Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. Today we speak to a globally best selling novelist who has a special knack for angering the Turkish government. Her name is Elif Shafak. In two thousand and six, at the height of her fame, she was charged with insulting Turkishness because one of the characters in her novel The Bastard of Istanbul, referred to the murder of Armenians during World War One as a genocide. That case was eventually dismissed, but last year Turkish authorities began a new investigation into her past work for what they called quote crimes of obscenity. One thing that the Turkish authorities have not been able to do, however, is to keep Turkish readers and readers all over the world from devouring Elif's books. The government also hasn't been able to keep critics around the world from praising Eliaf's books either. Her most recent novel, Ten Minutes thirty eight Seconds in This Strange World was shortlisted for the twenty nineteen Booker Prize. The novel is about a prostitute named to Quila Leila, and it begins at the end of her story with her body found in a dumpster. A Leif joined me from London, where she now lives, to talk to me about that new book and much more. Let me begin by asking a little bit about your process of writing. This is your eleventh novel, and you did something rather extraordinary and among writers, which is that you wrote many of your first novels in Turkish, your first language, and then you switched to writing in English. And as I was thinking about it, I thought, that's even harder than what Joseph Conrad did, because he, of course spoke Polish as his first language, and then he started but when he started writing novels, he started writting them in English. What you have done is more like what Nabokov did, writing many of his novels first in Russian and then turning to writing novels in English. What moved you to make that transition? And then I'd love to hear about some of the challenges and gifts that derive from that. I appreciate it. It is a challenge, and the master want to be honest, because I did not grow up in a bilingual environment, and I started learning English at the age of ten in Spain in Madrid, so at the time Spanish was my second language and English became my third. Turkish is my mother tongue, and of course, to me, English is an acquired language, which means I'm an outsider in this language, and I'm an immigrant, you know, a latecomer. And I think, like all immigrants know, there's always a gap between the mind and the tongue. When you're an immigrant, you always try to say more, but in a way you end up saying less. Maybe you want to crack better jokes, but there's always is a gap. And I think that gap can be quite intimidating. But if we learn not to be intimidated by that, I think it can also be very inspiring. In a nutshell, I think I'm someone who loves languages plural. I love letters. To me, it's almost magical, the very fact that with a very limited number of letters we can create endless meanings. I love that. I adore that I wrote my earlier novels all in Turkish first, and then about fifteen years ago now I switched to writing in English first, and at the time in Turkey there was a big backlash. People criticize me a lot, especially nationalists, saying she now cannot be a Turkish author because you know, they accuse me of practically abundaning my mother tongue. And I think that's one of the many problems with nationalism. It's always an either or thing for them, Whereas I believe you can if you can dream in more than one language, you can write fiction more than one language. So all I can say over the years is that I found the possibility of writing in another language freeing. To me. It's freedom, and I needed that. Writing in Turkish can be quite heavy, and I needed a bit of cognitive distance. Writing in English gave me that sense of freedom overall. If my writing has melancholy, sadness, longing, and sorrow, I find these things much easier to express in Turkish. But when it comes to humor and irony and maybe satire, I find these things much easier in English. Well, this new novel has both. It has melancholy and it has longing, and it has humor and satire. And it strikes me that it must have been particularly challenging to write a novel, all of the action of which takes place in Turkey, in Turkish, in the English language. In other words, there must have been some degree of internal thought of translation on your part as you imagined what your characters might have said. Since you know the characters, presumably in your imagination, we're saying these words originally in Turkish. All the things I do not translate in my head, because for me, language is a bit like a zone, you know, a different zone space I enter in, and so when I am in that space, I'm in that space. I do not translate in my head, which doesn't mean I don't make mistakes. I will always make mistakes or mispronounced words, but I'm in that space, and to me, that's very important to follow the flow, the rhythm of that language. And in a way, maybe when I'm a little bit distant from the Turkish language, maybe I can take a closer look at my motherland. It's a bit like if when you want to see a painting better, you don't get nearer, you just sometimes need to take a step back. And that space in between, that cognitive distance or linguistic distance, if you will, I found it in a paradoxical way, maybe it brings me closer to Turkey. In fact, I want to ask you a little bit about national allegory. There are moments reading the novel when I thought of, you know, the protagonist's father's gradual move towards greater religious observance, and the components of hypocrisy that the novel draws attention to in that in that process where I wondered if those could be read as engage with or in criticism of changes and developments that have taken place in Turkey in recent decades. I think that's correct, because what we've seen in Turkey is a slide backwards, first a gradual one, and then speeding up, I think, with a bewildering speed. We've seen a decline. By that, I mean as we've lost democracy, we've also seen a rise in nationalism, religiosity definitely, fundamentalism of all kinds, authoritarianism certainly. But when these things happen, I think women need to be more worried because alongside we've seen an increase in patriarchy, we've seen an increase in sexism, and also we've seen an increasing in homophobia and transphobia. In my opinion, it's this is not a coincidence because wherever we see an increasingbltranationalism. Any kind of extremist narrative will always go hand in hand with some kind of misogyny an intolerance towards particularly minorities. What happens in countries where democracy is shattered to pieces is diversity also is never appreciated. You know, I come from a country or diversity. It has never been appreciated properly. But we've completely lost our respect towards diversity. As a result, the public space becomes more and more intolerant, and then it becomes very difficult to be different. If you are different for whatever reason. This could be the color of your skin, how you look, it could be your sexual identity, it could be your political views for whatever reason. If you are deemed to be different in the eyes of the society, than your life is going to be very difficult. So I think it became more and more difficult to be the other in a country like Turkey that has been going backwards very fast. You talk a great deal about education in the first part of the novel, because the protagonist Tequila Leila, when she's a young girl, does go to school, does learn to read, unlike her her actual mother. Yet there is a moment where she rebels against education and where she says, I don't care about it. I'm paraphrasing, but it was something like I don't care about all this crap and that the word jumps off the page, and I was struck by it, and it was a very powerful moment for me because it was the moment when, you know, one could sense that education would not be liberating for this character. Yes, I'm a big believer in particularly girls education. At the same time, I want to explore this what do we mean by education, because sometimes education can be quite nationalistic, it can be very religious, particularly the context that I'm describing in the novel. She grows up in a polygamous family, so it's a family with one father and two mothers without quite knowing which one of these two women is her biological mother. And the kind of education that her father is trying to give her is extremely patriarchal and very religious. So there's a part of her that reacts to all that heritage and is longing for freedom. And that's not an easy thing because it's a society that doesn't allow that kind of behavior, particularly when you're a young girl. So I also want to show those layers. At the end of the day, I'm a big believer in books. Maybe I make a distinction between information, knowledge, and wisdom, and I think they're very different things, particularly the age we're living in. I believe we have too much information, a lot of information, let alone misinformation, and that's an obstacle in front of knowledge because knowledge requires us to slow down, and knowledge requires in depth analysis. It requires books, you know. And then there's wisdom, which is something else wholl together, and I believe that requires bringing the mind and the heart together. It requires empathy, emotional intelligence, and therefore it requires stories. So one of the questions that I ask myself is how can we change the ratio? Because we have too much information in this stage, less knowledge, and even less wisdom. How can we change that and have aim for less information, more knowledge, and much more wisdom. And that's especially challenging because sometimes the flow of information seems as though it will envelop us, and yet if we don't follow it, there's the possibility of losing the thread I mean, and therefore being unable to make the kinds of judgments that would be would be required. I mean, if one thinks of the Brexit debates or the debates over the impeachment of Donald Trump. Without the basic information, and of course the information, as you say, is contested and is met with misinformation. But without the basic information, it can become impossible to engage at all. I mean, one would like to achieve knowledge on these topics, of course, if such a thing is even possible. But they have a kind of you know, flowing like a river or feeling. And if you don't, if you don't keep drinking from the river, the river will just wash over you. Or maybe maybe the metaphors you have to just try to keep your head above the water as the river washes over you, or else you'll drown. Yeah, And I think that's a wonderful metaphor and so true. Because we cannot digest this much information, it doesn't stay with us. So all we're trying to do is just somehow management to sink. But that is not enough. So maybe this much information is really giving us the illusion that we know something about the subject. And maybe it's better if we don't know it. Just it's better to say, you know, I don't know. I'm still working on it. We forgot to say I don't know. In the stage, because if you ask me something and I don't know the answer, all I have to do is google it, and in the next five seconds or a couple of minutes, I have the illusion that I can give you an answer about that subject. But that's not knowledge. So I think we need to differentiate these things and be honest that we cannot process this much information. It doesn't stay with us. And to me, it's incredibly important. Two things to slow down because constantly we're in a hurry. And also loneliness, some kind of maybe intellectual loneliness is important because constantly we're in the company of each other. It affects us, we think in collective identities. When we are reading a novel, we are alone. Walter ban I mean he used to call the novel the loneliest form of art, and I love that description. You know, the writers alone when she or he is writing, but also the readers alone when she or he is reading, and we need to go into that inner space. That solitude has a peaceful energy, and I think that's incredibly important in this fast moving age of constant information. Loneliness, the writer's loneliness, the reader's loneliness are enhanced. I think by a sense of distance. And I thought of that very much in reading your novel, because the city of Istanbul is a character in the novel, a very vibrant and rich character, and it's also a city from which you are now at some real geographical distance. And I wondered if perhaps there's an introduction to talking about that a little bit. You'd be willing to read out a passage from from your novel. It's the chapter that's called this Manic Old City. Istanbul was an illusion, a magician's trick gone wrong. Istambul was a dream that existed solely in the minds of hushish eaters. In truth, there was no Istambul. There were multiple istambules, struggling, competing, clashing, each perceiving that in the end only one could survive. There was, for instance, an ancient Estambul, designed to be crossed on foot or by boat. The city of itinerant dervishes, fortune tellers, matchmakers, seafarers, cotton fluffers, rug beaters, and porters with wicker baskets on their backs. There was modern essemble, an urban sprawl, overrun with cars and motorcycles whizzing back and forth. Construction trucks laden with building materials for more shopping centers, skyscrapers, industrial sites. Imperial istambul versus plea in Istanbul global istambul versus parochial Istanbul, cosmopolitan istambul versus philistine Istanbul heretical istambul versus pious istambul, matro istambul versus a feminine istambul that adopted aphrodite, goddess of desire and also of strife, as its symbol and protector. Then there was the Istanbul of those who had left long ago, sailing to far away ports. For them, the city would always be a metropolis made of memories, myths, and messianic longings, forever elusive, like a lover's face receding in the mist. All these istambuls lived and breathe inside one another, like Matroshka dolls that had come to life. Extraordinary. That image of the city elusive like a lover's face receding the mist, calls to my mind medieval Attoman and Persian poetry in which the lover is always just about present and then evanesces and disappears into the distance. Yeah, exactly, always illusive. Indeed, Istanbul, which is a city with which you clearly have a very deep relationship, but from which you are now at a distance. As you were writing about the city, how did you think of that that distance. I think it's emotionally, to be honest, heart for me, because I love Istanbul and I feel very attached to the city, the people, it's culture, it's history, so that that connection is very personal. Nonetheless, I think wherever I go, I feel like I carry Istanbul with me. My relationship with the city is quite emotional, of course, but at the same time, I'm someone who believes in multiple belongings. Over the years, I've become a Londoner, I've become a British citizen. And to what Teresa Made, the previous Prime Minister, has been telling us, I would like to think of myself as a citizen of the world, because she said, if you're a citizen of the world, it means you're a citizen of nowhere. I think she was wrong. If you're a citizen of the world, it doesn't mean that you have no sense of belonging, that you're floating in the air aimlessly. I think a citizen of humanity means you do care about multiple things, multiple identities, multiple belongings at the same time, so you can be very attached to a place, but at the same time very much attached to or connected with your fellow human beings all around the world. I want to defend that kind of combination of local and universal at the same time. When you were writing this novel, it was at a time in your life where you can't visit Istanable, you can't go back to Turkey. I'm wondering, for a person who embraces multiple identities as you've just described, is it possible for a citizen of the world to feel herself to be an exiled right? I mean, one cannot be truly exiled from the world, but one can be exiled from from someplace. Is that a phrase that you hear and think to yourself, that is that's not me. I'm not an exiled writer because I'm at home in many places. Where do you think to yourself, Yes, I am at the stage of my life where that might be a fair description of me. I think what you've expressed is so true, because, on the one hand, I feel like you can't be exiled from the world, or from humanity, or from storyland. Storyland is my homeland is my motherland, and I won't be exiled from there. But at the same time, of course, there's an emotional pain, and I have to be honest about that that accompanies me, because I do know that I'm not able to go at the moment. So, yes, exile is a word that I take seriously, and I do think about a lot. To be honest. This is a little bit oblique to the question of exile, but it goes back to the point that you made in describing the novel of your fascination with the scientific studies that suggests that sometimes the brain can continue to live on for some time after the body dies, or after the heart dies at least. Yeah, as I read the novel, I kept thinking to myself, as a matter of genre, is this a novel of magical realism or is it a novel of realist realism. On the one hand, as you say, it's it's not the case that there couldn't be anything in the mind after the body dies. Of course, on the other hand, one could hardly communicate the details of that of that story. So there's something magical in that sense about it. And although it's not the kind of magical realist novel in which you know, trees begin to cry in the kind of classic Marquez sort of mold. It is a novel which shares, at least it seemed to this reader some rhythms and some connections with the great tradition of magical realism. Yes, I understand, and I think the reason why I hesitate slightly is because in my mind, I don't make these distinctions. You know, I don't believe in categories. I don't even know how to categorize or explain my own work, and I feel more free when I don't put it in a certain genre. So maybe there's a part of me that resists that. But that said, of course, I the writer's privilege. For certain, it's the writer's privilege to reject being boxed into any genre. Naturally, we try, you know. But what you said made me remember maybe a moment in time when I was in my grandmother's house in Ankara. This was a very patriarchal, very conservative neighborhood, and I'm talking about late nineteen seventies. This was a time of extreme political violence in Turkey. And there is a moment when I remember I was sitting by the window and thinking about the world outside the window, which was full of political clashes, bombs exploding, students were being gone down every day, people would die on the streets and inside the house. In my grandmother's house, it was somehow full of you know, maybe you call it superstitions. It was a very irrational world. And she would melt lead, she had her own coffee cup reading, she would have her magic charms towards of the evil spirits, and people would come to her, and in a way, she was a bit like an oral storyteller. Maybe there's a part of me that remembers that moment, you know, that wants to be able to write about what's happening outside the window and therefore ask political questions about the world we're living in and in its inequalities and injustices. But at the same time, there's also a part of me that is still tuned into that world that I found inside the house, which is maybe magical or superstitious or spiritual, whatever we call it, but definitely a very irrational world. I have never looked down upon oral culture, women's culture. And the reason why I'm saying this is because in Turkey usually intellectuals do not respect that area much because it's regarded as the domain of ignorant women. But either because of my own upbringing or my personality, I've always been interested in that world as much as I've been interested in academia and knowledge and the intellect. So maybe there's a part of me that wants to bridge written culture with oral culture in some way. Your protagonist, Tequila Leila, could not be more different from you. She's isolated, and she is repressed, and she is she's impoverished, she's unable to move and be global. She's stuck on many, many dimensions. But in another way, she's also the victim of concerted efforts really throughout her life to marginalize her and to criticize her, and to deny her her capacity to genuinely express herself. And I wondered writing this novel at a time where, for what looked from the outside like essentially political reasons, criticism from nationalists, you are unable to be in Turkey, whether you have some identification with the protagonist on that dimension, in the sense of being targeted and unfairly on the false with the false idea that somehow your truths are things that the public can't bear to hear or can't tolerate hearing. I think this feeling of being the other, if you will, that's something that I unfamiliar with, and I've felt like the other myself for different reasons throughout my life, and I think I always feel closer to people who've been pushed to the periphery, to the margins. It comes naturally to me, and maybe it's visible in all my work. One of the things that happened over the years is, you know, when I wrote the story of an Armenian family, people said, oh, she must be an Armenian herself. And then if there's a Jewish character in my books, they said, oh, she's a secret Jew, because in Turkey we have this. It's a country of in many ways, conspiracy theories unfortunately, so everything has to be secret, right, And then they said, oh, she's a secret Kurd, She's a secret this. But the underlying message is if it's not your story, why would you write it? You know, if you're an Armenian yourself, why would you care? Why would you write about Armenians? And that's the mentality that I want to challenge. Of course, at the end of the day, everything that we write as novelists. They have autobiographical echoes, certainly, But the reason why I love literature so much is because I can be anyone. You can't be anyone. You know, there's freedom. As long as you feel it in your heart and follow the story and really put effort in it, we can write anything and everything. I leave Shafak, thank you. I will look forward to learning more from you in the future, and I imagine that I'm joined by many others in that respect. Thank you so much for the conversation. I appreciate it so much. Thank you. The name of a. Leif Shafak's latest novel is ten minutes, thirty eight seconds In This Strange World. We'll be back with this week's playback in just a moment. Now for our playback, John Dunning, Miriam Haley, Jessica Man, Annabella Shora, Charole Wolf, Lauren Young, Meghan Hast, Joan Bluzi Orbone. Eight women who have changed the course of history in the fight against sexual violence. That's Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vans Junior, whose office prosecuted the case against tarwe Weinstein, speaking at a press conference right after the verdict was announced. If you heard that verdict. Briefly, you might have been a little bit confused because it sounds like it was a split verdict. On the one hand, Weinstein was convicted of two charges of rape, and those were the primary charges against him. Yet it's also true that Weinstein was acquitted on three other charges, including two of the most serious charges against him, charges that he was a sexual predator. After all, you might say to yourself, Weinstein obviously was a sexual predator, So maybe this isn't really that much of a win for the prosecutors or for the me too movement. Well, the honest truth is, if you go behind the scenes of this case and look at the prosecutor strategy, you'll see that it was a win for the prosecutors even though Weinstein was cleared of two of the most serious charges. And here's why. Ordinarily, in a criminal case, we do not allow evidence to be introduced of any bad acts that the defendant committed outside of the context of the specific charges brought against him. And there's a reason for that. We don't want to raise to convict people because they think they're just lousy, or because we think they're bad on general principles, or because they think that they're guilty of some other conduct other than conduct with which they are literally being charged. But there are exceptions. One is, if the prosecutors can introduce a pattern of prior conduct, they can get other bad acts admitted that happened actually in the Weinstein trial, and it's one of the reasons that several other witnesses three whose names have not been made public were introduced in order to testify to other bad acts of Weinstein's. But another way for prosecutors to introduce prior evidence of bad action in a criminal trial in the New York States system is to charge the defendant with being a sexual predator, and that charge is what allowed the prosecution to introduce the testimony of the actress Annabelle Ashura, who testified that more than twenty five years ago, Harvey Weinstein raped her. Now, on the surface, the fact that Weinstein was not convicted of being a sexual predator might make you think that the jury didn't believe Shura. That's not necessarily the case. It's entirely possible that the jury believed her but thought there wasn't beyond a reasonable doubt evidence of that charge, and that as a consequence, it strengthened their judgment that Weinstein was in fact guilty of the basic rapes with which he was charged. That's especially probable because those rapes involved situations in which it's often very difficult for prosecutors to get convictions, namely, no physical evidence and an ongoing professional, social, and even sexual relationship between the perpetrator and the victims after the crimes alleged, at least according to Weinstein's lawyers. Furthermore, to the extent the jury may actually have been engaged in an internal compromise, The fact that there were more serious charges that it could choose not to find Weinstein guilty of may have actually driven the jury in the direction of finding Weinstein guilty on the underlying charges of rape. Of course, we don't like to think the juries are horse training behind the scenes, but we understand that in reality they sometimes are. So that's another reason to think that the prosecutor's decision to introduce the charge against Weinstein of being a sexual predator actually contributed to his eventual conviction on the underlying rape charges, notwithstanding his acquittal on the sexual predation charges. The upshot here is at the legal system as like a lot of other complicated systems in the world. Sometimes to understand what's really going on, you've got to get behind the scenes. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia gene Coott, with studio recording by Joseph Fridman and mastering by Jason Gambrel and Jason Roskowski. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbn. Our theme music composed by Luis Garat special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weissberg, and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. This is Deep Background

Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. Today we speak to a globally best selling novelist who has a special knack for angering the Turkish government. Her name is Elif Shafak. In two thousand and six, at the height of her fame, she was charged with insulting Turkishness because one of the characters in her novel The Bastard of Istanbul, referred to the murder of Armenians during World War One as a genocide. That case was eventually dismissed, but last year Turkish authorities began a new investigation into her past work for what they called quote crimes of obscenity. One thing that the Turkish authorities have not been able to do, however, is to keep Turkish readers and readers all over the world from devouring Elif's books. The government also hasn't been able to keep critics around the world from praising Eliaf's books either. Her most recent novel, Ten Minutes thirty eight Seconds in This Strange World was shortlisted for the twenty nineteen Booker Prize. The novel is about a prostitute named to Quila Leila, and it begins at the end of her story with her body found in a dumpster. A Leif joined me from London, where she now lives, to talk to me about that new book and much more. Let me begin by asking a little bit about your process of writing. This is your eleventh novel, and you did something rather extraordinary and among writers, which is that you wrote many of your first novels in Turkish, your first language, and then you switched to writing in English. And as I was thinking about it, I thought, that's even harder than what Joseph Conrad did, because he, of course spoke Polish as his first language, and then he started but when he started writing novels, he started writting them in English. What you have done is more like what Nabokov did, writing many of his novels first in Russian and then turning to writing novels in English. What moved you to make that transition? And then I'd love to hear about some of the challenges and gifts that derive from that. I appreciate it. It is a challenge, and the master want to be honest, because I did not grow up in a bilingual environment, and I started learning English at the age of ten in Spain in Madrid, so at the time Spanish was my second language and English became my third. Turkish is my mother tongue, and of course, to me, English is an acquired language, which means I'm an outsider in this language, and I'm an immigrant, you know, a latecomer. And I think, like all immigrants know, there's always a gap between the mind and the tongue. When you're an immigrant, you always try to say more, but in a way you end up saying less. Maybe you want to crack better jokes, but there's always is a gap. And I think that gap can be quite intimidating. But if we learn not to be intimidated by that, I think it can also be very inspiring. In a nutshell, I think I'm someone who loves languages plural. I love letters. To me, it's almost magical, the very fact that with a very limited number of letters we can create endless meanings. I love that. I adore that I wrote my earlier novels all in Turkish first, and then about fifteen years ago now I switched to writing in English first, and at the time in Turkey there was a big backlash. People criticize me a lot, especially nationalists, saying she now cannot be a Turkish author because you know, they accuse me of practically abundaning my mother tongue. And I think that's one of the many problems with nationalism. It's always an either or thing for them, Whereas I believe you can if you can dream in more than one language, you can write fiction more than one language. So all I can say over the years is that I found the possibility of writing in another language freeing. To me. It's freedom, and I needed that. Writing in Turkish can be quite heavy, and I needed a bit of cognitive distance. Writing in English gave me that sense of freedom overall. If my writing has melancholy, sadness, longing, and sorrow, I find these things much easier to express in Turkish. But when it comes to humor and irony and maybe satire, I find these things much easier in English. Well, this new novel has both. It has melancholy and it has longing, and it has humor and satire. And it strikes me that it must have been particularly challenging to write a novel, all of the action of which takes place in Turkey, in Turkish, in the English language. In other words, there must have been some degree of internal thought of translation on your part as you imagined what your characters might have said. Since you know the characters, presumably in your imagination, we're saying these words originally in Turkish. All the things I do not translate in my head, because for me, language is a bit like a zone, you know, a different zone space I enter in, and so when I am in that space, I'm in that space. I do not translate in my head, which doesn't mean I don't make mistakes. I will always make mistakes or mispronounced words, but I'm in that space, and to me, that's very important to follow the flow, the rhythm of that language. And in a way, maybe when I'm a little bit distant from the Turkish language, maybe I can take a closer look at my motherland. It's a bit like if when you want to see a painting better, you don't get nearer, you just sometimes need to take a step back. And that space in between, that cognitive distance or linguistic distance, if you will, I found it in a paradoxical way, maybe it brings me closer to Turkey. In fact, I want to ask you a little bit about national allegory. There are moments reading the novel when I thought of, you know, the protagonist's father's gradual move towards greater religious observance, and the components of hypocrisy that the novel draws attention to in that in that process where I wondered if those could be read as engage with or in criticism of changes and developments that have taken place in Turkey in recent decades. I think that's correct, because what we've seen in Turkey is a slide backwards, first a gradual one, and then speeding up, I think, with a bewildering speed. We've seen a decline. By that, I mean as we've lost democracy, we've also seen a rise in nationalism, religiosity definitely, fundamentalism of all kinds, authoritarianism certainly. But when these things happen, I think women need to be more worried because alongside we've seen an increase in patriarchy, we've seen an increase in sexism, and also we've seen an increasing in homophobia and transphobia. In my opinion, it's this is not a coincidence because wherever we see an increasingbltranationalism. Any kind of extremist narrative will always go hand in hand with some kind of misogyny an intolerance towards particularly minorities. What happens in countries where democracy is shattered to pieces is diversity also is never appreciated. You know, I come from a country or diversity. It has never been appreciated properly. But we've completely lost our respect towards diversity. As a result, the public space becomes more and more intolerant, and then it becomes very difficult to be different. If you are different for whatever reason. This could be the color of your skin, how you look, it could be your sexual identity, it could be your political views for whatever reason. If you are deemed to be different in the eyes of the society, than your life is going to be very difficult. So I think it became more and more difficult to be the other in a country like Turkey that has been going backwards very fast. You talk a great deal about education in the first part of the novel, because the protagonist Tequila Leila, when she's a young girl, does go to school, does learn to read, unlike her her actual mother. Yet there is a moment where she rebels against education and where she says, I don't care about it. I'm paraphrasing, but it was something like I don't care about all this crap and that the word jumps off the page, and I was struck by it, and it was a very powerful moment for me because it was the moment when, you know, one could sense that education would not be liberating for this character. Yes, I'm a big believer in particularly girls education. At the same time, I want to explore this what do we mean by education, because sometimes education can be quite nationalistic, it can be very religious, particularly the context that I'm describing in the novel. She grows up in a polygamous family, so it's a family with one father and two mothers without quite knowing which one of these two women is her biological mother. And the kind of education that her father is trying to give her is extremely patriarchal and very religious. So there's a part of her that reacts to all that heritage and is longing for freedom. And that's not an easy thing because it's a society that doesn't allow that kind of behavior, particularly when you're a young girl. So I also want to show those layers. At the end of the day, I'm a big believer in books. Maybe I make a distinction between information, knowledge, and wisdom, and I think they're very different things, particularly the age we're living in. I believe we have too much information, a lot of information, let alone misinformation, and that's an obstacle in front of knowledge because knowledge requires us to slow down, and knowledge requires in depth analysis. It requires books, you know. And then there's wisdom, which is something else wholl together, and I believe that requires bringing the mind and the heart together. It requires empathy, emotional intelligence, and therefore it requires stories. So one of the questions that I ask myself is how can we change the ratio? Because we have too much information in this stage, less knowledge, and even less wisdom. How can we change that and have aim for less information, more knowledge, and much more wisdom. And that's especially challenging because sometimes the flow of information seems as though it will envelop us, and yet if we don't follow it, there's the possibility of losing the thread I mean, and therefore being unable to make the kinds of judgments that would be would be required. I mean, if one thinks of the Brexit debates or the debates over the impeachment of Donald Trump. Without the basic information, and of course the information, as you say, is contested and is met with misinformation. But without the basic information, it can become impossible to engage at all. I mean, one would like to achieve knowledge on these topics, of course, if such a thing is even possible. But they have a kind of you know, flowing like a river or feeling. And if you don't, if you don't keep drinking from the river, the river will just wash over you. Or maybe maybe the metaphors you have to just try to keep your head above the water as the river washes over you, or else you'll drown. Yeah, And I think that's a wonderful metaphor and so true. Because we cannot digest this much information, it doesn't stay with us. So all we're trying to do is just somehow management to sink. But that is not enough. So maybe this much information is really giving us the illusion that we know something about the subject. And maybe it's better if we don't know it. Just it's better to say, you know, I don't know. I'm still working on it. We forgot to say I don't know. In the stage, because if you ask me something and I don't know the answer, all I have to do is google it, and in the next five seconds or a couple of minutes, I have the illusion that I can give you an answer about that subject. But that's not knowledge. So I think we need to differentiate these things and be honest that we cannot process this much information. It doesn't stay with us. And to me, it's incredibly important. Two things to slow down because constantly we're in a hurry. And also loneliness, some kind of maybe intellectual loneliness is important because constantly we're in the company of each other. It affects us, we think in collective identities. When we are reading a novel, we are alone. Walter ban I mean he used to call the novel the loneliest form of art, and I love that description. You know, the writers alone when she or he is writing, but also the readers alone when she or he is reading, and we need to go into that inner space. That solitude has a peaceful energy, and I think that's incredibly important in this fast moving age of constant information. Loneliness, the writer's loneliness, the reader's loneliness are enhanced. I think by a sense of distance. And I thought of that very much in reading your novel, because the city of Istanbul is a character in the novel, a very vibrant and rich character, and it's also a city from which you are now at some real geographical distance. And I wondered if perhaps there's an introduction to talking about that a little bit. You'd be willing to read out a passage from from your novel. It's the chapter that's called this Manic Old City. Istanbul was an illusion, a magician's trick gone wrong. Istambul was a dream that existed solely in the minds of hushish eaters. In truth, there was no Istambul. There were multiple istambules, struggling, competing, clashing, each perceiving that in the end only one could survive. There was, for instance, an ancient Estambul, designed to be crossed on foot or by boat. The city of itinerant dervishes, fortune tellers, matchmakers, seafarers, cotton fluffers, rug beaters, and porters with wicker baskets on their backs. There was modern essemble, an urban sprawl, overrun with cars and motorcycles whizzing back and forth. Construction trucks laden with building materials for more shopping centers, skyscrapers, industrial sites. Imperial istambul versus plea in Istanbul global istambul versus parochial Istanbul, cosmopolitan istambul versus philistine Istanbul heretical istambul versus pious istambul, matro istambul versus a feminine istambul that adopted aphrodite, goddess of desire and also of strife, as its symbol and protector. Then there was the Istanbul of those who had left long ago, sailing to far away ports. For them, the city would always be a metropolis made of memories, myths, and messianic longings, forever elusive, like a lover's face receding in the mist. All these istambuls lived and breathe inside one another, like Matroshka dolls that had come to life. Extraordinary. That image of the city elusive like a lover's face receding the mist, calls to my mind medieval Attoman and Persian poetry in which the lover is always just about present and then evanesces and disappears into the distance. Yeah, exactly, always illusive. Indeed, Istanbul, which is a city with which you clearly have a very deep relationship, but from which you are now at a distance. As you were writing about the city, how did you think of that that distance. I think it's emotionally, to be honest, heart for me, because I love Istanbul and I feel very attached to the city, the people, it's culture, it's history, so that that connection is very personal. Nonetheless, I think wherever I go, I feel like I carry Istanbul with me. My relationship with the city is quite emotional, of course, but at the same time, I'm someone who believes in multiple belongings. Over the years, I've become a Londoner, I've become a British citizen. And to what Teresa Made, the previous Prime Minister, has been telling us, I would like to think of myself as a citizen of the world, because she said, if you're a citizen of the world, it means you're a citizen of nowhere. I think she was wrong. If you're a citizen of the world, it doesn't mean that you have no sense of belonging, that you're floating in the air aimlessly. I think a citizen of humanity means you do care about multiple things, multiple identities, multiple belongings at the same time, so you can be very attached to a place, but at the same time very much attached to or connected with your fellow human beings all around the world. I want to defend that kind of combination of local and universal at the same time. When you were writing this novel, it was at a time in your life where you can't visit Istanable, you can't go back to Turkey. I'm wondering, for a person who embraces multiple identities as you've just described, is it possible for a citizen of the world to feel herself to be an exiled right? I mean, one cannot be truly exiled from the world, but one can be exiled from from someplace. Is that a phrase that you hear and think to yourself, that is that's not me. I'm not an exiled writer because I'm at home in many places. Where do you think to yourself, Yes, I am at the stage of my life where that might be a fair description of me. I think what you've expressed is so true, because, on the one hand, I feel like you can't be exiled from the world, or from humanity, or from storyland. Storyland is my homeland is my motherland, and I won't be exiled from there. But at the same time, of course, there's an emotional pain, and I have to be honest about that that accompanies me, because I do know that I'm not able to go at the moment. So, yes, exile is a word that I take seriously, and I do think about a lot. To be honest. This is a little bit oblique to the question of exile, but it goes back to the point that you made in describing the novel of your fascination with the scientific studies that suggests that sometimes the brain can continue to live on for some time after the body dies, or after the heart dies at least. Yeah, as I read the novel, I kept thinking to myself, as a matter of genre, is this a novel of magical realism or is it a novel of realist realism. On the one hand, as you say, it's it's not the case that there couldn't be anything in the mind after the body dies. Of course, on the other hand, one could hardly communicate the details of that of that story. So there's something magical in that sense about it. And although it's not the kind of magical realist novel in which you know, trees begin to cry in the kind of classic Marquez sort of mold. It is a novel which shares, at least it seemed to this reader some rhythms and some connections with the great tradition of magical realism. Yes, I understand, and I think the reason why I hesitate slightly is because in my mind, I don't make these distinctions. You know, I don't believe in categories. I don't even know how to categorize or explain my own work, and I feel more free when I don't put it in a certain genre. So maybe there's a part of me that resists that. But that said, of course, I the writer's privilege. For certain, it's the writer's privilege to reject being boxed into any genre. Naturally, we try, you know. But what you said made me remember maybe a moment in time when I was in my grandmother's house in Ankara. This was a very patriarchal, very conservative neighborhood, and I'm talking about late nineteen seventies. This was a time of extreme political violence in Turkey. And there is a moment when I remember I was sitting by the window and thinking about the world outside the window, which was full of political clashes, bombs exploding, students were being gone down every day, people would die on the streets and inside the house. In my grandmother's house, it was somehow full of you know, maybe you call it superstitions. It was a very irrational world. And she would melt lead, she had her own coffee cup reading, she would have her magic charms towards of the evil spirits, and people would come to her, and in a way, she was a bit like an oral storyteller. Maybe there's a part of me that remembers that moment, you know, that wants to be able to write about what's happening outside the window and therefore ask political questions about the world we're living in and in its inequalities and injustices. But at the same time, there's also a part of me that is still tuned into that world that I found inside the house, which is maybe magical or superstitious or spiritual, whatever we call it, but definitely a very irrational world. I have never looked down upon oral culture, women's culture. And the reason why I'm saying this is because in Turkey usually intellectuals do not respect that area much because it's regarded as the domain of ignorant women. But either because of my own upbringing or my personality, I've always been interested in that world as much as I've been interested in academia and knowledge and the intellect. So maybe there's a part of me that wants to bridge written culture with oral culture in some way. Your protagonist, Tequila Leila, could not be more different from you. She's isolated, and she is repressed, and she is she's impoverished, she's unable to move and be global. She's stuck on many, many dimensions. But in another way, she's also the victim of concerted efforts really throughout her life to marginalize her and to criticize her, and to deny her her capacity to genuinely express herself. And I wondered writing this novel at a time where, for what looked from the outside like essentially political reasons, criticism from nationalists, you are unable to be in Turkey, whether you have some identification with the protagonist on that dimension, in the sense of being targeted and unfairly on the false with the false idea that somehow your truths are things that the public can't bear to hear or can't tolerate hearing. I think this feeling of being the other, if you will, that's something that I unfamiliar with, and I've felt like the other myself for different reasons throughout my life, and I think I always feel closer to people who've been pushed to the periphery, to the margins. It comes naturally to me, and maybe it's visible in all my work. One of the things that happened over the years is, you know, when I wrote the story of an Armenian family, people said, oh, she must be an Armenian herself. And then if there's a Jewish character in my books, they said, oh, she's a secret Jew, because in Turkey we have this. It's a country of in many ways, conspiracy theories unfortunately, so everything has to be secret, right, And then they said, oh, she's a secret Kurd, She's a secret this. But the underlying message is if it's not your story, why would you write it? You know, if you're an Armenian yourself, why would you care? Why would you write about Armenians? And that's the mentality that I want to challenge. Of course, at the end of the day, everything that we write as novelists. They have autobiographical echoes, certainly, But the reason why I love literature so much is because I can be anyone. You can't be anyone. You know, there's freedom. As long as you feel it in your heart and follow the story and really put effort in it, we can write anything and everything. I leave Shafak, thank you. I will look forward to learning more from you in the future, and I imagine that I'm joined by many others in that respect. Thank you so much for the conversation. I appreciate it so much. Thank you. The name of a. Leif Shafak's latest novel is ten minutes, thirty eight seconds In This Strange World. We'll be back with this week's playback in just a moment. Now for our playback, John Dunning, Miriam Haley, Jessica Man, Annabella Shora, Charole Wolf, Lauren Young, Meghan Hast, Joan Bluzi Orbone. Eight women who have changed the course of history in the fight against sexual violence. That's Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vans Junior, whose office prosecuted the case against tarwe Weinstein, speaking at a press conference right after the verdict was announced. If you heard that verdict. Briefly, you might have been a little bit confused because it sounds like it was a split verdict. On the one hand, Weinstein was convicted of two charges of rape, and those were the primary charges against him. Yet it's also true that Weinstein was acquitted on three other charges, including two of the most serious charges against him, charges that he was a sexual predator. After all, you might say to yourself, Weinstein obviously was a sexual predator, So maybe this isn't really that much of a win for the prosecutors or for the me too movement. Well, the honest truth is, if you go behind the scenes of this case and look at the prosecutor strategy, you'll see that it was a win for the prosecutors even though Weinstein was cleared of two of the most serious charges. And here's why. Ordinarily, in a criminal case, we do not allow evidence to be introduced of any bad acts that the defendant committed outside of the context of the specific charges brought against him. And there's a reason for that. We don't want to raise to convict people because they think they're just lousy, or because we think they're bad on general principles, or because they think that they're guilty of some other conduct other than conduct with which they are literally being charged. But there are exceptions. One is, if the prosecutors can introduce a pattern of prior conduct, they can get other bad acts admitted that happened actually in the Weinstein trial, and it's one of the reasons that several other witnesses three whose names have not been made public were introduced in order to testify to other bad acts of Weinstein's. But another way for prosecutors to introduce prior evidence of bad action in a criminal trial in the New York States system is to charge the defendant with being a sexual predator, and that charge is what allowed the prosecution to introduce the testimony of the actress Annabelle Ashura, who testified that more than twenty five years ago, Harvey Weinstein raped her. Now, on the surface, the fact that Weinstein was not convicted of being a sexual predator might make you think that the jury didn't believe Shura. That's not necessarily the case. It's entirely possible that the jury believed her but thought there wasn't beyond a reasonable doubt evidence of that charge, and that as a consequence, it strengthened their judgment that Weinstein was in fact guilty of the basic rapes with which he was charged. That's especially probable because those rapes involved situations in which it's often very difficult for prosecutors to get convictions, namely, no physical evidence and an ongoing professional, social, and even sexual relationship between the perpetrator and the victims after the crimes alleged, at least according to Weinstein's lawyers. Furthermore, to the extent the jury may actually have been engaged in an internal compromise, The fact that there were more serious charges that it could choose not to find Weinstein guilty of may have actually driven the jury in the direction of finding Weinstein guilty on the underlying charges of rape. Of course, we don't like to think the juries are horse training behind the scenes, but we understand that in reality they sometimes are. So that's another reason to think that the prosecutor's decision to introduce the charge against Weinstein of being a sexual predator actually contributed to his eventual conviction on the underlying rape charges, notwithstanding his acquittal on the sexual predation charges. The upshot here is at the legal system as like a lot of other complicated systems in the world. Sometimes to understand what's really going on, you've got to get behind the scenes. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia gene Coott, with studio recording by Joseph Fridman and mastering by Jason Gambrel and Jason Roskowski. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbn. Our theme music composed by Luis Garat special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weissberg, and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. This is Deep Background