Turkish Novelist Faces Trial Over Characters' Words

ISTANBUL, Sept. 9 -- Elif Shafak, one of Turkey's leading authors, is about to have a baby -- and go on trial.

The reason for this conjunction of joy and foreboding is her new novel, which has exposed her to a charge of "insulting Turkishness" because it touches on one of the most disputed episodes of her country's history -- the massacres of Armenians during the final years of the Ottoman Empire.

A professor of Near Eastern studies at the University of Arizona, Shafak, 35, divides her time between Tucson and Istanbul. She sought a postponement of her trial, set for Sept. 21, until after her first child is born, but she was refused.

She could receive three years in prison, though similar trials of other Turkish writers have often folded on technicalities.

"I think my case is very bizarre because for the first time they are trying fictional characters," Shafak said, referring to the words she gave to an Armenian voice in the novel.

The case has broad ramifications, highlighting a rising wave of Turkish nationalism and the question of whether Turkey, a Western ally and NATO member, should be admitted to the European Union -- a move the Bush administration supports.

Turks who long for E.U. membership worry that trials of writers are setting back their cause. But nationalists such as Kemal Kerincsiz, one of the lawyers suing Shafak, say Turkey should not have to forsake bedrock convictions -- for instance, that there was never any Armenian genocide -- just to please Europe.

"The Easterner has to insult himself and degrade his own culture to ingratiate himself with the West," Kerincsiz said in a recent interview. "Our place is in Eastern culture."

The novel in question, "The Bastard of Istanbul," deals with taboos -- domestic violence and incestuous rape -- that are rarely discussed in this conservative, predominantly Muslim country. But it is what Shafak's Armenian American characters say that has landed her in court.

For instance, this from a man worried about his niece being brought up by a Turkish stepfather:

"What will that innocent lamb tell her friends when she grows up? . . . [That] I am the grandchild of genocide survivors who lost all their relatives to the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915, but I myself have been brainwashed to deny the genocide because I was raised by some Turk named Mustapha!"

Turkey insists the deaths of up to 1.5 million Armenians during forced evacuations in World War I was not a planned genocide but the result of the bloody breakup of the Ottoman Empire.

Shafak said she does not take sides on the genocide debate but accuses Turkey of having "collective amnesia."

"Turks and Armenians are not speaking the same language," she said. "For the Turks, all the past is gone, erased from our memories. That's the way we Westernized: by being future-oriented. . . . The grandchildren of the 1915 survivors tend to be very, very past-oriented."