Nostalgia Nalan: A Fascinating Transgender Character Of Elif Shafak

It often happens in literature that we start living with the characters we read, those characters that are pure imagination of writers, even if we sometimes forget the stories but there are few characters that always live inside us and leave ever-lasting impacts. Characters like Hamlet, Oedipus, Achilles, Romeo and Juliet, Sherlock Holmes or Harry Potter are best examples of that. Likewise I have come across one such character while reading Turkish novelist Elif Shafak's latest novel "10 Minutes 38 Seconds In This Strange World", published in 2019.

Most often we mainly find three types of characters in stories:

(a) Protagonist: The lead character, a hero or the heroine of the story who tries to over come some sort of hurdle, one of the main characters in the story.

(b) Antagonist: the villain, who tries to create hurdles in protagonist life, a negative character trying to make hell of hero's life, and

(c) Supporting Character: Such character (s) could be friends, family, enemy of both protagonist or the antagonist, these characters bring soul to the story and take it to a different level.

                                   Elif Shafak: 

The Independent has attributed Elif with these words: "one of the most important writers at work today."

While Sunday Times writes about her that: "Shafak is passionately interested in dissolving barries, whether of race, nationality, culture, gender, geography or a more mystical kind."

Ms. Shafak is at present the most widely read Turkish female novelist, she has written 17 books both fiction and non-fiction including: The Bastard of Istanbul, The Flea Palace, Forty Rules of Love, Three Daughters of Eve, The Architect's Apprentice, Black Milk, Honor, and recently her new novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this strange world has been published.

She has received many international awards and her books have been translated into as many as fifty languages of the world. Ms. Shafak holds a Ph.D degree in Political Science and has taught in numerous universities of Turkey, United States of America and United Kingdom, while she is political and rights' activist. She twice gave speeches at an internationally recognized platform TED and both times got standing ovation. Two years ago she was chosen to be one among twelve people who would make the world a better place.

                10 Minutes 38 Seconds In This Strange World:

A sex worker named Tequila Leila born to a poor family of Van, is strangled to death on the street of Istanbul though her heart beat stops but her mind continues to for approximately ten minutes, precisely ten minutes and thirty-eight seconds, in which she recalls her entire life , the people she met, the family she loved and the friends with whom she used to live. Each minute brings a new memory in her mind till it stops working.

 For example the first memory she'd was of salt, as mentioned on Pg no: 11:

"Time became fluid, a fast flow of recollections seeping into one another, the past and the present inseparable.
  The first memory that came to her mind was about salt-- the feel of it on her skin and the taste of it on her tongue."

In this novel Shafak has beautifully described the city of Istanbul as well, calling it an illusion, a magician's trick gone wrong, a dream that only existed in minds of hashish eaters. In truth, there was no Istanbul, she writes. That's what I think about Karachi. this novel is published by Viking: an imprint of Penguin Books in 2019 and the story is spread over 300 pages. This novel has been long-listed for the Man-Booker Prize 2019.

                 Why People Opt To Become Transgender:

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) defines this term as the word “transgender” – or trans – is an umbrella term for people whose gender identity is different from the sex assigned to us at birth. Although the word “transgender” and our modern definition of it only came into use in the late 20th century, people who would fit under this definition have existed in every culture throughout recorded history.

HRC claims that according to a 2016 survey by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, commissioned by the Human Rights Campaign, 35 percent of likely voters in the United States “personally know or work with someone who is transgender.” That's more than double the 17 percent who answered yes when asked the same question in 2014.

Other research suggests that there are at least 700,000 transgender people in the United States, about 0.3 percent of the total population and about 3.5 percent of the LGBTQ community; but these estimates are likely conservative because of the limited amount of studies that have attempted to measure the transgender population.

The transgender community in countries like Pakistan, Turkey, Iran and others face problems such as no legal protection, poverty and unemployment, harassment and stigma, health care issues, don't get identity documents and violence.

According to online information the most studied factors are biological. Certain brain structures in trans women have been found to be similar to cisgender women's as opposed to cis men's, and trans men's have been found to be similar to cis men's, even controlling for hormone use, which can also cause trans people's brains to become closer to those of cis people of the same gender. However, these studies are limited as they include a small number of tested individuals. Brain structure differences have also been part of extensive research on biology and sexual orientation. Studies have also found that both androphilic and gynephilic trans women's brain function and responses are like cis women's and unlike cis men's, or are intermediate between the two. Environmental factors have also been proposed.

Ray Blanchard has developed a taxonomy of male-to-female transsexualism built upon the work of his colleague Kurt Freund, which assumes that trans women have one of two motivations for transition. Blanchard theorizes that "homosexual transsexuals" transition because they are attracted to men, and characterizes them as displaying overt and obvious femininity since childhood; he then characterizes "non-homosexual transsexuals" as transitioning because they are autogynephilic (sexually aroused by the thought or image of themselves as a woman), and as being either attracted to women, attracted to both women and men, or asexual. (Wikipedia.com)

             Nostalgia Nalan: The Transgender:

Being a female in male dominating and religiously inflamed societies like Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and others might be a sin but being a transgender in such societies is a curse. Everyday you would find a transgender murdered during party or abused.

In Shafak's this novel Nalan falls in the third category of characters that is supporting character. Nostalgia Nalan is one of the five friends of Leila, the other four happen to be Sabotage Sinan, Jameelah Zayanb122 and Hollywood Humeyra.

Though each character in the story has different background and role to play but the character that I was most fascinated with was of Nostalgia Nalan, a transgender and an atheist in Turkey.

One night suddenly the Istanbul police conducts raid on nightclubs, bars and off-licences, Leila finds herself in a cell with tall and well-built woman named Nalan. She lives in dank basement flat near Taksim Square, sharing the flat with four other trans-woman, being a homesick she adds Nostalgia to her name, she happens to be the bravest among all friends.

In real Nalan belonged to a farming family of Anatolia, born as a male, the youngest son named Osman, from early days in his childhood Osman thinks himself of being a female, as his siblings would go to sleep, he would sit beside the lamp forming dancing shadows on the opposite walls, always pretending to be the main character in his stories and every time the main character would be female like a Persian poetess, Chinese princess or Russian empress. Shafak writes that in his mind he was always a girl. As his friends at school come to know that he paints his toes, they start taunting him of being sissy pants. On the night of his wedding he runs away from his house an catches train to Istanbul, he knows that this not the city for him but he also knows this is the only city where he could live his dream, he gets job of cleaning toilets at a railway station. 

On page no: 238, Ms. Shafak beautifully depicts the life of a transgender and hardships she faces in Turk society, she writes:

"The only professions open to trans women were hairdressing and the sex industry. And there were too many hairdressers in Istanbul already, with a salon seemingly down in every alleyway and in every basement. Trans women were not allowed in licensed brothels either. Otherwise the customers felt cheated and complained. Eventually, like many others before and after her, she began working on the streets. It was dark, exhausting and dangerous; every car that stopped for her left an imprint on her desensitized soul, like tyres on the desert sand. With an invisible blade, she divided herself into two Nalans. One of them watched passively over the other, observed every detail and thought a lot, while the second Nalan did everything she was supposed to do and thought absolutely nothing. Insulted by passers-by, arbitrarily arrested by police, abused by clients, she suffered one humiliation after another. Most of the men who picked up trans women were of particular kind, lurching unpredictably between desire and contempt. Nalan had been in the business long enough to know that the two emotions, unlike oil and water, mixed easily. Those who loathed you, would unexpectedly, reveal an urgent lust, and those who seemed to like you could turn spiteful and violent as soon as they got what they wanted."

  Furthermore, she amazingly describes the way Turk police behave and treat such trans women, I was petrified while reading it, thus describes Shafak that situation on page no: 239:

"Each time there was a state occasion or a major international conference in Istanbul, as black cars carrying foreign delegates wove their way through the traffic from the airport to the five-star hotels scattered across the city, some police chief would decide to clean up the streets on their routes. On such occasions, all transvestites would be taken into custody overnight, swept away like so much litter. Once, after one of these clean-up operations, Nalan was kept in a detention centre where her hair was shaved in random patches and her clothes stripped. They had made her wait in a cell, naked and alone, every half hour or so coming to check how she was doing and to throw another bucket of dirty water over her head."

The fascinating thing about this character is the boldness and the way she thinks, for example she thinks that there are two kinds of families one the blood family and other the water family, relatives formed the blood family while friends formed the water family. From childhood she seems unable to tolerate people being treated unfairly or cruelly. she seems upset on her friend's murder but it is something else that is slicing her heart, let's read Shafak's words: 

"What deepened Nalan's sense of helpness was not only Leila's sudden death, or the brutal and horrific way it had happened, but the absolute lack of justice in everything. Life was unfair, and now she realized death was even more so."

In recent past I have come across with two other transgender characters one in Haruki Murakami's novel "Kafka On The Shore" and other in Arundhati Roy's novel "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness," but one thing is sure Shafak's Nostalgia Nalan would remain with me for a longer time then the other two transgender characters.