62 pages • 2 hours read
Elif ShafakThe Bastard of Istanbul
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Wheat”
Asya Kazanci is composing articles for her Personal Manifesto. It’s Sunday morning and her aunts, including Zeliha, won’t leave her alone. They force her to join them for breakfast. Later that day, they will pick up an American from the airport—Mustafa’s stepdaughter. Asya doesn’t understand the fuss that the family is making for this stranger, and she resents how Grandma Gülsüm persistently defends Mustafa’s distance from the family.
Auntie Banu tells a story to ease the tension. She tells them about a man who traveled around the world to escape Azrail, the angel of death. The man sees Azrail in Cairo and flees to “a small, sleepy town in China” (131). When he arrives, he finds Azrail waiting for him in the first tavern he visits. Azrail greets the man and says how surprised he was to meet him in Cairo when it had been his destiny for them to meet in China.
Auntie Banu then buys simit (circular bread encrusted with sesame seeds) for breakfast—the Kazanci family tradition. She buys an extra one for “the missing sibling,” Mustafa (132). Auntie Banu tells the family another story about a crabby weaver who refuses the Ottoman sultan’s offer of baskets of wheat that will turn into golden coins. Asya loathes this story, which she blames for making her the butt of her classmates’ jokes during her childhood. She believed this story so heartily that she put straw under her pillow, believing she would awake to find a gold coin in the morning, and told her classmates as much.
The stories, which she has tired of hearing, coupled with the upcoming visit, leave Asya feeling crabby, though she isn’t sure why. She has inherited her mother’s ill-temper. Auntie Banu insists, however, that she be nice to the guest when she arrives, because Asya is the only member of the family who speaks English well, which makes her the translator. Before Asya leaves the house, under the pretext of going to a Chinese film festival, Auntie Zeliha tells her to return home before five so that she’ll be present before they go to the airport to pick up their guest.
On her way out, Asya hears Petite-Ma playing piano as though she were “looking for a melody long lost” (136). In her youth, Petite-Ma had been an accomplished pianist. She married Riza Selim Kazanci, a man 30 years older who was previously married to a woman who had abandoned him and their son. Riza refers to the first wife only as a “slut.” Riza worked, for a time, as a cauldron maker and chose the name “Kazanci” on the basis of his profession after the 1925 Law of Surnames required every citizen to choose one. Petite-Ma loved Riza because he could love someone else more than himself, which made her feel safe. His son, Levent, however, never accepted her as his mother. Together, Riza and Petite-Ma had no children due to an inability to get the timing right.
To occupy her time, Petite-Ma took piano lessons from a Russian who escaped the Bolshevik Revolution. She became his best student. After Riza succeeded in the flag-making business—capitalizing off of the nationalist fervor that erupted after the Turkish Republic was formed—he entertained distinguished guests, particularly government officials and “their dainty wives” (140). The female guests were divided into the “defeminized, desexualized” professional women, while the wives were exaggerated emblems of femininity (140).
Riza one day died unexpectedly, setting a trend that would become common among Kazanci men. Petite-Ma believed that others’ judgments about their childlessness had pierced through the walls of their konak and killed him. These days, however, her Alzheimer’s makes it so that she can barely recall anything but flickers of their past together.
Back in the present, Asya is sitting nude in the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist’s apartment, still working on her Personal Manifesto. When he asks when they’ll meet again, she ridicules him and accuses him of using her. The cartoonist is hurt by her callousness, which Asya blames both on her being “a bastard” and on being distant from her mother but so much like her. Worse, Asya notices how her family ignores all that they don’t wish to remember. She wonders if it would be better to have Alzheimer’s, like Petite-Ma—to be genuinely incapable of recalling things instead of pretending not to remember like the others.
Asya announces that she must leave to pick up her “pen pal” from the airport, a girl named Amy who wrote from San Francisco, saying that she was her Uncle Mustafa’s stepdaughter. Before she leaves, the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist tells Asya that he loves her. Asya thrusts her hands into her pockets and feels crumbs. When she pulls them out, she sees that they’re wheat grains, put there by Petite-Ma to protect her from the evil eye. She hugs the cartoonist, then runs down the stairs and out of the building.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Pine Nuts”
Asya isn’t pleased to learn that Amy will be rooming with her, depriving Asya of her much-needed privacy. Amy is asleep, recovering from jetlag while Asya talks over the rooming situation with her aunts. Their solicitousness toward the stranger irritates Asya, who feels that she’s never shown the same courtesy.
In the midst of this conversation, Armanoush steps into the living room. Everyone is watching a Turkish version of The Apprentice. Armanoush is wearing “faded denim jeans and a navy sweatshirt long and loose enough to hide the features of her body” (154). She chose the unflattering outfit thinking that it would help her blend into a conservative society. She was, thus, surprised when Auntie Zeliha picked her up from the airport wearing a mini-skirt and high heels, while Auntie Banu was “in a head scarf and a long dress” (154).
Seeing Armanoush, Auntie Banu rises and goes to the kitchen to get her some lentil soup, figuring that she must be hungry. Armanoush looks around the living room, which is a bright, colorful space full of mementos. On the dining table, she sees all of her favorite foods.
The elder women engage her in conversation. Armanoush answers Auntie Feride’s question about America and Grandma Gülsüm’s question about Mustafa. They’re impressed with Armanoush’s knowledge of Turkish cuisine, which she says she knows because the dishes on the table are all staples in Armenian cuisine. The commonalities between the cultures are further emphasized when Auntie Zeliha hears Armanoush’s surname, “Tchakhmakchian,” and notices that the Armenians, too, add a suffix to their names “to generate professions” (159).
Armanoush likes Auntie Zeliha’s funky, daring style and her non-judgmental attitude. Over dinner, Armanoush explains that she’s come to Istanbul to see her grandmother’s old home. Auntie Feride tells the others in Turkish that she thinks Amy has returned to uncover “gold coins” hidden away in her ancestors’ home. Asya rolls her eyes and listens to the rest of Armanoush’s story. She tells them how her great-grandfather, a poet and writer, was on a list of Armenians to be sentenced to death. He was taken to Chankiri to be killed. Meanwhile, Armanoush’s grandmother was forced out of her father’s home with the rest of her family and marched to an unknown place. Eventually, the children got separated but reunited after many years. Grandma Shushan’s Great Uncle Yervant later took her to the United States to be reunited with her relatives.
The aunts listen to the story. Auntie Cevriye wonders who performed this atrocity against Amy’s people, as does Auntie Banu. After dinner, Amy calls San Francisco and Tucson, letting her grandmother think that she’s in Arizona and encouraging her mother to think that she’s in California. Hanging up from the call with Rose, Amy looks around Asya’s room. The Turkish rugs and old-fashioned lamps cause her to feel the foreignness of the place. She worries that she may have acted impulsively and, worse, without her family’s knowledge.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Orange Peels”
Asya and Armanoush leave early the next morning to find the house where Grandma Shushan was born. They find the neighborhood, but they realize that the house was razed at some point to make room for the modern apartment building that currently sits where the house once was.
From there, they go to a fish restaurant, where the cook talks about Istanbul’s diverse, cosmopolitan past. They walk out. Bored, they buy something from every vendor they encounter. While strolling along the Bosphorus River, Armanoush tells Asya that she likes the Kazancis. Asya expresses her negative feelings toward her family, describing how they’ve pressured her to succeed at all the things they couldn’t achieve. Armanoush identifies with this, thinking of her own aunts and how they overwhelm her.
Armanoush also notices the peculiar relationship between Asya and Zeliha. Asya explains that she calls Zeliha “Auntie” because she felt that she could either have four moms or four aunts, and chose the latter. Furthermore, referring to Zeliha as an aunt makes her “sin” of having a child out of wedlock less visible. Armanoush has noticed that there’s no paternal figure in the household. She assumed that Asya’s father must have died. Asya explains that there’s a lot of secrecy around the subject of her paternity, and Zeliha won’t offer the truth.
They segue to less weighty topics, such as music and favorite books. Armanoush is fond of classical music, Armenian music, and jazz, while Asya favors Johnny Cash. Armanoush loves fiction, while Asya mostly reads existentialist philosophy. Armanoush believes that Asya’s aversion to Turkish music is evidence of her self-hatred; Asya perceives Amy’s wistfulness over the lost Armenian literary canon to be evidence of her self-pity.
While sitting in a café, Armanoush asks Asya why she has little interest in history and prefers to refer to herself as “Western.” Asya tells her that it’s because history is a burden. Behind them, a group of teenagers plays charades. A boy lifts his fingers, clutches an imaginary round object, and smells it. Asya turns around in her chair and guesses: orange. It’s meant to be a clue to the film A Clockwork Orange. Asya goes on and says that she can’t become attached to history when she doesn’t even know her father.
The girls leave the café and walk through the maze-like city. They stop at a döner restaurant that Asya favors and have a late lunch. Armanoush admits that Istanbul is more modern than she thought. The pair begin to bond: Asya invites Amy to join her sometime at Café Kundera; Amy tells Asya how much she reminds her of her friend Baron Baghdassarian: “so empathetic” yet “so stringent” and “so confrontational” (181).
Later that night, back at the konak, Armanoush waits until everyone is asleep before logging into the chat room, Café Constantinople. She tells her cyberfriends about Istanbul’s “hilly streets” and “constant fog,” which remind her of San Francisco (182). She says that they would love the cuisine so much that they “would be in heaven” (182). She realizes that she shouldn’t have typed the last sentence. Anti-Khavurma chimes in first and accuses her of having been “Turkified” (182). Baron Baghdassarian then asks her if she’s been thinking about “Janissary’s Paradox” (183). He explains that she can only be friends with the Turks if she denies her Armenian identity.
Amy is startled by a knock at the door. It’s Auntie Banu, awake at the late hour for prayer. She leaves a plate of peeled oranges with Amy, who eats them while wondering how to respond to Baron Baghdassarian.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
Auntie Banu’s story of the man who flees from Azrail is an allegory of Mustafa’s attempt to go to Arizona to escape his own mortality, particularly his fear of dying young, like many of the other Kazanci men. The fate of the pursued man in Auntie Banu’s story foreshadows Mustafa’s death. It is also significant that Banu tells this story because she uses her knowledge of Zeliha’s rape to ensure her brother’s demise in a later chapter.
While Asya listens—however begrudgingly—to the story of Azrail, she becomes angry when hearing the story about the wheat that can turn into gold; for, it reminds her of an instance in which she was vulnerable and susceptible to attack from others—in that instance, her classmates. The story triggers a memory that Asya would like to forget, following the tendency of most members of her family to forget the memories that bring them discomfort. Petite-Ma is the only character in the novel who is truly devoid of historical memory and, therefore, is also the one with the greatest desire to recover what she has lost.
Conversely, Asya seeks to distance herself from the past in the interest of creating a sense of self that is unburdened by history and tradition. Her work on her Personal Manifesto is another attempt at this. By seeking to create her own moral code, she is rejecting the tenets of Islam and distancing herself from her family’s values, even the shamanic tattooing practices of her mother which, though not religious, are still rooted the supernatural. Asya has outgrown her belief in magic, which is another reason why the story about the wheat is tiresome.
While Asya seeks to distance herself from aspects of Turkish culture, Armanoush is eager to engage. She is surprised that Turkey is not as conservative as she had believed; the fact that the Kazancis are watching The Apprentice is an example of the globalization of popular culture. Meanwhile, Zeliha and Banu are exemplary of how Istanbul contains both modernist and traditionalist modes of living, given Zeliha’s fondness for short skirts and Banu’s preference for the traditional Muslim veil. Banu, like her youngest sister, exhibits feminist tendencies. She, too, operates her own business and has chosen not to live within the confines of marriage. Shafak uses Banu’s choice to wear a veil to suggest that it is not always a sign of conservatism or backwardness. This is one of the ways in which the author blurs the boundary between traditionalism and modernity.
Similarly, the line blurs between Armenian and Turkish cultures even further by leading Armanoush to doubt her chatroom’s unquestioned hatred of Turks. Auntie Banu’s nurturing, as well as the depth with which Armanoush begins to identify with Asya, indicate that the divisions between Turks and Armenians are not as simple and clear as her cyberfriends want to believe.
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