{"id":8777,"date":"2024-03-05T22:14:06","date_gmt":"2024-03-06T03:14:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/?p=8777"},"modified":"2024-03-06T17:24:22","modified_gmt":"2024-03-06T22:24:22","slug":"honor-by-elif-shafak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/honor-by-elif-shafak\/","title":{"rendered":"“Honor” by Elif Shafak"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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\"Honor\" by Elif Shafak<\/h1>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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\"ElifOn March 5 our book club discussed:<\/em><\/p>

Elif Shafak, Honor<\/em> (New York: Viking, 2013), 354 pages<\/strong><\/p>

The novel is set in the 1960s and \u201970s 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. \u00a0<\/p>

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 \u201chonor\u201d violation occurs, Pembe\u2019s elder son Iskander exercises what he feels is his responsibility to clear the honor of the family, resulting in tragedy.<\/p>

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

–“Honor”–it\u2019s tied with shame.. Kurds fear shame and embarrassment, and that fear lies at the root of this behavior. It\u2019s ingrained in our identity to avoid shame and make our families proud. But are we really preserving our \u201chonor\u201d for\u2014people back home? It\u2019s baffling that it stays with us. I\u2019m sure we\u2019re not the only culture that practices that.<\/p>

–I\u2019m wondering whether things have changed since the 1960s and \u201870s, the time frame for this novel. Do honor killings still persist among Kurds, even in the diaspora? Is it normalized among us? \u00a0And compared to other Middle Eastern societies that have \u201chonor\u201d killings, how strong or weak is it, relatively, among us?<\/p>

–Many other groups have it. In those cultures, nothing can stain men\u2019s dignity, but women \u201ccarry the honor of the nation between our legs.\u201d<\/p>

–I think the author has an unfortunate Turkish bias. She\u2019s 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.<\/p>

–But in those days Kurds really did have less access to education\u2014it 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.<\/p>

–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\u2019 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, \u00a0tell 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 \u00a0from Hakkari, When the president met her, he asked her, \u201cWhere are the people with tails?\u201d So even the president of Turkey thought Kurds had tails.<\/p>

–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\u2019t go into it\u2014instead she just refers in passing to \u201cclashes.\u201d Pembe encounters racism in London, yes, but what about in Istanbul?<\/p>

–But the author does talk about how Turkish government racism against Kurds, like when Pembe goes to the doctor, we see the doctor\u2019s treatment of her. And in the \u00a0elementary school , the children of the town\u2019s elite–officials, attorneys, government representatives\u2014would sit separately from the rest of the kids in the class, in separate tables or chairs. \u00a0So the book tells us what kind of racism we faced.\u00a0<\/p>

–Burhan S\u00f6nmez too mentioned historical events without going into them in great detail. But remember, he told us, \u201cWe write imagination, not analysis.\u201d<\/p>

–Readers of this book need more background on Kurds so they won\u2019t perceive us as uneducated villagers with shame culture.<\/p>

–Despite Turks thinking Kurds are uneducated, Kurds really have made huge contributions to \u201cTurkish\u201d literature. The author Ya\u015far Kemal, a Kurdish writer, is considered one of Turkey’s leading authors. Yilmaz G\u00fcney changed Turkish cinema. \u00a0<\/p>

–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. \u00a0Once she drops a hint, you know it will come up in a later chapter, but how? \u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s a captivating story, well plotted.<\/p>

–Unlike Iskander, the younger brother Yunus makes friends with outcasts. I couldn\u2019t understand why that story was happening concurrently with the other stories.<\/p>

–I think she \u00a0was giving us a sense of London in those years.<\/p>

–Yunus was born in Europe and has a different lifestyle from his older brother Iskander, the \u201csultan\u201d of the family. That happens a lot with migrant families\u2014kids 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.<\/p>

–But let\u2019s get back to \u201chonor.\u201d 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?<\/p>

–It\u2019s not as severe now as it was then. In my hometown, Bing\u00f6l, people have boyfriends and girlfriends. Couples go to cafes. That wasn\u2019t a norm 50 years ago. \u00a0Travel and mass media and social media have changed the mentality, even if not completely. Bing\u00f6l has a big university with 50,000 students\u2014it\u2019s changed the character of my town. People have changed,\u00a0 the times have changed.<\/p>

–It depends on where you\u2019re located, and on the generations. My grandparents haven\u2019t changed, but their children have. In my town, Sil\u00eaman\u00ee, we had a lot of female suicides by burning. They were doing it to draw attention, during a time of political unrest. People didn\u2019t ant to acknowledge that honor killings were happening.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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“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 \u201970s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8780,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[97,62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-club","category-literature"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8777"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8777\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8783,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8777\/revisions\/8783"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}