I had absolutely no idea when I read, ‘The Comedy of Errors’ that it was set here
which I think, as someone who is Turkish but grew up in London,
there’s a really interesting kind of distinction between reading something
and not being aware that it’s actually from your homeland
and I think, partly because of the spelling of Ephesus,
which is not spelt in the Turkish alphabet,
always presents itself as being something,
like a lot of Classical literature, it presents as being either Greek or Latin.
That’s how we understand the Classics
to be in the Western world and with that there’s this kind of erasure
of any Middle Eastern or Turkish or Lévon influence in that.
So it wasn’t really until a few months ago
that it suddenly occurred to me that Ephesus is here.
- The real Ephesus.
- Yeah, it’s actually here.
- So you’re Turkish and you were born in Turkey
but do you ever feel like there’s still a cultural divide
or an identity divide for you?
Yeah, I was born in Nişantaşı like the heart of what we call the ‘White Turkey’
like western Turks, westernised Turks, modern Turks, that kind of thing.
So I had an English education and it’s ended up with this PhD in English Literature.
So this Istanbul-based person reading Shakespeare,
trying to explore themes Shakespeare did and writing in English at the end.
But this duality is interesting because
it is something that people fear of
and people are angry about.
It’s like, “Why aren’t you just a Turk?”
or “Why aren’t you just a westerner?”
but then it gives you a way to discuss these
divisions in society in an interesting way.
I wanted you to first get annoyed by this fact
of the lack of femininity in Shakespeare.
Do you remember?
- I think the first time I became aware of it
and aware of why I wasn’t engaging properly with it
was when I was at university and we were studying, I think it was ‘Macbeth’,
and we ended up having to watch Roman Polanski’s adaptation of it
and there was this really interesting scene with the witches at the beginning
where one of the witches lifts her skirt and it looks ever so slightly
like she might have male genitals.
And there was, for the first time, that sparked an interest in me
because it gave a female character a slightly different dimension.
And I remember for that entire essay, because I had felt I think so bored
and like Shakespeare was just constantly
recycled in the same way whist it was being taught to us
without this development of cultures
or perhaps even relating it to a more contemporary social understanding.
There are things that are familiar. We’re just not really drawing those out just yet
whilst we’re teaching a lot of these topics.
So when I think about ‘Comedy of Errors’,
it seems like Shakespeare's most powerful celebration of the immigrant
and how crucial the phenomenon of immigration is for a person
to discover her character and her powers.
It almost seems like a message to his fellow countrymen and countrywomen
that you should travel more, you should change places more,
because it’s how you will reach any form of wisdom.
Immigration is this big thing for you, right?
- Of course
- It gives power to your writing and to who you are
- Yeah
- and this constant search for what you might call your home.
- That’s exactly it, that’s exactly it.
You’re always looking for where that place is
and I think in a lot of ways it’s ultimately
it’s always kind of, it’s not just the place or the space,
but it’s, as you said, it’s the wisdom
that the people around you bring to you as well.
Which is effectively what ‘Comedy of Errors’ is about
and the experiences of other people forming and coming together in your own life.
And then you take all these little pieces and then when you put them together
that eventually becomes a part of, not necessarily your interpersonal identity
but certainly your understanding of ‘home’.
So the immigrant is a character in ‘The Comedy of Errors’, not a central character
but a character and you can imagine people watching him from the stage
but then in our day the immigrant came so much to the fore
that it’s as if it’s dominating the cultural world and political world.
My book is about young Turk people under the shadow.
It’s about frustrated, anxious young people.
They’re not exactly immigrants but in an intellectual way they are immigrants.
They are bringing foreign ideas to Turkey
and they want to export their ideas they brought
so this puts them into a fragile position
because the political system, the structures,
they’re not for the kind of cultural immigration that the young people are striving for.
So I think that kind of struggle continues on both fronts.
- It does.