The Bastard of Istanbul

The Kazancis are a family of women without men. However, they are no less vulnerable than other Turkish women to street harassment, abuse, and feelings of subordination.

Shafak uses one of the main characters, Zeliha Kazanci, to explore how women who do not conform to traditional femininity are punished in Turkish society. Zeliha is extraordinary for reasons both within and outside of her control. She is taller than most other women in Istanbul, voluptuous, and iron-willed. She has a preference for short skirts, wears a “shiny nose ring” that she gave herself to irk her mother, and opens a tattoo parlor, eschewing a Muslim tenet that prohibits tattooing while becoming so successful that she can purchase an Alfa Romeo (3). She is the only woman in her family who can drive, which is another sign of her independence. 

Zeliha’s biggest sin, particularly in the eyes of her mother, Grandma Gülsüm, was to have a child out of wedlock. What none of the disapproving women in the family realize is that their association of sex with sin, and the belief that women must remain chaste to have value, are some of the very reasons why Mustafa Kazanci raped Zeliha, thereby causing the pregnancy of his own younger sister. After their father, Levent, died, Mustafa assumed that his status as the only male in the household, and an elder brother, gave him the right to police Zeliha’s body—to curse her for wearing short skirts and for shaving her legs with his razor instead of waxing, which also goes against feminine conventions. Her seizure of her brother’s razor could have suggested a wish to usurp a masculine role or to defy conventions in an attempt to erode them. Either way, Mustafa raped Zeliha to assert dominance and to demand that she remain obedient to the conventions designed around her biology. By making her pregnant in a society that disapproves both of women who have children out of wedlock and those who have abortions, he reinforced the idea that her biology, which he wanted to control, would always determine her destiny.

Other men in the novel also demonstrate toxic masculinity—that is, behavior that subordinates women and indirectly harms men by teaching them to exploit women. The Nonnationalist Scenarist of Ultranationalist Movies is a member of Asya’s social circle at Café Kundera and maintains a steady rotation of young, beautiful, dull girlfriends. He treats women as though they are ornaments and he a consumer of the choicest ones. Though his behavior is less explicitly harmful than that of Mustafa, he, too, is incapable of viewing women as fellow human beings with value beyond their sexuality.

Shafak does not create all of her male characters equally. Barsam Tchakhmakchian, Hovhannes Stamboulian, and Aram, Zeliha’s partner, are all kind and empathetic men. Shafak uses Aram, in particular, as a foil to Mustafa. Zeliha’s loving relationship with him is proof that the trauma of rape does not always prevent the development of loving future relationships. 

Shafak also demonstrates the ways in which women in a sexist society are vulnerable to internalizing sexism. Asya identifies strongly with the men in her social circle but dislikes women and never hides her contempt for the scenarist’s girlfriends. Instead of sympathizing with these vulnerable young women and worrying over how the scenarist exploits them, she finds them contemptuous, as they are reminders of the ways in which women can be made vulnerable in her society. Toxic masculinity and sexism have taught Asya, and her mother, Zeliha, that they must always be strong, or at least appear so, in a society that seems determined to break them.

Many of the characters within the novel struggle with painful memories—both personal histories and the weight of the collective memory of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. The theme of memory and forgetting explores how people cope their own experiences, as well as knowledge of others’ experiences. Asya, Mustafa, and Zeliha steel themselves against memory, hoping to erase a history they cannot redress by forgetting it. Asya expresses disinterest in history, a tendency that she blames on her being fatherless. For Asya, her inability to locate her own origins makes the contemplation of national history seem pointless. 

On the other hand, Armanoush feels that memory is her only source of connection to a heritage that feels distant, due both to her family’s exile and its assimilation into American culture. She takes no interest in her mother’s family history, which is not explored in the novel beyond the reader’s awareness that Rose is from Kentucky, because Rose doesn’t come from a context in which the erasure of her identity is a fear. On the contrary, she comes from a cultural setting in which her identity is the default. This fear of erasure is what leads Grandma Shushan to condemn Rose’s marriage to Mustafa, as Shushan is worried that a Turk will make it so that Armanoush will not be raised as an Armenian with an understanding of what it is to come from a culture that has “shrunk like a pruned tree” (59).

Similarly, Petite-Ma tries to connect to the person she once was through memory. A relatively mute character throughout the novel, Petite-Ma observes the occurrences of the Kazanci household but says little about them, having retreated due to her dementia. When Asya overhears her great-grandmother playing a discordant song on the piano, she feels sympathy for her, knowing that the elderly woman is trying to recover her former identity as a talented pianist. However, Asya also wishes that she were like Petite-Ma and genuinely unable to recall the past, instead of pretending as others do. Mustafa is among the pretenders, having become so distant from his cultural identity that he avoids “communicating with Turks in the United States” (289). For him, the process of forgetting has involved the total assimilation that Armanoush seeks to avoid—aloofness from both national history and language. 

The novel concludes with the belief that it is always better to remember the past, even when it is painful. If not for Armanoush’s unwillingness to forget, to distance herself from history, the Kazancis never would have had the chance to deal with the pain of their family history in a way that brought them all closer together.