"Honor" by Elif Shafak

On March 5 our book club discussed:

Elif Shafak, Honor (New York: Viking, 2013), 354 pages

The novel is set in the 1960s and ’70s and concerns two Kurdish twin sisters from a village in Urfa. Pembe marries a Turkish soldier, then moves to Istanbul. Jamila stays in the village. Pembe later moves to London.  

The novel portrays the social norms among Kurdish immigrants in those years, including the persistence of feudal ones that they have brought along to the diaspora. When a certain “honor” violation occurs, Pembe’s elder son Iskander exercises what he feels is his responsibility to clear the honor of the family, resulting in tragedy.

That raised among our group a discussion of honor killings. Here are some points of the discussion, giving a sense of its flow:

–“Honor”–it’s tied with shame.. Kurds fear shame and embarrassment, and that fear lies at the root of this behavior. It’s ingrained in our identity to avoid shame and make our families proud. But are we really preserving our “honor” for—people back home? It’s baffling that it stays with us. I’m sure we’re not the only culture that practices that.

–I’m wondering whether things have changed since the 1960s and ‘70s, the time frame for this novel. Do honor killings still persist among Kurds, even in the diaspora? Is it normalized among us?  And compared to other Middle Eastern societies that have “honor” killings, how strong or weak is it, relatively, among us?

–Many other groups have it. In those cultures, nothing can stain men’s dignity, but women “carry the honor of the nation between our legs.”

–I think the author has an unfortunate Turkish bias. She’s Turkish, so she has a moral responsibility to study Kurdish identity. But here in this book, she portrays Kurds uneducated villagers. She makes us part of her east-west dichotomy, where Kurds are backward easterners, and Turks are educated westerners.

–But in those days Kurds really did have less access to education—it was part of state policy. The Turkish state built more schools in the west. So in the 1960s and 70s it was probably true that Turks were more educated.

–In the 1960s, when Kurds started migrating to big Turkish cities, the Turkish image of Kurds was really very negative. Turks made fun of Kurds’ accents. That was the reality back then. And the image even prevailed that Kurds had tails. I once heard Pervin Buldan, former HDP co-chair,  tell a story about the early 1980s, when she was 17. That year every city sent a boy and girl to Ankara to meet the president. Pervin was sent  from Hakkari, When the president met her, he asked her, “Where are the people with tails?” So even the president of Turkey thought Kurds had tails.

–But a whole horrifying context was going on for Kurds in Turkey in the 1990s, the razing of villages and mass killings. Yet the author doesn’t go into it—instead she just refers in passing to “clashes.” Pembe encounters racism in London, yes, but what about in Istanbul?

–But the author does talk about how Turkish government racism against Kurds, like when Pembe goes to the doctor, we see the doctor’s treatment of her. And in the  elementary school , the children of the town’s elite–officials, attorneys, government representatives—would sit separately from the rest of the kids in the class, in separate tables or chairs.  So the book tells us what kind of racism we faced. 

–Burhan Sönmez too mentioned historical events without going into them in great detail. But remember, he told us, “We write imagination, not analysis.”

–Readers of this book need more background on Kurds so they won’t perceive us as uneducated villagers with shame culture.

–Despite Turks thinking Kurds are uneducated, Kurds really have made huge contributions to “Turkish” literature. The author Yaşar Kemal, a Kurdish writer, is considered one of Turkey’s leading authors. Yilmaz Güney changed Turkish cinema.  

–I want to give the author more credit. She did a good job of keeping the reader engaged by her way of foreshadowing the future.  Once she drops a hint, you know it will come up in a later chapter, but how?   It’s a captivating story, well plotted.

–Unlike Iskander, the younger brother Yunus makes friends with outcasts. I couldn’t understand why that story was happening concurrently with the other stories.

–I think she  was giving us a sense of London in those years.

–Yunus was born in Europe and has a different lifestyle from his older brother Iskander, the “sultan” of the family. That happens a lot with migrant families—kids develop different channels. when I was growing up in Germany, I found refuge with the future Green Party people. They were against cutting trees and nuclear power. They had long hair, but they were with us. They were open to foreigners. Yunus found a happy life with that anti-establishment group.

–But let’s get back to “honor.” Why do only women carry it? Why not men too? Why do women always pay the price when something happens? And my first question–is it any different now, in Turkey or Kurdistan?

–It’s not as severe now as it was then. In my hometown, Bingöl, people have boyfriends and girlfriends. Couples go to cafes. That wasn’t a norm 50 years ago.  Travel and mass media and social media have changed the mentality, even if not completely. Bingöl has a big university with 50,000 students—it’s changed the character of my town. People have changed,  the times have changed.

–It depends on where you’re located, and on the generations. My grandparents haven’t changed, but their children have. In my town, Silêmanî, we had a lot of female suicides by burning. They were doing it to draw attention, during a time of political unrest. People didn’t ant to acknowledge that honor killings were happening.