Elif Shafak

Back in 2006 you were tried in absentia for something you had written. More recently we have seen newspaper editors thrown into prison. Are you more careful now about what you say and write, given the situation in Turkey?

I think every writer in Turkey and also every poet, every journalist, every academic, particularly journalists, I must emphasize because journalism has become the most dangerous profession in Turkey. But in general, anyone who belongs to the literati, let's say, knows that because of an article, a poem, a book, or even a tweet, we can easily get into trouble. And it can happen so fast. In one day, you can be called a traitor by pro-government papers, you can be almost lynched in social media, put on trial, exiled, or imprisoned.

I haven't heard anything about your father. How often did you see your father growing up?

Just three or four times in my entire life. Goodness. I grew up very disconnected from him and trying to understand that emptiness took me a long time. Then there was a time when I felt very angry about this in my early twenties, probably, but anger is very toxic after a while. So it took me a long time to get rid of that anger. I went through many seasons. However, what was much more difficult for me to digest was the fact that my father was a very good father to his other children. I have two. Yeah, I have two half-brothers and they adored him always. He he was a very good academic to his own students and a good husband, I'm uh assuming, in his second marriage. So what was difficult for me to understand was when somebody is looks so perfect in all other respects, how come our relationship was so broken?

You combined Middle Eastern studies with LGBT studies. How much pleasure do you get from disrupting expectations in that way?

Don't exactly wait. Usually, these are departments that don't work together. And I used to teach a course called The Queer in the Middle East. … I always felt closer to minorities, to the other, whoever feels like the other in a given context for any reason. So in my work, in my books, both cultural, ethnic, but also sexual minorities have always played an important role. And in a country like Turkey, I have many readers who are, for instance, very xenophobic. I know when I speak to them publicly, they have all sorts of prejudices against Armenians, Greeks, Jews, but then they come to me and they say, I read your book and I love this character, and the character they're talking about is maybe Jewish or Armenian. Similarly, I have many homophobic readers who have grown up in houses in which they were told, Oh, this is a disease, this is, you know, they're perverts, this is the kind of rhetoric that they're hearing. But then they come and they say, The character I loved most in your story was the gay or the bisexual or the transsexual. … the art of storytelling can change people. I know it because it changed me. So I have that faith in the transformative power of books.

Your novel Honour is about so-called honour killing. You say this is not about religion. Why do you say that?

Uh But It's about patriarchy. Of course, religion intensifies that. The way I see it, they're all connected, in fact. Extreme religiosity, nationalism, misogyny, authoritarianism. It is not a coincidence that very patriarchal and closed societies are at the same time very homophobic societies, for instance. They're all connected. But I guess what I'm trying to question is this notion of masculinity, how we raise our sons differently than our daughters. And unfortunately, sometimes women also take part in the continuity of those very old and wrong traditions. There's nothing honourable about honour killings. We should stop using that word. And in my book, I wanted to question mother-son relationship and how a son is raised in so many traditional Middle Eastern, Turkish or immigrant families sometimes, thinking that they have a right to keep an eye on the modesty, so-called modesty of their sisters, of their female family members. What makes them think this, the way we raise them, like as if they're small sultans in the family? That needs to change.