Elif Shafak: Women in Turkey are divided as war is waged on us

Last week Turkey’s president Erdogan declared that a woman’s life would be considered “incomplete” if she had no children of her own.

“A woman who refuses maternity and gives up housekeeping faces the threats of losing her freedom,” he said. “She is lacking and is a half [woman] no matter how successful she is in the business world.”

This is not the first time he has expressed his views on how we Turkish women should live our lives. Erdogan and the AKP government members have repeatedly instructed women on how many children we should have (three, preferably five), how we should not laugh out loud in public (indecent) and how we should always focus on motherhood as our primary goal.

As a feminist, I find it very difficult to stay composed when I read such alarming comments. But there is also a personal side to my reaction and rebellion. I am the creation of two strong women: my mother and my grandma. They raised me together at a time and in a place where this was very unusual.

I was born in Strasbourg. Shortly afterwards my parents went their separate ways. My father stayed in France. My mother and I came to Ankara, Turkey. Mum was very young, confused. She had dropped out of university when she got married. She had no diploma, no degree and no money when we arrived in Grandma’s house in a conservative, religious, middle-class Muslim neighbourhood. She was also a divorcee. People immediately began looking for a suitable husband to marry off my mother. Having been divorced she was regarded as a danger to society. My grandma intervened.

“My daughter will go back to university, she’ll graduate, she’ll have choices,” she said. “And I will take care of my granddaughter in the meantime.”

Thus, for several years, I called my mother abla, or big sister, and I called Grandma anne, meaning mother. The two of them could not have been more different. My mother is westernised, rational, secular, modern. She completed her degree with flying colours and became a career diplomat.

My grandma is full of superstitions, irrationality, folk tales and myths. From one I got my passion for written culture, from the other my love for oral storytelling. In my own writing, I have always tried to bridge these two worlds. And here is something that troubles me immensely: the gaps. The cultural, existential, cognitive gaps.

After I tweeted recently about how deeply honoured I felt for being a judge at the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction (awarded last week to Irish writer Lisa McInerney for Glorious Heresies), an angry reader wrote to me from Istanbul: "Bombs are exploding here. People are dying. And you are talking about . . . books?"

Quite a dilemma

I have been thinking about this dilemma for a long time. After which ominous threshold does fiction become a “luxury” that only a few people in the West can afford? And what happens if we lose books? What will be the next dark stage?

Being a writer in Turkey is very different from being a writer in England or Ireland. In Turkey, a comment I make in an interview or an article can draw the apoplexy of readers. “If you are defending the Kurds, I’m going to burn all the books of yours I have at home,” seethed a Turkish reader once.

Every writer in Turkey knows one can get into serious trouble with words. We compose our sentences with this knowledge. There is increasing self-censorship, a subject we find difficult to talk about. It is easier to say “I’ve been censored by other people” than to say “I am censoring myself, too”.

Two areas are extremely hard for Turkish novelists to tackle: political taboos and sexual taboos. The moment you openly criticise rising authoritarianism, bigotry, fanaticism, ultranationalism, Islamism and the loss of liberal democracy, all of which are happening in Turkey today, you can be labelled a “betrayer”, “traitor”, “a pawn of western imperialist powers”.

Critical minds are being suppressed, silenced and marginalised. Paranoia dominates the land. It is equally hard to write about sexual taboo: incest, domestic violence, child brides, honour killings, and a shamelessly sexist culture that always finds a way to blame the victims instead of rapists.

Being a female writer in Turkey is further complicated. Turkey is a patriarchal, sexist and homophobic land. And the literary culture is certainly not immune to that.

All across the Middle East today, from the streets to the public squares, cities belong to men. There is a systematic backlash to push women into domestic spaces and make sure they stay there. In Turkey we feel this backlash acutely. Ever since relations with the EU thawed 10 years ago, the country’s fragile democracy has been eroded. The country is sliding backwards fast, and nowhere is this transition more visible than in the loss of women’s rights.

As this war on women is waged, we Turkish women have not been able to develop a language of sisterhood. We are yet to build a women’s movement that cuts across the ideological spectrum and brings together women from all cultural, ethnic and class backgrounds.

The country is bitterly politicised and sadly polarised. There are enormous gaps between us. Between Kurdish and Turkish women, between headscarved and Kemalist women. And of course where women remain divided and indifferent to each other’s pain, it is only the patriarchy that benefits. And men such as President Erdogan can more easily preside over us, judge and jury of the many ways they believe we women are “incomplete”.

• Elif Shafak is Turkey's most-read female writer and an award-winning novelist. Writing in both English and Turkish, she has published 14 books including the novels The Bastard of Istanbul and The Forty Rules of Love. She appears at Dalkey Book Festival at 7pm on Thursday, June 16th, in the Seafront Marquee for a talk Exile, Migration and Dislocation. Book tickets and find more on the festival on dalkeybookfestival.org