THE PROBLEM OF HISTORICAL MEMORY IN THE NOVEL “THE BASTARD OF ISTANBUL” BY ELIF SHAFAK
Shafak’s “The Bastard of Istanbul” has become a controversial and debated novel, inter alia due to mentioning the Armenian Genocide which bears a psychological complex for most of the Turkish people. Shafak’s novel displays the real problems of Turkish society and its individuals. When discussing these issues, the author points out many parallels between the Turs and Armenians. Shafak raises a painful problem, namely amnesia, as another difference between the two nations. For the Armenians, time was a cycle in which the past incarnated in the present and the present birthed the future. For the Turks, time was a multihyphenated line, where the past ended at some definite point and the present started anew from scratch, and there was nothing but rupture in between.