Elif Shafak’s work is one that would never tire you!
10 Minutes 38 Seconds In This Strange World is a story of Leila, a lady from traditional Turkish family – a rebel – and her struggle in a personal secular world. When she was found dead, she was buried in a cemetery reserved for the outcast. Her friends showed loyalty and exhumed the body, honored her and put the body to the sea for the fish to swallow.
The book chronicles Leila’s life in reverse order, told through the receding consciousness of the dead, events unfolding by the minutes of her death in successive burst of flash back, from the 10 minutes of her death to the 38 seconds, beginning with her body found in a waste bin at a street corner near a brothel, her birth and the story of her mother’s marriage, her growing up and upbringing, etc.
The daughter of Bannaz, Leila grew up in a closely knit family. An only daughter, she was loved and indulged by her father. His first wife was barren and was possessed with a strong desire to have a child. He got a second wife, Bannaz, Leila’s mother, who gave birth to a child. As a consolation, Leila was handed over to the first wife to bring her up. This was left a secret in the household. Tired of insults and dark innuendoes, Bannaz decided to reveal the secret to her daughter, her own daughter, who didn’t believe her because nobody took her seriously in the house as she was branded mentally ill.
Two things in Leila’s life stood out for me as repugnant and unacceptable, that she is a sex worker and sufferer!
All through more than half the book I was wondering why Leila should go into sex work. This is someone I love. According to my northern sensibilities, I really wouldn’t like to see someone I love in such condition but Leila kept moving from one bad, harsh condition to another.
If Elif sees sex outside traditional marriage as a tool for challenging convention, this harsh, repugnant way that she cast Leila in is unfit and unjustifiable. What did she do to deserve this? Even when I found why, my sense of justice wouldn’t accept it.
Challenging convention, Shafak could do that without being that extreme. Take Zeliha for instance, in The Bastard of Istanbul, wild and rebellious and assertive under fer family roof. Like Zeliha, she can also be rebellious, have sexual freedom and a great life without being suffered.
But with her rebellious writing, there is no way you cannot love Elif. She says of Leila:
Her body had been changing fast. Hair under her arms, dark patch between her legs, new skin, new smells, new emotions. Her breasts had turned into strangers, a pair of snobs, holding the tipis of their noses in the air. Every day she checked her face in the mirror with a curiosity that made her uneasy, as though half expecting to see someone else staring back. She applied make-up at every opportunity, kept her hair unbound instead of in neat braids, wore tight skirts whenever she could, and had recently, secretly, taken up smoking, stealing from Mother’s tobacco pouches.
This is really a Hausa girl, Hausa girl(s) at the start of her puberty: wild, rebellious, bubbling with assertive energy to draw attention to themselves and announce their coming, even thinking, at this point, they are the same with their mothers.
Reading Elif Shafak and Orhan Pamuk brings me to a seeming familiarity with Turkish culture; I know which side of the street is dangerous, which family does what for trade, from which side of the street to get what. Buried inside these books, I can inhale the smell of Bosphorus and the air of Taksim Square.
As a result of these show of small small social and Islamic cultures, I sometimes feel more connected to Turkish or Senegalese novel than to a Southern Nigerian story which I can end up being dumb at for events taking place in closed and intimate spaces, places like the church and the inner family setting where I have no direct experience with.
Leila, the continuation of Zeliha from the Bastard of Instanbul, is what appears to be Elif herself. Bold, rebellious, female characters who disgrace their family. Elif has a way of casting her characters to represent the society she desires. She has the habit of neatly scooping culture and religion off their feet, keeps them upended in the air and then slides them to the ground headfirst!
Leila and Zeliha have incest in the family. Leila was violated by her uncle during a family vacation, and years later, when the novel reached its height, she broke the news to the family. For the first time she is bold and unafraid, no longer hiding things or scared to speak out. But when she opened up, the dreaded thing happened: her family belied her and believed her uncle, which allowed him to walk off the case.
Elif relied on irony, opposition and contradiction to spice up the story. Leila is hugely ideologically different from her parents. The parents are so similar yet markedly different from each other as they struggle with their own inner contradictions. For instance, they wanted to indulge their daughter but they were pulled by the need to keep traditions. Deep within, they believe their daughter’s story but who wants to disgrace their family? Instead, they tried to set her up for an arranged marriage with a relative.
Leila ran to the city. There she fell into the hand of an unassuming criminal, who, along with his business partner, sold her to another hand to another hand, on and on, ending up in prostitution and sexual slavery. She didn’t deserve this! What did she do to warrant this travail? Leila deserved good life that she never had.
Along the way, we have come to know the stories of five people whose paths crossed with Leila’s. Osman, the trans person; Sinan, the son of a Lady Pharmacist; Jameelah, the African prostitute and bead-maker; Zainab122, the short Arab and fortune-teller; Humeyra, one of the five, the ballad singer who escaped terrible marriage from her border town village.
There is D/Ali the itinerant, the revolutionary who later married Leila. Meeting him is one of the best moments of her life, albeit very short-lived experience. D/Ali was killed in the revolutionary march, making her return to prostitution. This time, as a pricy, classy service provider, sought out by a rich man to teach and cure his gay son ahead of his wedding day.
The 38 Seconds remainder revealed the scene of Leila’s body in the morgue and her burial. For me part two of the story is somewhat trash. The story died with Leyla! Explaining the mystery of her death and the story of the rich man’s right-hand man are all but killjoy and a spoiler. I understand Elif is just trying to tell us “Researchers at various world-renowned institutions had observed persistent brain activity in people who had just died; in some cases this had lasted for only a few minutes. In others, for as much as ten minutes and thirty-eight seconds.”
Elif is dead bent on normalizing the abnormal, showing the middle finger to the traditional Turkish society by bringing deviant characters to challenge the established norms. By so doing, she sets up Leila for rebuke and reprove of the traditional society.
What is more, when she died, these characters come to the morgue to receive her body, with a different sense of respect and honor to the dead, smoking cigarettes, flinging insults and aggression.
The doomed cemetery, the cemetery of the companionless, where Leila was taken, is the house of gays and trans women, prostitutes, AIDS victims, crack addicts, pimps, poets, singers and strippers…all sorts of outcast and cultural lepers, as Elif would like to say, rebel with treacherous words and contentious beliefs. But does it matter? No, they are going nowhere. They would be eaten by organisms, absorbed into plants and eaten by humans, on and on into the endless life cycle.
Madison, WI
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