The Bastard of Istanbul

by Elif Shafak

When you didn’t tell anyone the extraordinary, everyone assumed the normal, Armanoush discovered at an early age.

Imagination was a dangerously captivating magic for those compelled to be realistic in life, and words could be poisonous for those destined always to be silenced.

“It might not be good for the people around you, but it’s good for you,”

It was his belief that nationalist zeal would solely serve to replace one misery for another, inevitably working against the deprived and the dispossessed. In the end minorities tore themselves apart from the larger entity at a great cost, only to create their own oppressors. Nationalism was no more than a replenishment of oppressors. Instead of being oppressed by someone of a different ethnicity, you ended up being oppressed by someone of your own.

While a brawny soldier with beady eyes suspiciously scanned through Rousseau’s Social Contract, Hovhannes Stamboulian couldn’t help but ponder the passages the man was staring at without really seeing: Man is born free but everywhere is in chains. In reality, the difference is that the savage lives within himself while social man lives outside himself and can only live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the feeling of his own existence only from the judgment of others concerning him.

It is past dawn now. A short step away from that uncanny threshold between nighttime and daylight. The only time of the day when it is early enough to harbor hopes of realizing one’s dreams but far too late to actually dream, the land of Morpheus now flung far away.

The oppressor has no use for the past. The oppressed has nothing but the past, commented Daughter of Sappho.

All my life I wanted to be pastless. Being a bastard is less about having no father than having no past…and now here you are asking me to own the past and apologize for a mythical father!