Abstract

Turkish history is marked by the erasure of historical events, where the act of forgetting is a deliberate decision enacted by an individual or a community. Collective amnesia was institutionalized through a legal framework that penalized the recollection of events contradicting the official version of history. For instance, Article 301 of the Turkish penal code labels such acts as denigrating Turkishness. Many writers who wrestled with this official denialism have succumbed to the state’s authority. However, Elif Shafak and her writings stand apart, as they focus on domestic events that serve as microcosms of larger political and historical events. They demonstrate how quotidian interactions within the family are laden with political significance, serving to both reflect and perpetuate historical silences. Drawing inferences from The Bastard of Istanbul, this work argues that it uses female memory and agency to talk about a history that has often been subjected to erasure. Shafak’s mnemonic narrative challenges the culture of oblivion by confronting the lack of historical consciousness in Turkish society. Further, the article proposes that the novel can be classified as a feminist fiction of memory, as it articulates women’s micro-memories. The multivocality in the narrative enables her-story to resurface and counter the Pan-Turkish identity discourse. The article builds its conceptual framework from memory studies and feminist criticism, employing the works of Birgit Neumann, Gayle Greene, Cathy Caruth, Marianne Hirsch, and Maurice Halbwachs to examine collective memory, postmemory, and mnemonic reconstruction within a feminist historiographical reading of Shafak’s novel.