember and remind each other that we're not alone. Mm-hmm.

That is a very helpful distinction, this idea not to fear the feeling, right? That the feeling isn't a thing that we need to run from, that feelings are good. Feelings are good. It means we're human. And I think, honestly, maybe I'm going to put this bluntly, but it worries me and it makes me sad to see that oftentimes populist demagogues are better at connecting with people's emotions than their liberal counterparts. Yeah.

The solution is not to suppress or sweep these feelings under the carpet in the name of looking strong, but put it out there. Let's try to turn it into something more constructive, both for ourselves individually, but for our communities and for humanity. Yes, be honest about the feeling and then move from there. Yeah.

Well, Elif, thank you. Your fiction has inspired me maybe more than any other writer that exists. So I just want to thank you for your work and for being with me today. It's just been an honor. I'm so grateful for this wonderful conversation. Thank you so much. Thank you.

That's the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I've put some relevant links about Elif in the show notes, and we're also still collecting your cultural questions, so you can send those to me at lilarap at ft.com by email, L-I-L-A-H-R-A-P, or on Instagram, also at lilarap. I can't wait to read them.

I'm Lila Raptopoulos, and here's our wonderful team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smith is our producer. Our sound engineers are Joe Salcedo, Sam Jovinko, and Breen Turner, with original music by Metaphor Music. We had help this week from Katie McMurrin. Tovar Forges is our executive producer, and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have an exceptional week, and we'll find each other again on Friday.

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