I deem Elif Shafak’s novel Ten Minutes and Thirty-Eight Seconds in This Strange World, in which she tells the story of a prostitute named Leyla, nicknamed Tequila, worthy of being referred to as a moral compass. This feeling was present in my heart as I read the novel to the end. It made me feel this way right after Leyla escaped to Istanbul.
When first heard and spoken, the phrases “moral compass” and “story of a prostitute” sound very contradictory, don’t they? To tell the truth, the colloquial language, which creates this perception of difference, whispers, and without making it too obvious, gives a secret about the general moral understanding of society. That’s why I say this book is a moral compass because there is a chaos of concepts during the time when Leyla lived. Unfortunately, this chaos of concepts remains today too.
This situation can also be understood when we look at how society treats sex workers and similar vulnerable groups. Those who despise Leyla don’t detest the man who threw a sulfuric acid bottle at Leyla as much as they detest a prostitute. While even her family does not listen to why Leyla fell into that brothel, society spontaneously offers justifications for someone who harms people. So, is sex work more immoral than inflicting irreversible harm on someone?
Ultimately, the antagonist can walk around in a way that threatens these groups of people – so much so that he is free enough to go to the same room with Leyla. They call him “insane” and attribute his actions to his insanity, but the people of that society do not show such tolerance even to Leyla’s brother Tarkan. To hide the Tarkan from judgmental eyes, his family locks him in four walls whenever a visitor comes to the house. The society that gives freedom to the man who acts as an aggressor can find a baby with Down Syndrome strange. They don’t attribute his appearance to Down Syndrome. After all, the farthest land that Tarkan baby has seen in his short life is the garden. They limit baby Tarkan’s horizons to the garden gate. The same society frees those who stole Leyla’s souvenir bracelet. Moreover, this society never restrains those who fooled Leyla and exposed her to a dark life.
Here is a society that equates an aggressor to an insane person. The same society hates Leyla by calling her a “whore” and pushes away those who are different, finding them embarrassing. They don’t even hold accountable those who killed and trashed Leyla because she is a prostitute.
In this novel, Elif Şafak strikingly reflects on why there is confusion about the morality of society. When you read this story it is necessary to think for a long time about a moral understanding, which is the reason why I call this novel the moral compass.
They first put the immorality on a sex worker’s shoulder and then hide it between her legs. They ruthlessly put the blame on this poor woman for the wrongdoings that have infiltrated tradition, culture, and everyday life.
While reading this novel, my eyes got filled with tears in many parts. Sometimes I even shed tears. Especially with the part of Leyla’s story that takes place in her childhood, she gives the reader a chance to empathize, at least in order to feel Leyla’s experiences about her poor, blameless, and innocent life. And most importantly, Elif Shafak knows how to awaken the feeling of compassion in the human heart.
The original title of the book is Ten Minutes and Thirty-Eight Seconds in This Strange World. Indeed, the world has been strange lately. People are generally angry and anxious. In the fire of anger, sensitive and fragile feelings like compassion began to melt. Because of this, people who are unsympathetic, devoid of empathy, aggressive, and full of vengeance and revenge have sprung up everywhere. Everyone started to waste so much time defending and protecting themselves from these that they forgot those who really need protection, special attention, and understanding.
This is how the world is today. When one travels to the past with a historical novel, one realizes that the integrity of humanity has deteriorated considerably. People have crushed and killed the poor for their needs and interests and sometimes even their greed. Didn’t they find Leyla desperate from the very beginning and set their sights on marketing her? Didn’t they sell her for a little more profit?
People have become blind to intolerance. Incredible stereotypes and unacceptable traditions and impositions are internalized. By insulting Leyla as a whore, many consider her worthy of death in the garbage. But no one asks, “Leyla, why did this happen to you? When people ask, they will find out who is immoral.
Here, Elif Şafak holds a mirror that reflects the truth with crystal clear clarity.
There were so many episodes that made me cry. I cried at first when baby Tarkan’s short life, confined to a garden wall just because he had down syndrome, was over. That baby left this world in all its innocence, without the slightest taste of pleasure or joy. A baby paid that price just because he was different. His short life was spent hiding from others. When the sharp and limitless tongues and unauthorized judgments of others frightened them, their family found a solution not to show Tarkan to anyone. Whoever came, they hid him.
In that small and strange world where cruelty, ignorance, arrogance, and unauthorized judgment are cherished, only Leyla did not accept this strange behavior. She accumulated the pain inside. She never learned what love means. When the baby Tarkan died, she couldn’t stand the normalization of the anomalies of life, and one day she left her home.
The fact that the novel was so poignant was enough for me to put it in a special place in my heart. There is also the aspect of being a moral compass, as I mentioned at the beginning, and at the same time an honest mirror. These are more effective than the novel’s poignancy. Worlds that reach people’s perceptions such as literature and media are already full of mirrors. But how many of them reflect a real Turkey? Some present the real image in a blurred way to human perception. Some lie to everyone, like the mirror of Snow White’s stepmother.
But with this novel, Elif Shafak immediately told the truth to her readers with her rich vocabulary and her talent beyond the limits:
Leyla was innocent.
Leyla needed to be freed from the burden of shame and guilt placed on her shoulders as a child. But it didn’t happen.
And they heartlessly dumped her body in the trash.
And I cried one evening at the fate of a fictional character. Because I knew that this fiction could be a chilling truth in one of those side streets that we were afraid to enter.
Image sourced via the publisher and is intended as fair use.
Ten Minutes Thirty-Eight Seconds in This Strange World was published by Doğan Kitap.
