Unsettled belonging: How Shafak writes identity across rupture, diaspora, and denial

Abstract

The Ottoman Empire, ruled by the Turks, invaded several lands, including Southeast Europe, West Asia, and North Africa. Istanbul (Constantinople) was the center of the Ottoman authority, which massacred a large number of Armenian people in Turkey. In The Bastard of Istanbul, Elif Shafak portrays some Turkish Armenians who had to leave Turkey and move to a safer country to survive. Also, her Turkish Muslims resist the norms and traditions that have been deeply rooted in Turkey. Shafak looks at Armenian residents as the colonized people who are victimized, and she regards the Ottoman authority and Turkish government as the colonizers. Therefore, it can be concluded that Turkish residents must be in a better situation than their Armenian peers. However, this paper argues that Shafak’s characters, including both Turkish and Armenian ones, suffer and struggle to adopt some strategies to assert their own identities. This paper aims to examine The Bastard of Istanbul as a postcolonial work and analyze the characters’ cultural identities by employing Homi K. Bhabha’s postcolonial theories, particularly hybridity and displacement, to demonstrate how these Turkish Muslim and Armenian characters struggle to construct new identities. In other words, although The Bastard of Istanbul may seem to reinforce a colonizer/colonized divide that privileges Turks and portrays Armenians only as victims, this paper ultimately challenges this view by showing that both Turkish Muslim and Armenian characters are displaced, hybrid individuals who keep reshaping their identities beyond ancestry.