Tag Archives: writer: elif shafak

How To Stay Sane In An Age Of Division, by Elif Shafak

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The truth is, there are plenty of negative sentiments all around and within us – anger, fear, discontent, distrust, sadness, suspicion, constant self-doubt … but perhaps more than anything, an ongoing apprehension. An existential angst. All these emotions are very much part of our lives now. Even digital spaces have become primarily emotional spaces. The posts that go viral or the videos that are watched most widely are freighted with emotions. What is equally significant is how this creates a tendency, a habit of mind, that perpetuates itself through space and time. In a study conducted by the Institute for Social Research scholars have found that ‘when exposed to less positive news, people posted less positive comments and more negative ones. When exposed to less negative posts, the opposite pattern occurred.’*
* ‘Anger, Fear and Echo Chambers: The Emotional Basis for Online Behavior’, D. Wollebaek, R. Karlsen, K. Steen-Johnsen, B. Enjolras (April 2019)
[NB – I see online versions of the book where the chapter division is very different to my printed edition.]

A short book, written in the wake of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, arguing for optimism and effort despite the depressing state of the world. I read it a couple of weeks ago, in the course of having a long and decompressing bath after I got back from a trip to Georgia, and it really helped my mood.

Shafak briefly and compellingly discusses the problems of anxiety and anger, the need and duty to tell ourselves and each other better stories, the importance of empathy and compassion, and the power of conscious optimism. It is peppered with personal anecdotes and observations, but not to the point that these distract from the core message. She also weaves in a few powerful quotations from others, including Martin Luther King’s “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” A short text that gave me a lot to think about. You can get it here.

The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak; and a brief note on the Green Line in Nicosia

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The heat had started in the small hours of the morning, swiftly building up. Around ten o’clock, it had fully erupted into being, just after Turks and Greeks on each side of the Green Line had finished their morning coffees. Now it was past noon and the air was stiff, difficult to breathe. The roads were cracked in places, the tar melting in rivulets, the colour of charred wood. A car somewhere revved its engine, its rubber tyres struggling on the sticky asphalt. Then, silence.

A novel set in Cyprus and London, by well-known Turkish writer Elif Shafak, telling several parallel stories of forbidden love and tragic death from the points of view of the protagonists and also from the perspective of the fig tree in their garden, both on the smaller island and a shoot from it that is planted in the London garden. I confess that because I am already familiar with the history and current situation of Cyprus, I was not very surprised by any of it, and I found the imagery frankly a bit clunky (eg the parallel between the fig tree, buried for its own protection, and the corpses of civilians killed in 1974, thrown down a well to protect their killers). But if the novel brings the island’s story to a new generation of readers who aren’t as familiar with it, that’s fine by me. You can get it here.

Reading it did make me dig into the archives and find the original Green Line map of Nicosia as drawn by a British officer, Major-General Peter Young, in 1963, and compare it with the current situation (ie since 1974) on OpenStreetMaps. It’s striking that in the city centre, very little has changed at all, and there’s not a lot of difference in the nearer suburbs either. Further out, of course, is a different matter.

I used to have fantasies of some day opening a long-shut cupboard in the Green Zone to find a bunch of tapes of lost Doctor Who stories, abandoned by some luckless TV technician in 1974, but in fact now that I’ve established that the Green Zone in Nicosia is still basically where it was when established in 1963, I accept that this is never going to happen, especially not to me.