PETYA TSONEVA
Writing “Like a drawing compass”: cross-cultural negotiationsin Elif Shafak’s novel honour
GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture
Volume I, Number 01 (2018): 97-103

WRITING “LIKE A DRAWING COMPASS”:
CROSS-CULTURAL NEGOTIATIONSIN ELIF SHAFAK’S NOVEL HONOUR
Petya Tsoneva

Abstract
The present article is concerned with how Elif Shafak, a contemporary writer of
Turkish origin, questions certain presumptions about the Middle East which, significantly, the region has advanced itself. Shafak not only writes about the region’s geographically closest parts neighboring Europe; she directs her narrative
perspective from there and her writing, which she compares to the expanding circle of a drawing compass, configures the multidirectional relationship between
vernacular and world cultures. This approach, at first taken as a symptom of selfOrientalism, has much wider implications. Shaping a response to Kemalist “westernization,” it seeks to restore an internally split Turkey to itself, mediating between its excessive seclusion and culturally violent ways of self-assertion, on the
one hand, and the willingness to discard its past and traditions altogether in an
attempt to emulate western secularism, on the other.
Shafak’s quest for a productive pathway out of such confinements yields
the perspective of secular Sufism, a more philosophical and ethical attitude than areligious conviction. This paradigm shifts the modes of self-location from external
observation of traditional norms that leads to violent practices of cultural control
such as honor killings, to inward understanding and appreciation of difference. In
a TED talk, she refers the two perspectives to the two conflicting visions of God
she came to know from her two grandmothers – that of Jalal as punishing andmasculine; and that of Jamal as maternally all-embracing. In a wider culturalcontext, Jamal and Jalal represent two figurations of Turkey (and, by inference,
the Middle East) within national boundaries and beyond them. Jalal apparently
refers to a violent, homogeneous version of nationalism and cultural confinement,
while Jamal coincides with the ethos of multiplicity and conviviality.
Keywords: migration, border crossing, secular Sufism, Middle East, vernacularand world cultures.
Shafak appears to be one of the contemporary authors of Turkish origin (alongside paradigmatic Orhan Pamuk) who endeavor to restore Turkey’s silent self to its contemporary crossborder position, but, in doing that, she also seeks to push open a number of tightly-bordered
enclosures, homogenizing national and religious discourses and “hegemonic identitarian nar-

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Writing “Like a Drawing Compass”: Cross-Cultural Negotiationism Elif Shafak’s Novel Honour

ratives.”1 Thus, for instance, in The Bastard of Istanbul (2007), one of Shafak’s most debatednovels longlisted for the Orange prize, she addresses the problematic “monocultural confinement”2 of ethnic minorities within post-Ottoman Turkey and insists on the urgent necessity toperceive the kaleidoscopic composition of Turkish identity beyond any monochrome pronouncements. Similarly, in The Saint of Incipient Insanities (2005) and The Forty Rules ofLove (2010), she expands the space of individual and collective self-location in cross-border
movements that work against discourses of isolation applied to the Middle East and Turkey,
in particular.
Shafak’s cross-cultural narratives revisit philosophical, religious, aesthetic and ethicalrepresentations that lie within Middle-Eastern self-articulation and yet go against the verygrain of radical interpretations of religion that underpin hosts of violent traditions and practices. Keith Critchlow’s research Islamic Patterns. An Analytical and Cosmological Approach
explores the principles that regulate “beauty” in Islamic decorative art to conclude that the
beautiful resides in human ability “to see the forms of nature once again as the vestigii Dei
and multiplicity as so many reflections of the Unity which is both the origin and end of theorder of multiplicity.”3 The way this principle operates can be observed in artistic patterns that
produce a larger figure out of its miniature collected reflections, arranged according to figuralor kinetic geometrical rules (as the figural compositions of the muqarnas dome roofs, Persian
glass mosque mosaic, ceramics, tilework and arabesque decoration). In these works, the ideaof unity in diversity is translated into the variety of ways of orientation of the pieces to eachother and to the whole, and while each fragment constitutes a figure in itself, its significancecan only be achieved by referring it to the larger figure of the pattern.
Such optical performance is made possible by the interaction of the observer and theobserved, studied with exquisite philosophical luminosity by Ibn al-Haytham, author of Kitab
al-Manazir (Book of Optics, 1011-1021) and one of the brilliant philosophers and theoreticians of visual perception and representation in the eastern schools of thought. According tohim, beauty is the outcome of the correspondence of the parts to the whole, “when a form
combines the beauty of the shapes of all its parts and the beauty of their magnitudes and theircomposition and the proportionality of parts.”4 From a contemporary perspective, Claudia
Michael points out that,the complexity of unity is best described through the geometry of the circle. […] It is a complete
form, yet it has no beginning and no end. Its shape symbolizes the perfect unity of filled and unfilled space. […] It has many parts within a whole yet contains a center point that anchors all other1

Elena Furlanetto,“‘Safe Spaces of the Like-Minded’: the Search for a Hybrid Post-Ottoman Identity,” in Elif
Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul, Commonwealth Essays and Studies 36, no. 2 (2014), p. 21.
2
Elena Furlanetto, “‘Safe Spaces’,” p. 27.
3
Keith Critchlow, Islamic Patterns. An Analytical and Cosmological Approach (Rochester, Vermont: Inner
Traditions, 1976), p. 6.
4
Ibn Al-Haytham, The Optics of Ibn Al-Haytham. Books I-III on Direct Vision, trans. ed. A.I. Sabra (London:
University of London, 1989), p. 205.

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dissections of its core. / The circle exhibits several types of symmetry. It has lateral, radiating and5reflective symmetrical properties.

Here, it is necessary to draw a definite distinction between the circle as a line of graphical contour, which, I suggest, is the way Shafak refers to circular enclosure in the opening of
one of her TED talks, and the way she employs circularity as a structural mode of narrationthat coincides with a figure of openness perceived by the contents it includes. Such a distinction is needed to avoid the internal conflict caused by the same trope Shafak employs when
she refers to the harmful effects of the like-minded, self-encircled communities, and when she
describes the way she sees herself as a writer in the same TED talk,
There’s a metaphor which I love – living like a drawing compass. As you know, one leg of thecompass is static, rooted in a place. Meanwhile, the other leg draws a wide circle, constantly moving. Like that, my fiction as well. One part of it is rooted in Istanbul with strong Turkish roots, but
6the other part travels the world, connecting to different cultures.

While the circle as a ring-folded line may signify seclusion and tightly-bordered identity, the kinetic figuration produced by the drawing leg of a compass is a representation of a“spatial envelope,” i.e. “a description of the whole space that provides an instant impressionof the volume of the place.”7
The mobility of Shafak’s writing space is remarkably reminiscent of the Sufi model ofthe universe, symbolically performed in the whirling dervishes’ dance. The choreography andreligious significance of their movements imply extreme openness towards the four directionsof the world and the cosmic universe that surrounds it, as the ecstatically moving bodies ofthe dancers strive to produce a human equivalent to the mythological axis mundi, the pathway
to heaven, and the rotating skirts of their robes “embrace” horizontally a multifarious world.
In what follows, I will observe how Shafak applies this dynamics to articulate border crossing
in her novel Honour through the relationships between the characters Pembe and Jamila, theirfamilies, Turkish Kurdistan, Istanbul and London.
The narrator Esma traces her familial history back to a 1945-Kurdish village on thebanks of the Euphrates. Significantly, the place is located in the margins of Turkey, at a literaland metaphorical crossroads between the “universe beyond the shores of the Euphrates,”8
identified as a space of “strange things” like “[t]he aftermath of the Second World War, theatomic bomb…” 9 and the “world” beyond Turkey’s eastern border with Syria. The borderlocation of the village is metaphorically enhanced by its name, Mala Çar Bayan, which, trans5

Claudia Michael. “An Interdisciplinary Study of Symmetry in Islamic Geometric Design and Symmetry in
Moroccan author Laila Lalami’s novel Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits,” last modified January 30, 2016,
http://www.macece.org/fhsprojects/CMichael.pdf
6
Elif Shafak, “The Politics of Fiction,” last modified October10, 2016,
http://www.ted.com/talks/elif_shafak_the_politics_of_fiction/transcript
7
Aude Oliva, Soojin Park et al., “Representing, perceiving, and remembering the shape of visual space,” inVision in 3D Environments, eds. Laurence Harris and Michael Jenkin (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), p.
111.
8
Elif Shafak, Honour (London: Penguin Books, 2013), p. 6.
9Ibid., p. 6.

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lated from Kurdish, means “House of the Four Winds.”10 The place is likewise ambiguously
represented as a site of rooted belonging where “human beings [are] ordained to be sedentary,
like trees and boulders”;11 as a panoptic accumulation of communal life, “[w]hatever took
place in one corner was heard, at once, by everyone else”;12 but also as a starting point of selfrelocation in a world of larger, cosmic and natural movements. Thus, in spite of the seemingly
stagnant, monotonous and repetitive ways of life in the village, there are hints that its locationis governed by the winds, and the winds, in their association with the four cardinal directions,appear to convey the same sense of motion and spherical openness as the twirling perimeter ofa dervish robe.
The controversial location of the village is confirmed by reminiscences of its multicultural past. When the narrative voice describes Jamila’s dwelling place in a hollow-nested hut
in the ravine, it becomes evident that the present-day village is just a remnant of a formerly
teeming multicultural settlement: “For centuries Christians and Muslims and Zoroastrians andYazidis had lived here side by side, loved and died side by side. Their grandchildren, however, had long ago left for other lands. All but a handful of peasants remained in the area – andJamila.”13 Rather than being solely a site of oppressive enclosure, then, the House of theWinds is also located as a place of departure, similar in many ways to the “interval space” ofthe airport lounge in Kapka Kassabova’s meditation on contemporary migrant processes.14
Such forms of openness obviously operate in the regime of Shafak’s rooted and routed writing
and self-location. Gaston Bachelard’s theoretical inquiry into the phenomenology of spacedescribes such type of mixed, semi-mobile spatial experience through the metaphor of thecosmic house, a largely imagined domestic form which takes shape in the movements ofhomecoming and home-leaving: “an immense cosmic house is a potential of every dream ofhouses. Winds radiate from its center […] Or, to put it differently, the universe comes to inhabit [it].”15 A similar form of imagined domesticity is at the heart of Shafak’s negotiation of
Turkishness in a wider multicultural context.
For Shafak, the beginning of a family history is extremely important because it represents the “center point that anchors all other dissections to its core.”16 In consistence with theSufi aesthetic paradigm in this curious case of narrative geometry, the main centrifugal
movements that dissect the characters’ displacements are performed by the specular splittingof the twin sisters Pembe Kader and Jamila Yeter, born in the strictly patriarchal family of
Berzo and Naze as the next two in the row of already six daughters. The proliferation of female offspring that plagues the familial expectations of a son intensifies the manifestations ofShafak’s articulation of rural Kurdish culture. An interesting fact adds further strength to thishypothesis – the Kurdish plural form of the word “wind” – “bayan” coincides with the plural
10

Ibid., p. 6.
Ibid., p. 6.
12Ibid., p. 6.
13
Ibid., p. 35.
14
See Kapka Kassabova, Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria (London:
Portobello, 2008).
15
Bachelard, Gaston, “House and universe,” in The Poetics of Space, trans. John R. Stilgoe (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1964, 1994), p. 51.
16
Claudia Michael, “An Interdisciplinary Study.”
11

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form of “woman” in Turkish. This known, the pun makes it possible to translate the name ofthe village as “House of Women” and consider the “house,” in its more symbolic and imaginative significance, as a womb-like figure. We can, therefore suggest that the village on the
Euphrates “births” the characters’ centrifugal itineraries, while, at the same time, it provides aconstant point of orientation in their routes. In a parallel way, Pembe and Jamila’s twinshipconfigures the spatiotemporal relationships in the novel both as a centrifugal embrace of difference and as a centripetal retreat to origins. Pembe’s marriage to Adem Toprak, their migration to Istanbul and settlement in London represent the wider moving circle in the drawingcompass model of Shafak’s narration, while Jamila’s physical barrenness, life in the remotevillage and attachment to the land shape the fixed axis of the narrative. Jamila’s journey toEngland, vigorous intervention to protect her sister offering her life in her stead and Pembe’s
subsequent return to the village to take her sister’s place at the end of her life, reverse themodel, thus destabilizing the focal point of reference, constantly mediating between “here”
and “there” in a productive dialogue. Prior to her death, however, Pembe reclaims her origins
as a “kneeling place” from where she can offer her prayers to the four corners of the world.
This spectacular geometrical expansion and retraction of space operates in consistence withthe symmetric principle of moving circularity, illustrating the “many reflections of the Unity
which is both the origin and end of the order of multiplicity.”17
The aspect of multiplicity is also frequently visualized by tropes of fluidity (water andair) that, by virtue of their containment properties, evoke the ambience of fetal development
and birth-giving. Thus, the four winds that circulate the village and the river Euphrates operate as symbols of extreme mobility that suggests both fertility and evasion, the plerosis – kenosis cycle of conception and birth. Within this dynamics, the body of Pembe and Jamila’s
birthland equally splits between the specularly conjoined possibilities of a triumphant motherhood (Pembe’s birth of Iskender as fulfilment of her mother Naze’s lifelong wish for maleoffspring) and barren motherhood (Jamila’s barren womb that reciprocates the barrenness ofthe village). In the Sufi registry of correspondences, physical barrenness is part of the physiology of life while spiritual barrenness is unnatural and signifies ultimate self-enclosure. The
narration negotiates between these two extremes of human self-location in a familial dynamics, in which multiplicity is constantly checked and sanctioned by the principle of selfassertion. The ensuing growth and sickness of the family lines operates as a genealogicalmodel of cross-cultural relationships in Shafak’s attempt to negotiate difference.
Both the circular and the branching genealogical structures in the novel correspondtechnically to the complex symmetric relationships that hold between the multiple elements oflarger figures in the aesthetic organization of space in Middle-Eastern art and architecture.
The dynamically changing routes of the characters’ displacements and their willingness or
unwillingness to go beyond bordered forms of self, are part of Shafak’s larger project of raising ethical questions by means of an aesthetic technique of narration producing a text thatwill, possibly, instruct contemporary readership on the pernicious effects of violently bordered identities.
In a chain of relationships, the expanding and retracting movements of the characters’
self-location configure places, times and positions in specularly reflexive units. Thus, for in17

Keith Critchlow, Islamic Patterns, p. 6.

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stance, the Kurdish village, urban Istanbul, London and Abu Dhabi, Adem Toprak’s final destination, are catoptrically refigured versions of each other. They all share a quality of elusiveness, shape-shifting and instability, which is positively defined by tropes of fluidity within theparadigm of comprehensiveness. At the same time, fluidity is constantly constrained bynorms, regulations and traditionally affirmed practices of surveillance defining fluctuation as
a deviation that has to be reinserted within the limits of the norm. Thus, while Mala Çar
Bayan is the House of the Winds, i.e. a place of extreme openness, it likewise represents thesite where communal regulations require the death of Naze and Berzo’s eldest daughter Hediye who “taints” family honor. Pembe and Adem’s migration exports village and regional
culture to London where it enters the diasporic borders of the Muslim community. Similarly,
Istanbul is configured as a place of ambiguous experience. Esma’s memories of her earlychildhood there recollect it as a city of water, ever-changing shapes and erosion of firmlybuilt enclosures (the floodings in the Toprak family’s basement flat, for instance). However,the city also enters Esma’s narrative through her father’s memories of his childhood, loss ofmother (who joins the group of family-betraying characters), sober and drunken father and theclaustrophobic enclosure of public opinion. London reciprocates the Kurdish village and Istanbul in its methods of surveillance (racism, migration laws, spikes to prevent migrant birds
from settling on window sills), but also with its fluidity and the multicultural encounters it
welcomes. The latter quest for openness is best illustrated by the squatters’ house, a dwellingin suburban London. It represents an aquatic version of the House of the Winds through its
association with Noah’s ark, “‘It is like a floating house’,”18 and operates as another manifestation of embraced diversity. The squatters’ unwillingness to observe government laws is, inturn, ambiguously defined as a mock sense of freedom without obligations.
Abu-Dhabi is yet another ambiguous location in the novel. Its city-scape outlined by
skyscrapers built on “soft sand”19 operates as a panoramic spatial projection of Adem Toprak’s failure to understand the beauty of multiplicity. In the chapter entitled “Sandstones” welearn about what underpins his inability to embrace difference, “His life had been a maze of
mirrors, in each mirror he had seen a different reflection of himself, but which one of them
was the real Adem, he couldn’t tell.”20 The specular properties of sand grains, magnified bytheir accumulation in the desert, constitute a natural version of the labyrinth of mirror selves
Adem attempts to decipher in the course of his problematic self-assertion. The greatest predicament he faces in this endeavor is his willingness to claim only one of his reflections as histrue and only self in consistence with the Jalal-regulated mode of thinking. As he finds this
impossible, he prefers to have himself absent, lose himself in the labyrinth. His final escapefrom choice stages his literal and metaphoric dissolution in the desert space, a symbolic sparagmos of his parched self. As a literal and metaphoric location, Abu Dhabi illustrates veryclearly Shafak’s model of individual and collective self-location. Read parabolically, the cityscape with solid buildings reared on sand foundations operates not only as a configuration of
the successfully maintained symbiosis between nature and culture, but also as a spatial projection of the fluid and solid components, the “routes” and “roots” of self-location.
18

Elif Shafak, Honour, p. 63.
Ibid., p. 271.
20
Ibid., p. 270.
19

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In the novel, places form part of Shafak’s mosaic topography – they represent variations on one and the same pattern whose multiplicity yields new, different forms. The same
compositional principle underlies character construction. We already observed that the toposof twinned femininity can be attributed not only to the role of symmetry in her aesthetic project, but also to her own experience of relocation as a writer who sees part of herself “pegged”
and another part – moving freely across cultures. It is, however, difficult to measure Pembe
and Jamila’s fixity and mobility separately. In the end, each one of them takes her sister’s
previously established place, which attests to Shafak’s cross-cultural approach. At the sametime, neither sister can fully leave the place of her origins, or fully remain there. When in
London, Pembe loves to do her shopping on Ridley Road and is fascinated with the multicultural vitality of the place where “one could come across so many different people with skinsof all shades of brown, white and black, from places that were, to her, only names on a blurrymap.”21 Pembe’s displacement may, at first sight, seem to fulfil her childhood wish to becomea sailor waking up at a different port every morning. Yet, when she finally arrives in London,
she is not in a hurry to see the ocean or the Queen’s palace. Rather, she feels comfortable inthe multi-ethnic, but predominantly eastern neighborhood of Lavender Grove, and is always
anxious to perform her traditionally imposed obligations.
Pembe’s likeness Jamila occupies an equally ambiguous position. Seemingly subsumed by the desiccating Kurdish village, she is open-minded, performs her midwife duties in
the company of smugglers, and is not afraid of difference – when faced with a villager’s superstition about his wife’s birth of conjoined twins, one alive, the other – dead, she assures
him that the living child is special and needs exceptional parental love and care. Although aschildren Pembe and Jamila have different dreams about the world and unlike Pembe who
wishes to see it, Jamila feels comfortable at home, she undertakes a perilous journey to England, helped by smugglers.
Pembe and Jamila’s migrations take shape as vectoral movements that both extend thedomestic world of the beginning and reroute it to new forms of self-location. Contrary to theconventionally interpreted myth of the Dioscuri twins whose separation guarantees life’s continuation, Jamila’s death in her sister’s place is followed by Pembe’s sickness and death in thevillage not long afterwards. For Shafak, such forms of conjoined multiplicity organically result in the spread of loss across the entire body of the interconnected parts.
In conclusion, Shafak’s novel questions certain presumptions about the Middle East
which, significantly, the region has advanced itself. She not only writes about its geographically closest parts neighboring Europe; she directs her narrative perspective from there andher writing which she compares to the expanding circle of a drawing compass configures themultidirectional relationship between vernacular and world cultures. This movement, at first
approached as a symptom of self-Orientalism, has much wider implications. Shaping a response to Kemalist “westernization,” it seeks to restore an internally split Turkey to itself,
mediating between its excessive seclusion and culturally violent ways of self-assertion, on the
one hand, and the willingness to discard its past and traditions altogether in an attempt at
emulation of western secularism, on the other.

21

Ibid., p. 337.

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