“But again coming back to the novel as a form, the novel can hold all these disciplines and, and much more. That’s why I feel very sad when you know some people say, I don’t have time to read fiction you know, I read important things because so much suffering in the world so I read about finance and technology you know, the big, big stuff. That makes me really sad because I don’t have time for fiction means I don’t have time for emotions.”
Matthew Carpenter
EDI and Engagement Manager, Mishcon de Reya
Hello everyone and welcome to this Mishcon Academy Session; in conversation with Elif Shafak, A Voice Of Our Time. This is part of a series run by the Academy of online events, podcasts and videos looking at the biggest issues that are facing communities, individuals and businesses today. My name is Matthew Carpenter, I am the EDI and Engagement Manager here at Mishcon and I’ll be hosting today’s event. Time now on to the fun part - I am very excited to introduce award winning, British Turkish novelist and storyteller, Elif Shafak. Elif welcome to Mishcon or should I say welcome back to Mishcon?
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
Well thank you so much, it’s wonderful to be back.
Matthew Carpenter
EDI and Engagement Manager, Mishcon de Reya
It’s, so having previously read one of Elif’s novels I am really excited to be interviewing today. There is however another super fan amongst us who actually had a birthday cake in the shape of one of your books. So you’ve got a big fan base here at Mishcon. So we’re here today to talk about your latest novel which is ‘There Are Rivers In The Sky’. For those of you that haven’t had the chance to read it yet, this novel weaves together the stories of one lost poem, two great rivers and three remarkable lives which are all linked through a single drop of water. In the book it explores themes of belonging, displacement, relationships, memories, identity and highlighting and uncovering a whole host of different traditions and voices of marginalised groups throughout centuries and continents and cultures. So everyone strap in because we’ve got a lot to cover in the next hour.
So Elif I wonder whether we start today by talking about that single drop of water that ties it all together and we follow the lifecycle of that water with it landing on the head of King Ashurbanipal thousands of years ago. So what inspired you to start the story in this way and also actually write about something as seemingly insignificant as a drop of water?
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
What a beautiful question. I really appreciate every word. I think you know, it might seem like an epic novel, epic in the sense that as you kindly said, it does span centuries and cultures and continents but actually everything came to me with a very small idea and that idea was the single drop of water. The raindrop, it just landed on my hand as I was walking by the river one day. But it was almost like a spiritual question. One that maybe William Blake asks centuries ago. You know, can we see a whole world inside a grain of sand. Can we take something as seemingly small and insignificant as a drop of water and try to see its story, the universe that it hides. And I say this not in a perhaps abstract way, I say it as someone, as a writer, as a novelist who comes from the Middle East yeah. I am Turkish originally and this is important because today out of the most ten water stripped nations in the world, seven are in the Middle East and in North Africa so for us water crisis is not some theoretical abstract debate. It is an acute reality. Sometimes in, in Europe we forget that climate crisis is primarily water crisis. We are talking about fresh water scarcity. We forget it because understandably sea levels start rising everywhere and there are flash floods so it gives us the illusion that there’s an abundance of water all around and the irony is amidst this abundance there isn’t enough water to drink. And because we see our rivers are dying, they’re drying out, I also want to perhaps connect the dots you know, this has consequences for everyone but particularly for women, young women, usually are water carriers, they bring water to their communities. When there’s no drinkable water nearby the distance the young woman has to walk increases. Unfortunately increasing the possibility for gender violence and it is very important because we put them in separate boxes, like this is a box for climate crisis, this is a box for water scarcity, this is the box for gender inequality or racial inequality but actually everything’s connected and I think water reminds us that we are all connected.
Matthew Carpenter
EDI and Engagement Manager, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah and I think the importance of water is really seen in that book and, and connects everything and there is this lovely quote that talks around the fact that you describe trees as rooted water, streams as flowing water, birds as flying water and humans as waring water, never at peace and that relationship between humans and water is something you sort of play, play with throughout the book and you describe water has having human qualities and also water… and, and the reverse and humans having water qualities with the flow of our emotions and the rivers within us are both good and evil. What do you hope to achieve by bringing to light that connection between humans and water?
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
Yeah I really find this important because we need to talk about this fluid nature of being human. And in an age in which we are constantly pushed into boxes and attributed some labels and told to stay in our own boxes once and for all, I think it’s really important to remember how fluid we are by nature. We’re always learning, changing, becoming, right? That’s the beauty, that’s the challenge of being human but also we are all multiples, we all contain multitudes like the poet Walt Whitman told us. The problem is we’re living in a world that doesn’t allow us to celebrate our own multiplicity’. We are, are being told that diversity is a problem, multiplicity is a burden, that it’s better and safer if we’re surrounded by sameness, that’s a myth, that’s an illusion. So I think as human beings we learn from difference, differences. That’s what challenges us you know, intellectually, spiritually. So there’s a part of me that wants to also celebrate that multiplicity and the fluid nature of being human.
Matthew Carpenter
EDI and Engagement Manager, Mishcon de Reya
And one of the really interesting things that I think that are qualities that you give water is, and you talk about it a lot through the book, is the memory of water and the idea that I think the fourth section actually is called Memories of Water and there’s a quote within the book that says, ‘Waters remembers. It’s the humans that who forget’. What do you mean by that?
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
Yeah I mean the, the very opening of the book is this, this little rain drop lands on the head of a very mighty King called Ashurbanipal as you pointed out. Let us remember that he was the most cultured and educated, intellectual King that the Assyrian empire had ever seen. That doesn’t mean that he was less cruel than his predecessors. And ever since that moment in time so many mighty Kings have come and gone, so many empires have crumbled, so much has happened and if we can remember, if we can have a memory of the past I think we won’t make the same mistakes and yet as human beings we never learn. We have an illusion of a linear time that tells us tomorrow is going to be more progressive, more developed than yesterday. There’s no such guarantee. We like to believe that the arc of history is going to bend towards justice. That is, that is words. When you follow the, the story of a river, of a mountain, of a tree then it makes you pause. Is time really linear or is it more cyclical, is it for instance, let us look at the history very briefly of the River Thames. Beautiful river that shapes this, this very city that we live in. It’s a zombie isn’t it? Because it was dead not that long ago. It was biologically declared dead. Why? Because of the way we human beings mistreated the river. It was full of such filth that no bio species could live inside this water and yet what the river did was to renew itself, recreate itself and today it’s home to more than 200 bio species which is a miracle. And even though we have to admire this, what we’re doing today is, what water companies are doing in the name of greed, in the name of profit and money. They are pumping sewage back again into the same river. So when you follow the journey of one river is really history linear, it makes you question.
Matthew Carpenter
EDI and Engagement Manager, Mishcon de Reya
Definitely. I think, we’ve talked about water but now I think it would be useful to just introduce us very briefly to the three characters. So we’ve got these three characters that are connected by the water. So in 1840’s London we meet Arthur who is born in poverty in the slums of London by the River Thames. We then jump to 2014 in Turkey, we meet Narin who is a young Yazidi girl being raised by the River Tigris by her grandmother, Bhishma and then we also have a, a slightly leap to 2018 where we are back in London and we meet Zakila who is a hydrologist who’s moved to a houseboat on the River Thames after a divorce. So within the book you describe these characters to begin with and their interaction as a water molecule, so H2O. Can you share with us what you hope to achieve through that?
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
Yes so, I mean each and every one of them is very different of course but I am hoping by the end of the book it will be, they will all surprisingly come together. So Arthur is my oxygen, maybe I can say a few words about him and maybe about the others separately. He is actually based on an actual historical figure. Of course my character is imaginary. I call him in the book King Arthur of the Sewers and the Slums and there’s a reason why he is given this unusual name. But he is loosely based on a, on a person called George Smith who was also born in Chelsea at the time in the slum tenements of Chelsea, into severe poverty and I think had he been alive today we would have recognised the beauty of his mind, the neuro diversions of his mind and we would have respected this. But of course at the time he gets no such recognition and this boy grows up in extreme poverty and suffering. I had to dream up a childhood and youth for him because we don’t know much about his past. But at some point he comes to the British Museum and purely by the power of his visual memory he looks at these shuttered, broken clay tablets brought over from the Middle East – which is another subject – but then he starts piecing them together, little by little, but we’re talking about thousands and thousands of shards that he pieces together. And he starts to decode the QA form and he decodes the flood tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh. This is a major, major discovery and, and this guy is a very shy, he’s an introvert, he’s a very timid human being. So he finds himself in the middle of a very heated debate between science and religion because what he finds is a story that goes like this. There’s an ark or there’s a coracle, on board this coracle there are animals, there are human beings, they’re surrounded by water, a deluge and they are looking for land. The story is very familiar isn’t it? It’s so similar to the story of Noah’s Ark in the Old Testament. But the difference is this was written thousands of years before the Bible and the Old Testament so people who are religious, they would say, well you see it proves that the Holy Book is right, it really happened. But people who are more scientific at the time, they would say, it proves that as humanity we’ve been telling ourselves the same old stories over and over. And that’s a very heated debate not only in the UK or across Europe but also on the other side of the Atlantic in the US as well and he finds himself in the middle of this debate. He comes to the Middle East twice to find the missing lines in the Epic of Gilgamesh. In that section seventeen lines he’s looking for and he loses his life there. He is buried today between Turkey and Syria in a forgotten graveyard and a part of me wanted to honour this very unusual Victorian scholar and genius.
Matthew Carpenter
EDI and Engagement Manager, Mishcon de Reya
And in the story where we meet Arthur we have a brief and surprising cameo from Charles Dickens and we see him as a flustered, yet very kind man who inspires and influences Arthur. Can you sort of share why you brought in this historic figure to the story?
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
I love Dickens. I mean like many of us, I have been yeah, I felt his impact on me on my own literary journeys but I think when we look at each section of this book, the style changes a little bit. I always believe that every story brings its own style you know, its own rhythm and language. So the parts that are take place in Victorian London are a bit more Dickensian and the parts that are where I describe the Yazidi girl who lives in Turkey with her grandmother, they are more dialogues in that part because this was a culture that mostly relies on oral storytelling. They don’t have a written book, everything depends on oral stories. And the third part where I talk about the, the water scientist who is studying buried rivers is more like contemporary, modern novel. So the style varies but I very much enjoyed trying to, to the best of my ability, capture the Dickensian tone.
Matthew Carpenter
EDI and Engagement Manager, Mishcon de Reya
And before we move on to those, the hydro core molecules and the next characters, I think one thing that’s really interesting is that you explore through Arthur and his relationship with his employer, the British Museum. You see, and you also see throughout the book with others interactions with museums and also historical artefacts is the sort of connected themes around colonialism, exploitation and theft. This obviously is a debate you can sort of see through the lens of different viewpoints through those interactions. But as you grown with Arthur you see him as a boy that’s very enamoured by it and very excited by it and then as he progresses through his life, he’s then more very critical, more critical perspective. Could you, and again we could probably spend the entire hour talking about this topic in particular, but could you summarise what you hoped to achieve by sharing this narrative and how that contributes to the debate?
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
Yeah I really appreciate that we’re talking about this. It’s such a delicate subject, it’s a complex subject and it’s so important and social media is not the place to discuss this. You know, literature is because in literature there’s room for pluralism, there’s room for nuance and for calmness. I think our museums need to engage in this debate. They cannot say, well you know our doors are open to everyone and whoever wants to come, they can visit this cultural artefacts. How many people can even get a visa? We need to talk about how for instance, right now we’re focussing on the artefacts brought over from the Middle East, more specifically from Iraq, Syria, Nineveh for instance. How did they, they end up here. This was not a smooth transition, so many artefacts were broken, lost, plundered, stolen on the way. At the bottom of the River Tigris there are lamassu sculptures, there are clay tablets. Why? Because while they were being carried over they sunk. We never talk about this, we never learn about these things and I think museums need a new narrative, they need to be more positive, constructive but we need to be able to talk about colonial history and how these artefacts ended up here and all these lost and buried truths you know. But I am as I mentioned, a Turkish writer. If I am talking about British colonial past, I am also, I also need, need to talk about the Ottoman Authorities. What were they doing? Try, you know, that kind of ignorance and destruction of cultural heritage is a layer in Turkey that we never talk about. So that’s another layer. And then we need to talk about ISIS. ISIS, extremist militants, how they destroyed cultural heritage not only in Syria and Iraq, in a, in a very deliberate way but also behind the scenes while they were filming this barbaric video, videos, behind the scenes they were also selling these artefacts and making enormous amounts of profit out of this to such an extent that at some point in London, on Portobello Road there were artefacts from Syria being sold on the streets you know. So this illicit trafficking of artefacts, ISIS also made a lot of money out of this. So that’s then another layer. That’s why we need to be calmer and that’s one of the many reason why I love the novel of the forms so much because you can hold multiple thoughts inside a novel. Unlike a place like Twitter.
Matthew Carpenter
EDI and Engagement Manager, Mishcon de Reya
Definitely. So moving on to our next character, we meet Narin. We are in at this point, in 2014. We are in Turkey, she is a young Yazidi girl with a rare hearing condition and she is being raised by the River Tigris by her grandmother, Bhishma and as someone whose eighty one year old grandmother joined LinkedIn so she could like and watch this episode, this, this session, I’ve got a bit sort of soft spot for Narin and her grandmother and I believe this actually is based upon your own grandmother and that relationship? Can you sort of share a bit about her and how this inspired the characters of Narin and Bhishma?
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
Yeah and may I send my love from me to your grandmother. Yeah we love, we love grandmothers. I was raised by a grandmother myself until I was about ten years old and she really shaped me in so many ways. She shaped my writing as well. Very briefly what I, maybe I say a few things about my own story too. I was born in France and my parents got separated and I came to Turkey with my mum. At the time my mother was very young, she had dropped out of University therefore she had no diploma, as a young divorcee no career and nothing to fall back on. And I remember like the neighbourhood, they see a young divorcee almost as a, as a threat right. The patriarchal order and immediately they try to find a, older husband to take care of and it was my grandmother who intervened and she said, ‘no my daughter should go back to University and I’ll raise you know, my granddaughter until my mother is ready’. It was very unusual my upbringing in that regard and it really changed our lives. My grandmother was not a very well educated woman, only because she had been pulled out of school for being a girl and she wholeheartedly believed in women’s education and independence and because she supported her daughter’s independence the impact of that solidarity and sisterhood I think goes beyond generations. So I see traces of my own grandmother in, in the character of Bhishma but I want to say a few words about Yazidi’s if I may. This is one of the most persecuted, misunderstood and maligned minorities in the world. The Yazidi Law, because it is mostly based on old storytelling. The Yazidi Law talks about seventy two massacres, day by day you know. They keep the memory and the seventy third happened, the genocide initiated against the Yazidi minority was of course started by ISIS fanatics in 2014 but maybe not many people notice that the very first thing that ISIS did was to kill the water. So they killed, they poisoned all the wells and fountains leaving no drinkable water for entire communities. And the second thing they did was to kill the elderly. In a community like the Yazidi’s where memory is kept by the older generation, if you kill an entire older generation you are killing collective memory. If you kill collective memory, you kill collective identity. They killed defenceless men and then they kidnapped women and children and as we’re speaking there are still more than three thousand women. We don’t know their whereabouts, they are turned into sex slaves, kept in quote/unquote ordinary neighbourhoods across the Middle East. Purely by coincidence while I was writing this book, one of these women was saved in a house, in Ankora in the neighbourhood where I grew up in my maternal grandmother’s house two streets away. And it really struck me hard because how is it possible that a human being is kept under these circumstances in a tightknit community and the entire neighbourhood doesn’t hear or doesn’t see or doesn’t know. So there’s a lot of numbness or indifference going on and I think that’s also part of the problem.
Matthew Carpenter
EDI and Engagement Manager, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah and I think with the stories that you share in terms of it, like chaos and the persecution of Narin’s story, there are some beautiful moments with the grandmother being a storyteller, the memory keeper and you able almost taking up the mantle of that role as author, as storyteller and almost archaeologist of some of the customs, traditions and stories and histories almost at the point of being extinct and sharing those within that book. One of those stories that really, I think really sticks out and sort of encapsulates that is the, is the book, within the book is a story of, is it Nasabu, the goddess of writing and throughout history she was the goddess of writing and she was stripped of her powers and accolades and they were handed to a male god and then she was then transmuted from the goddess of writing and then seen as his wife, seen as his secretary and then sort of disappeared. Are you able to share perhaps a bit more about that history and why you included that in the text?
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
Yeah, really, really appreciate. So as we go back in time of course there’s a direct relationship between the way we, as humanity, the way we invented writing and agriculture right, they went hand in hand. So when you trace it back thousands of years ago, it is one goddess that represents both in the Middle East and her name is Nisaba. She has multiple other names but Nisaba is the most common one and over time she becomes the goddess of literature, literacy, libraries at scribal schools where students learn to write on clay tablets. Her name is written at the entrance. Many tablets are finished by saying ‘praise be to Nisaba’. So she represents the art of storytelling but also harvest, fertility, as I said, agriculture and so on. As patriarchy becomes more and more consolidated slowly Nisaba is pushed aside and then you start seeing a male guard called Nabu takes over her you know, skills. Nabu becomes the god of writing and literacy and literature and with Nisaba in the drawings Nisaba is in the background, she becomes the faithful wife of Nabu and then she becomes the secretary to Nabu and then she disappears completely. Later on Nabu affects Greek and Roman civilisation so you can see in various guards the traces of Nabu. So scholars can see the continuity from, from Nabu it was Greek gods and Roman gods but with Nisaba, she stays in the region and completely forgotten and almost no one remembers her. So it seemed important to me to finish this book by saying ‘praise be to Nisaba’.
Matthew Carpenter
EDI and Engagement Manager, Mishcon de Reya
And then finally we would move across to our final sort of hydrogen atom, so we have Zakila who is a hydrologist who has moved to the houseboat on the River Thames after a divorce and she is there seeking solace, meaning and she is grappling with identity. Can you sort of introduce her to us and her importance of that final piece of the atom?
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
Yeah. Thank you so much. So Zakila is a child of immigrants as you mentioned. At the beginning of the book she is going through a rough period in her life. She lives in a houseboat in Chelsea, exactly the spot where George Smith or Arthur was born you know 100 years later Chelsea is a very different world right now and she is studying, she is studying buried rivers, lost rivers. As you know London is very much shaped by lost rivers right. The biggest rivers in our planet are the invisible rivers, meaning atmospheric rivers and then of course there are so many rivers under our feet and not only in London but New York is very much shaped by buried rivers. So is Moscow, Tokyo, Stuttgart, Athens, beautiful Athens. You go there, it feels like there are no rivers. Of course there are, where are they? Under the ground. Three rivers in one city but we don’t see them. So what we did as humanity as we built our cities, we declared some rivers insignificant, too dirty, unnecessary and we covered them and we built roads above them. We built our buildings above them and now with the sea levels rising and the climate crisis, that system is not sustainable anymore. That’s why we are seeing more and more flash floods because the rivers that we buried cannot carry this much water. So they will burst right. So there’s now awareness across the world in Paris, because Paris has another very important buried river beneath. There’s the, there’s the movement now, they call it daylighting, bringing these buried rivers into daylight. There’s an important example of this in Seoul in South Korea, they’ve done it very successfully. As a writer for me it is also an important metaphor because I want to ask what else is buried in our lives, in our societies, in our cultures can we bring them to daylight, can we talk about the silences as well as the stories.
Matthew Carpenter
EDI and Engagement Manager, Mishcon de Reya
And through this character without giving too many spoilers and throughout your work there is LGBTQ+ representation and characters. How important to you is that to include and also particularly perhaps within the current social climate that we have our conversation earlier to include those representations?
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
Yeah. Yeah indeed. I think we are living in very liquid times you know, not that long ago meaning scholars, experts used to divide the world almost into solid lands and liquid lands. In late 1990 the early noughties and you know, there was this assumption that if you are in, in one of these solid lands in the West you don’t have to worry about human rights, democracy, freedom of speech or LGBTQ+ right because these things have already been achieved right, we are beyond that. But you have to worry about these things in the liquid lands over there. That arrogant and voyeuristic perception of the world I think is shattered now isn’t it. Now we know that there’s no such thing as solid lands versus liquid lands. In fact we’re all going through liquid times and what that means is there is no guarantee, there’s nothing you know, we can’t say, ‘oh this has been achieved so we don’t have to worry about that’. I think we all need to worry more. I am not saying let’s be pessimistic but let’s keep the mind awake, alert and I think women’s rights or minority rights are under threat across the world and wherever, whenever we see a country starting to go backwards these two will be the very first rights that will be taken away. It will be women’s rights and minority rights. History shows us this, this pattern so I think to me this has always been an important subject. It’s very visible in my writing but it was only recently I gave a TED talk, I gave two TED global talks. It was in the second TED global talk that I was able to say that it’s also my story, I am bisexual and this was something that I found very difficult to talk about and after I gave that talk I received a lot of, a lot of you know, verbal abuse and hate speech for about you know, two and a half months uninterrupted from Turkey, not from anywhere else. That was sad for me to see but I also receive every now and then a letter from maybe some mother, some parent or some young person saying thank you, you know, for sharing this story. So all I am trying to say is I think it’s a very crucial time for global solidarity and especially for global sisterhood and for minority rights.
Matthew Carpenter
EDI and Engagement Manager, Mishcon de Reya
Definitely and, one thing that also I think is an interesting sort of theme, perhaps topic that comes up is the idea of imposter syndrome and perhaps almost all your characters look at that and seem most, mostly go back to the first character on Arthur when he is sharing and presenting his ideas to scholars, to professionals coming from the slums. Is that something that you have experienced yourself or is that something that you thought is really important and seemed to include and weave throughout your stories?
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
Yeah, yeah what a brilliant question. We, we have so much self-doubt and I think self-doubt up to a certain point is such a healthy thing you know, we need it but we also need to have the faith. What seems unfair to me is that if you happen to be young, a young man from a disadvantaged background, like for instance Arthur in the story. If you happen to be an immigrant, if you happen to be for this reason or that reason someone who doesn’t fit this image of you know, what a successful person is, we constantly doubt ourselves and sometimes that turns into a nagging voice inside. I think we need to be very careful about that. If I may share one really, recent example. I used to go to schools a lot across the Middle East to give talks because I wrote a children’s book in Turkey which gave me a chance to observe, or to talk to very young readers like I’m talking about 6 or 7 years old yeah. If you speak to a young Turkish child or a Jordanian or an Egyptian child they are no different whatsoever from a Canadian, French, Norwegian. At that age children have so much chutzpah, so much creativity like ask in a room full of young students, ‘are there any artists here?’. So many hands go up you know, they are already artists, they have no doubt. ‘Are there any writers here?’, hands up. ‘Poets?’, hands up and then ask the same question to 17 year olds, 16 year olds in the same city, in the same country. ‘Are there any artists here?’, no hands go up. No poets, no novelists. What happened? What happened was I think and girls become timid, so 16 year olds, 17 year old girls are very, very timid to speak up. Why? Because as a society we teach, be careful you know, how you laugh, how you sit down, even the tone of your voice, the length of your skirt, everything is going to be judged and little by little we start to internalise that judging gaze to such an extent that when we look at ourselves in the mirror, we don’t need an external voice anymore, we see ourselves through that gaze, through that voice and then we are not pretty enough and now we’re not clever enough, we’re not this enough. But who says that? Which voice says that? All I am saying is we need to dismantle that voice and just remember the confidence and creativity that we all had naturally as children.
Matthew Carpenter
EDI and Engagement Manager, Mishcon de Reya
One thing that I think was really interesting and perhaps creative in the book is the fact that it is a book of fiction but within the book you have lots of pictures of the actual artefacts which is obviously more prevalent in the non-fiction book and actually the museums themselves. So you see the Lamas, you see the written tablets of Gilgamesh, you see depictions of King Ashurbanipal. What were the reasons that you included these images within your book?
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
Yes, I think I was a little bit inspired by the Victorian era you know, many novels at the time of course contained images and we lost that. We, now we start to think, now we think that if, if a book is serious, if it is serious literary fiction it will not have any pictures. Why not right? But basically I think I am very interested in interdisciplinary thinking. My own background in academia is also a bit interdisciplinary. I genuinely believe we need to leave our comfort zones a little bit in everything we do in life yeah. So to me it’s more, much more interesting if a novel becomes curious about physics or neuroscience or water science. I don’t know anything about this field but I want to learn you know, I want to be curious so you become a student of life. But if the same scientists could become interested in films series or a director could become interested in poetry or a poet in political philosophy, the moment we leave our compartmentalised zones and start to engage in other fields, other disciplines I think that’s when the mind is much more nourished. But again, coming back to the novel as a form, the novel can hold all these disciplines and, and much more and that’s why I feel very sad when you know, some people say, I don’t have time to read fiction you know, I read important things because so much is happening in the world so I read about finance and technology you know, the big, big stuff. That makes me really sad because I don’t have time for fiction means I don’t have time for emotions, it means I don’t have time for emotional intelligence. I don’t know a single human being who does not need to connect with their emotions. Whatever we do in life, dentist students, design teachers, we all have to deal with our own emotions, other people’s emotions especially in this age which is the age of anxiety, it’s the age of angst, it’s the age in which emotions dominate right? So fiction gives us a very different kind of knowledge wisdom. It’s very unfortunate that in the English language we use it as the opposite of fact but I think fiction brings us closer to truth so that kind of multiplicity and bringing into this way of thinking is very close to my heart.
Matthew Carpenter
EDI and Engagement Manager, Mishcon de Reya
And the fact within your fiction you can link it so much to the fact is because you’ve got a hydrologist as one of your main characters and someone working at a museum. One of the things that I obviously and you’ve spoken a little bit about it, is in terms of the, the zombie rivers and the bringing daylighting. In London do we have lost rivers?
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
Oh many, so many under our feet. I mean even Sloane Square right, every time you travel through Sloane Square imagine if we lift our heads we can see almost the skeleton of one of those lost rivers of course covered, just above our heads. Under Buckingham Palace, everywhere you know, from, from Westbourne Grove, every neighbourhood. This, this city in particular is very much shaped by lost rivers.
Matthew Carpenter
EDI and Engagement Manager, Mishcon de Reya
And is there plans to daylight any of those rivers that are under…
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
There are, there are some plans. One other thing that is very much you know, shapes the story of London is mud larking as you know. So there’s, there’s all these stories about buried rivers but also mud larking which is because the Thames is such a tidal river right, every day we can, we can observe the movement of the, of the river, the ebb and tide so people were mud larkers, mud larkers for centuries. They look for artefacts, for the things that the river brings us, for the discarded items. There are some artists who make jewellery from the pieces that they find as they were mud larking so, it’s very open to creativity as well.
Matthew Carpenter
EDI and Engagement Manager, Mishcon de Reya
And throughout the book you cover so many different topics that we’ve talked through today. Was there anything that you wanted to include or yes, felt that you couldn’t include within this book?
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
No really, I mean the only thing I can tell you is this, you know this is my thirteenth novel and sometimes people think if you’re, as you get older, as you write maybe a number of books, things get easier but it doesn’t. My experience is you always struggle a lot as a writer. There are weeks when you feel like okay I got this, I have an amazing story, I’m on top of the world and then the next week you’re crawling on the floor because what you’ve written the week before is so bad. So you just have to start all over again. The only thing I learned over the years is that that’s okay you know, that’s part of the creative process. This is not linear, this is not a smooth transition, it’s alright, anxiety, panic attacks, sometimes you feel depressed. That’s all part of the story but I really think as human beings we are storytelling animals. We also are story remembering animals. What we remember from our own past it’s always connected to stories. No one said it better than Maya Angelou right, she said, ‘people will forget what you’ve said to them, they might even forget what you have done for them but they will never forget how you made them feel’. It’s always the feelings that stay. There are very interesting studies that show if we go to a talk, if the talk is given via numbers, statistics, graphics, data, 24 hours later we forget half of the talk. Three days later over 70% of the talk has evaporated. We will not remember it. But if the same talk has been given via stories, if the person who was talking was sharing their emotions, sharing their stories, three days later, three years later we still remember. So there is a very direct relationship between memory, emotions and the art of storytelling.
Matthew Carpenter
EDI and Engagement Manager, Mishcon de Reya
And before I open to questions so get thinking and if people on line get those typed in. How do you hope people feel having read this book?
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
I’m you know, I, it might sound maybe too idealistic but I really believe in this because it happened to me. Books changed me so much you know, I was a, as I mentioned, I was an only child, raised by a single working mum and I felt life was so boring. It was books that showed me there were other possibilities, it connected me, books connected me with other worlds, other forms of existence and when I write a novel I feel like by the time I finish, I’m slightly different. I’m a different person, something has shifted in me. I’ve learned, I’ve changed so if you know, readers can also experience something similar that maybe they come and they say, ‘I’ve learnt something from your book’ or ‘I connected with this character’, that really means the world to me because on paper you might say, oh we all come from different boxes, we have nothing in common and then we read the same book, we meet inside the same story and then we realise our, our own shared humanity. So the ability to empathise, the, the ability to build bridges and connections I think lies at the heart of the art of storytelling. That’s something I very much believe in.
Matthew Carpenter
EDI and Engagement Manager, Mishcon de Reya
Well thank you Elif.
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
Thank you.
Matthew Carpenter
EDI and Engagement Manager, Mishcon de Reya
I am just now going to turn to question from the audience, I am hoping given all the super fans that we have in the room there will be lots of questions. If we do have questions, we just ask you to wait for the roving mike just so everybody online can hear your question which I am sure will be fantastic so they can hear it as well. So do we have any questions in the room?
Audience
Thank you so much. I was really struck by the way that you talked about the ways in which you’d written certain aspects of the book differently and how you were inspired by different storytelling traditions and I was wondering if that fluidity changes your actual writing process or whether or not you are much more kind of rigorous or rigorous is probably the wrong word but more kind of grounded and steady and in the actual craft of putting the words on the paper?
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
Yeah, you are so kind. I am never grounded and steady so (laughs). Um but as you can hear in my accent you know, English is not my mother tongue so this is an acquired language for me. English is my third language and I am writing as an immigrant you know, you feel like you’re an immigrant not only in this country which has become my home but also in this language which also has become my home but that said, it’s always a struggle because I think every immigrant knows what I am talking about. When you, when your whole existence is in a second or third language the mind always runs faster than the, the tongue and your tongue in a clumsy way tries to catch up and cannot, there is always a gap. That gap is very intimidating. You know, as immigrants, we always want to crack better jokes. We cannot quite get it right the way we want. You know, we hear the, the words we cannot pronounce, we doubt it, did I say that right, did I mispronounce. So that gap, that self-doubt is always there. But when I write fiction I don’t doubt in that sense. I just flow you know, or I follow the flow of, of that river of writing. Does it make sense? So, so you just leave all those doubts outside and then those characters become your friends. That story becomes your reality and, and then I just can take off and, and fly. So, I gave you maybe a longer answer but it’s not something that’s very rational, there’s room for irrationality. I think if you love what you do, that love becomes our guiding force.
Audience
Thank you.
Mishcon Online
Elif, I am just going to position a question from online if I may?
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
Yes.
Mishcon Online
It’s two parts. I am going to ask the first part first. A political activist and successful novelist, is creative writing your way to bring to public notice and address political issues you feel strongly about?
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
Yeah. Beautiful question, a powerful question. You know, fiction is where my heart beats. I am a novelist, I’m a storyteller that’s all I am and I have a lot of respect for people who are activists, who dedicate so much of their time. I wouldn’t necessarily call myself an activist in that sense. You know, I would only call myself a writer, storyteller but that said, when you come from a wounded democracy you do not have the luxury of saying I don’t want to talk about politics. You don’t have the luxury of saying, I don’t want to talk about what’s happening outside the world, outside the window when so much is happening outside the window right? Also I am a feminist, I’ve learned many wonderful things from past generations of women’s movement and of course one of the crucial things for feminist practice was the redefinition of politics. So politics is not only allowed Keir Starmer said yesterday or what happened in the Parliament a year before, it’s bigger than that. Wherever there is power imbalance there is politics. So the personal is also political right? That’s what in the generations of feminism, feminist theory talks about so my point is you might be writing about sexuality, gender, that can also be quite political work. You might be writing about trees, that can also be a political work. However, so there’s always politics inside a novel you know, it cannot be any other way. However, politics is never my guide or guiding force. I make a distinction to be honest, I don’t like it when writers try to preach or teach or try to make true. I find it very, very off putting and I don’t know the answers myself. The only thing I know is there are questions that I care about. I am still thinking about these questions so can we think together? Can we think about this together? So I think that’s, there’s an important nuance there. A writer’s job is never to try to dictate the answers but to only and only bring these buried questions into the surface then create an open space of nuance and pluralism, maybe have different opinions be heard and then you take a step back. You have to leave the answers to the reader because every reader is going to come up with their own answers. I know couples who have been married for 45 years, they read the same book, they don’t read it in the same way. I know friends who share every little secret, they read the same novel, one of them loves it, the other one hates it. Why? Because the reader is not passive. Every reader brings their own gaze into the story and I have to respect that diversity so I don’t like the kind of literature that preaches. I only like the kind of novels that are there to ask questions.
Mishcon Online
And thank you for that and the second half of the question is, without the interest in these political topics, do you think you would still be a novelist? And if so, what kind of novel would you write?
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
You mean in the future?
Mishcon Online
Yeah.
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
Well of course we, none of us knows our, our futures. Everything is evolving but I do know that the novel, the long narrative form is really where my heart beats and in so many ways this is the antidote of this age of hyper information, fast consumption isn’t it, instant gratification. We live in an age in which our attention spans are declining, decreasing. I earlier mentioned those two TED talks, the first TED talk very briefly, it was 20 minutes long, those were the guidelines. Years later the second TED talk the guidelines were can you please keep it limited to 13 minutes because we renewed our guidelines. I said why? Because the world attention, you know span, average attention span has shrunk. That is very sad so we are unable to listen to a talk that lasts 19 minutes but that, that says something about our psychology, about how we are conditioning, wiring our own brains. So what the novel does, the long form, remember there was this expectation that the novel was going to disappear, it will be the death of the novel because now everything is too fast, it’s the social media age. That is true, but the opposite is also happening and I think what is happening is the faster this world spins, the more confusing it becomes, the more anxious we feel, the deeper our need to slow down and there’s a part of us that really wants to appreciate the trees, touch the trees. There’s a part of us that wants to retreat into an inner garden right? There’s a part of us that is tired of this bombardment of snippets of information, it’s too much. It’s more than we can handle and the truth is we are not processing it. So let us put aside this too much information and let us focus instead on knowledge and wisdom and I really think for that we need the novel and we need art and literature.
Matthew Carpenter
EDI and Engagement Manager, Mishcon de Reya
Another question now, in terms of how do we push people to, to get that understanding of fiction and make it something that we should all be engaging with and all be consuming?
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
Yeah you know I’m observing something and this is what my personal observation particularly in the last two and a half years, because I do lots of literary events, I go to literary festivals, book events up and down, across the country and in different countries. More and more young people are coming to literary events, more and more young men are coming to fiction events because usually fiction you know, there was always this perception that men of a certain generation would not read fiction. That is changing. Now in the big cities, in New York, in London, I am sure you’ve come across this, there’s this movement, they are organising book review parties, like people are reading their phones for a few hours away. I think we are so tired, what this bombardment of information does is it’s causing emotional fatigue, brain fatigue and in the long run it creates apathy, numbness you know, then you just read snippets about Afghanistan, about this and that and we don’t really focus on anything. So coming back to your question, how do we you know, maybe spread the love of storytelling? By talking about stories. By reminding ourselves and each other that we are storytelling creatures. This was always the case. This is a kind of art that is definitely older than us, bigger than us and much, much wiser than us. That’s why I think there’s wisdom inside novels, not because writers are wise people. We, we’re a mess right. We really are but when I’m writing I feel like I tap into something that is older than me and that is the ancient art of storytelling. From the very beginning humanity has been telling stories. Let’s pay attention to those politicians who are very successful today. Whether we like them or not, they are the ones who have a story to tell right. Stories have power. In our jobs in every moment of our lives it’s the stories that, that stay with us so I think it, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the importance of reading.
Matthew Carpenter
EDI and Engagement Manager, Mishcon de Reya
Mm. Were there any more questions in the room? Any more questions online?
Audience
Thank you so much for your talk. So I wanted to ask you about AI and sort of following on from decreasing attention spans and sort of getting people to read more. As an author how do you feel about sort of the ongoing attack against creative industries by or let’s say, potential theft of content by AI sort of scraping in as an author what sort of, have you thought about this? What sort of proposals would you, if you could create a policy, what would you say we should do and you know as lawyers I guess, there might be some IT lawyers among us. So what would you do as if you were a policy maker in this area?
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
I really appreciate this question, it’s so important and I appreciate the work you do in this, in this area because it is so important and it is going to become even more important, not only for writers but for anyone in the creative industries. And of course with the latest developments in America it is very, very concerning. I personally would not want any tech company or any human being or any political party or any organisation to have absolute power. We are all human beings, we’re all fallible creatures. So extreme concentration of power and monopoly of power it’s a very dangerous thing and this is happening in front of our eyes via tech companies right now. It is very alarming that the content, you know the books that we write, it takes such a long time to be able to write a book, there’s so much work behind every, every book. All of that is taken without our consent and is AI models are trained on them. There is also a lot of bias but that’s another subject that we don’t talk about because most of the books that are used for AI training are actually very neurocentric right? So the stories of countries and cultures that don’t fit into that model are also gone. So within the AI training there’s also a bias, that’s another layer we need to question. But very briefly what I can say is, as you might have come across, we authors, we have been signing petitions, trying to organise grass roots movements, making our voices, trying to make our voices heard by the, the people in power but I really think it’s very important that they be rules and obstacles, rules preventing this from happening whether it’s the music industry or literature, it is not fair that they AI models are used in this way. And I think we need to also not be afraid of talking about these tech firms because we think that technology is such a confusing subject that not many of us are able to talk about this but I think we, in the public space, we need each other’s voices. We need the voices of more young people, more women, more minorities, talking about tech firms. So we, technology is way too important to leave it solely to tech firms is what I’m trying to say.
Audience
Just going back to your book which I’ve just read and absolutely loved and it’s, it’s such a pleasure to be here so thank you so much. I wanted to go back to how you actually started to write the book. Did you have all three characters in mind straight away? Did you, did you know that at the end, I don’t want to spoiler alert you know, that there was going to be some kind of connection? How did you go about it, was it all planned out, what’s your sort of, how do you write? Tell us. Thank you.
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
Yeah, beautiful question. I, I think there are two different ways of writing a novel. One is a bit more like you know, engineering in which the author wants to know the structure, the plot and how each and every character is going to behave. You want to plan it out. I have a lot of respect for authors who do this but it’s not my way. I like the second way in which you follow your intuition. You are a little bit drunk you know, you don’t quite know what you are doing. You know, one thing leads to another, there’s a flow and you trust that flow. But for me to be able to feel that confidence because it’s, it’s a matter of confidence right? You need to leap into the void, the ether. For me it, to be able to feel confidence I need to do my homework well as a writer. So I really try to read a lot, research a lot. I want to know everything you know, I can learn about these subjects. You absorb, you filter. Also we need to be good listeners, we need to listen to people and be open to learning which means we need to sometimes unlearn because a big part of learning is also unlearning. There are stereotypes, clichés, biases that we internalise so we need to also take those out and then there comes a moment when I feel like okay, from that moment onwards I can, I can fly you know and then the characters slowly start to take shape and they become my guides and then one thing leads to another. So the water drop leads to the epic leads to Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh led me to George Smith and George Smith led me to the other characters. That’s why he is my oxygen, he is at the centre but I did not plan everything. I just you know, I followed them, they became my friends.
Audience
Thank you.
Matthew Carpenter
EDI and Engagement Manager, Mishcon de Reya
I think we have got time for one more question.
Audience
So I love your books and I’ve never read a book where I’ve identified as being a second generation British person and I always find when I finish your books I regret not asking questions to my grandparents; how did we come here to the UK? What was your journey like? And through this book you’ve said, children from displaced families can never allow themselves to fall below level at which their parents started out and that really resonated with me. And just wanted to know how do you capture so beautifully that tension between homeland and new land and where our hearts are, where our heads are and did you do that from experience yourself as moving between different countries?
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
Yeah such a beautiful question, thank you so much. I think a lot about this concept, where is home? Can we have more than one home? Can we have multiple belongings? What is exile right? All these concepts mean a lot to me. I think we do not forget our motherlands even when we’re miles and continents away. We carry them with us you know, something that remains with us and something remains behind. There’s a melancholy to that. There’s also enrichment because you gain new things as well. So the balance of melancholy and maybe humour is something that really, really intrigues me. But very briefly what you said is so true and what I try to capture in the book. I’ve been observing through my experience of other people’s experiences. So many immigrant families. We do not allow our children to fail right? And this is true for any person who comes from a complex background or some minority experience as if that child or that young person is representing something bigger than themselves and if they fail they are going to fail a whole community, a whole collective identity. That’s a lot of pressure on the shoulders of a young person. Already it’s hard to be young right, for them. So we need to take that pressure off but this is happening. And the second thing that I find very important is in many families that have experienced some kind of complexity, they have been almost deracinated, uprooted and had to find their roots again, the older generation are usually the ones who have experienced the biggest hardships but they don’t talk about the past. They don’t even know how to talk about it. It doesn’t mean they have forgotten, it just sits inside their chest unspoken. The second generation, in that sense you are different but usually the second generation, and I don’t want to judge second generation but they don’t have the time for the past. They don’t have the energy for the past, understandably, because they have to build a new life, Tabula Rasa, they need to be forward looking, future orientated, there is no time. But that leaves the third or the fourth generation in these families, the youngest in these families are the ones today who are asking the biggest questions about ancestral memory, ancestral heritage. They are the ones who are daring to ask, what happened to my great grandparents? So they are digging deep into not only family stories but also family’s silences and I think in every family there is at least one memory keeper and I would like to hope that writers are the memory keepers of their own societies and their own times. Not, we’re not digging into memory in order to stuck, get stuck in the past but to honour the past, to learn from the past and hopefully never make the same mistakes again but also bring the beauties of the past and the buried stories. So I am very interested in people who are memory keepers of their own families.
Audience
Thank you.
Matthew Carpenter
EDI and Engagement Manager, Mishcon de Reya
Great well thank you everyone for the questions and thank you Elif for joining us today and sharing your…
Elif Shafak
British Turkish Novelist and Storyteller
It’s a pleasure for me.
Matthew Carpenter
EDI and Engagement Manager, Mishcon de Reya
…book and your stories and your insight. So I think we can end this session with a big round of applause.
[Applause]