Elif Shafak on Turkey’s turmoil: ‘Intimidation and paranoia dominates the land’

Ankara, the city where I spent most of my childhood and early youth, is not only the capital of modern Turkey, and the centre of Turkish politics and the military. It is also home to a vast population – students, white-collar professionals, human rights activists – with a secularist worldview and liberal lifestyle. It was here that a bomb detonated at rush hour on 17 February near the Turkish parliament, killing 28 and wounding more than 60 people. This latest tragedy is yet another in a series of terror attacks that rocked the country since last summer. When the news of the blast broke, I was sitting at a table with friends in Istanbul, in a small, bohemian flat overlooking the Bosphorus. On the walls were paintings by Middle Eastern artists and, facing them, a huge portrait of David Bowie that had been imprinted on the kitchen cabinets – an illustration of the many colours and conflicts in Turkish identity. There was a brief silence shattered by a plethora of questions. How could the Turkish intelligence service be so weak as to allow this to happen next door to military barracks and government buildings? Who could be behind the atrocity (later a Kurdish militant group, Tak, assumed responsibility)? Would Turkey manage to pull itself together or would it end up like Syria? Gradually, we went back to our dinner and to other subjects, but inevitably returned to politics, our mood vacillating between grief, sorrow and depression.

“Lebanon used to be like this at the time of the civil war,” said an Istanbul-based artist. “They would talk about death and love, funerals and weddings in the same breath. They would be crying one minute, laughing the next, and then cry a bit more. They could not hold on to an emotion for too long.”