back on hardline sensitivities” and “attacked the official version of history” (“Literature”).
Marginal or representative conditions? (II)
Yet should we also bear in mind the intersecting possibility that a staged marginality is co-opted in the commodification culture of a profitable book market? This suggests a second response to the query about a representative character of the stories of honor. It reveals a flaw in some of the above arguments: they do not always understand discourse as a Foucaultian event, as one can gather from ←6 | 7→Archaeology of Knowledge (II.1), one which includes speaker, words, hearers, location, language, and dissemination channels. “Who is speaking to whom” is a vital element of meaning: a writer’s positionality, location, or context are always relevant to the represented content (Alcoff 12, 14).13 In our time and not only in Europe the so-called masses, those who are struggling, “know perfectly well, without illusion,” yet “there exists a system of power which blocks, prohibits, and invalidates this discourse and this knowledge” – while the intellectual is “object and instrument” of the system (Foucault, “Intellectuals” 207–08).
Are writers instruments of a power system?
This question requires more attention, at least as a brief extension of our topic focus. Some authors whose works are part of our corpus comment quite explicitly on the experience, among them Turkish writer Ayfer Tunç. According to her own statement, she writes for “qualified readers” of her home country: “Turkey still has […] really powerful ‘qualified readers’ despite its population. In my opinion, this situation shows that our writers still can influence the readers in Turkey and their words create an effect into [sic] people even if they are not majority.”14 Yet what is especially significant in the present context is her experience that “Western writers expect us to write novels that show them more clearly as Westerners, and us more clearly as Easterners; they want us to make them feel happy and secure in this regard” (“Literature”). Western publishers, accordingly, “want stories of abject penury: about lives ruined under the weight of customs and traditions, about the unbreachable chasm between Muslim and Western lifestyles, and tales of ethnic strife” (“Literature”).15 Would that not invalidate the discourse?
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Gul Turner has aptly remarked about Sema Kaygusuz: “Turkish writers’ works are only published if they fit a preconceived/misconceived model of orientalism.” Kaygusuz reports the experience of being subjected, outside Turkey, to questions about Islam, Islamophobia or Sinbad, being treated as a “representative” of a particular country and religion (“Literature”). In the article “Buradan Bakmak,” Kaygusuz describes her experiences with Western literary expectations in detail, pointing out that readers generally only want to hear about her “Turkishness” as something exotic as well as her struggles in the role of an oppressed woman, thus restricting her artistic freedom (Aramızdaki 46–47). In a Voice Message via WhatsApp she has told Mine Krause that she generally does not have any particular audience in mind. She addresses
readers who feel restless, are curious about the world, who are searching for themselves. All those who are questioning themselves are my readers. Not specifically women or men, Europeans or Turks… I write to the whole world, even to the dead, and to future generations. This is my intention and my wish. I want to touch other people’s souls that do not have any gender or nationality.
In Turkey, Elif Shafak addresses a very heterogeneous group of readers: “My readers are surprisingly mixed. I have conservative readers, for instance, women with headscarves, but also many liberal, leftist, feminist, nihilist, environmentalist and secularist readers. Next to those are mystics, agnostics, Kurds, Turks, Alevis, Sunnis, gays, housewives and businesswomen” (Skidelsky). She turns against writers being seen not “as creative individuals on their own, but as the representatives of their respective cultures”:
If you’re a woman writer from the Muslim world, like me, then you are expected to write the stories of Muslim women and, preferably, the unhappy stories of unhappy Muslim women. You’re expected to […] leave the experimental and avant-garde to your Western colleagues. (“Politics”)
Such stories would, quite likely, be considered representative.
In a direct message to Mine Krause on Twitter, Négar Djavadi writes the following about her intended readership, which is rather Western:
Le livre [i.e., Désorientale] s’adresse avant tout aux Occidentaux, un moyen de leur faire connaître l’Iran et son Histoire, un pays peu connu et pourtant très fantasmé. À travers le personnage de Kimia mon désir était de leur dire que derrière une étrangère, une ←8 | 9→exilée, un homo, se cache une histoire, des histoires et si vous preniez le temps de les connaître vous verrez, vous serez surpris, ému, touché. En fait, cette envie a devancé celle de parler de l’Iran.
Scheinhardt is apparently also writing for Western readers who are less familiar with conditions in Turkey: “Deutsche und junge, in der Bundesrepublik aufgewachsene Landsleute” – as Anton J. Weinberger wrote in 1986. Yasmina Khadra seems equally to address at least some non-Western readers in order to effect a change in their perception:
If you think that my books are capable of bringing the necessary light to the beginnings of a solution, please advocate and support them. […] My readers, in all of the countries where I am translated, have accessed a certain reality of the world. […] [T];hinking that I am capable of changing something without your commitment is too much to ask. (Hoffmann)
Aboulela explains in an interview:
My books are […] marketed for the general reader, so if I count most of the people who read me, they are Western and non-Muslim. But the warmest response comes from Muslims. […] I’m increasingly getting the best reception from young, second-generation Muslims who grew up in the West. (Chambers, Interview 98)
She describes Minaret as “a kind of Muslim feminist novel, and girly or womanly as well” (Chambers, Interview 99).
Khaled Hosseini shares the following observations:
[…] The people who tend to read novels [in Afghanistan] are the educated, urban, progressive, affluent professionals. […] I do have my critics in my community, no doubt. The common theme among them is that some things are better left unsaid, kept in house, for instance the issue of ethnic tensions and treatment of women and violence against children. (Holmes)
Kamel Daoud’s aim seems to be to describe his homeland to readers from other countries: “I have for my country the affection of the disenchanted. A love that is secret and strong. A passion. I love the people and the skies, which I try to decipher in books and in glimpses at night” (“Correspondence”). Saleem Haddad stresses that “[i];n the Arab world, those of us on the margins often face a dual struggle: battling oppressive forces within our own communities and also resisting the global narrative that tries to use our ‘oppression’ to achieve broader military or political goals” (“Guapa” interview). However, Ayfer Tunç’s and Orhan Pamuk’s novels as studied here were not created for Western publishers; other writers will not want to be restricted in their range of subject matter and settings and will not only write novels about “lives ruined.” But when they do, ←9 | 10→we need not assume (without evidence) that the representation is invalidated by a publisher’s agenda, that it is not alloreferential. Concerning China, a Western literary agent is on record
