Your novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2019, was inspired by the real-life death of a sex worker in Istanbul. What was it about this story that compelled you to write a novel, and why do you often choose to write about individuals on the fringes of society?
As a writer I am not only interested in stories and storytelling, I am also drawn to silences – and the silenced. There is a part of me that wants to understand where are the silences in my society and who are the silenced. There is a cemetery I used to visit in Istanbul, it is known as The Cemetery of the Companionless. It has grown so fast over the years. It is massive. This is where people who have been ‘othered’ by the society are buried without a proper funeral –prostitutes, people who have died of HIV-related diseases, suicides, migrants who have lost their lives as they were trying to reach Europe… They are all buried there, side by side. There are no names or surnames on their tombstones, only numbers. It is a place where human beings are turned into numbers, and stories into silences. In my novel I wanted to flip this over. Just turn it upside down. I wanted to pick one of those numbers on the graves and give it a name, a story, friends or companions, reversing the process of dehumanisation.
10 Minutes… touches on various social issues, including human rights, gender, sexuality and marginalisation. What do you believe is fiction’s role in addressing such topics?
The art of storytelling can bring the periphery to the centre and make the invisible a bit more visible, the unheard just a bit better heard. I come from a country that is to a large extent shaped by collective amnesia. Turkey has a long and rich history but that does not translate into strong memory. Just the opposite, history, the way it is taught and canonised, is almost always his-story. Never her-story. And not the stories of men from poorer backgrounds or minority cultures and so on, but the stories of men in positions of power and authority. The moment you ask, who is telling this narrative, and who was not allowed to tell it, everything shifts. As a novelist I am interested in untold stories – the stories of women, the stories of minorities, the stories that have been conveniently erased, forgotten. These are not easy subjects to explore and when you do that you get a lot of attacks, but the novel, as a literary form of nuance, pluralism, complexity and empathy, is home in exile, a most needed sanctuary.
Location plays a large role in 10 Minutes…, with Istanbul providing the backdrop, along with its vivid sights, sounds and smells. How important is it for you to imbue your work with such a strong sense of place?
Place is very important to me. As an immigrant author I think a lot about questions of belonging and non-belonging. What does it mean to be uprooted or deracinated, rootless, re-rooted…. Can we have multiple homes, multiple belongings in a world that tries to narrow us down to a single box. All these questions matter to me. Life has also taught me that just because you are physically far away from your motherland it does not mean you are disconnected from it emotionally. We carry our motherlands with us wherever we go. There is a certain melancholy to that, a feeling of loss. At the same time the UK has become my home. And the English language too. I write fiction in a language other than my native tongue. So it is very complicated, my relationship with place and belonging and roots.
Critics and readers have observed that elements of magical realism appear in several of your works. What draws you to that style of fiction, and which other writers and works of magical realism have influenced you?
I have a lot of respect for authors who have been associated with ‘magical realism’, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison or Jorge Luis Borges. They have each left a profound impact on me. On the other hand, I sincerely think we should question this literary denomination, especially in a world that is profoundly interconnected. In the culture where I come from, or at least, in the house of my Grandma, the woman who raised me until I was ten years old, there were elements of spirituality and magic woven into every moment of daily life and political reality. My point is, these were not separate categories. For instance, when you live in a city like Istanbul for so long, you start to see how everything is constantly mixed with everything else. Sorrow with humour, actuality with surreal, in general, the absurd with the political… So, my understanding is that life itself does not keep ‘magic’ and ‘realism’ in two separate categories, but constantly and surprisingly blends them anyway. Maybe we need another term, a new concept altogether and literary critics can help us with. As an author, all I know is, I would like my fiction to bridge oral culture and written culture, the East and the West, the spiritual and the material, the surreal and the political, humour and melancholy, joining seemingly different entities of identity, time and place, showing how, in truth, everything and everyone is connected.
