Can the other Speak? A representation of Otherness in Elif Shafak's Bastard of Istanbul

Abstract

Being a third world woman, Gayatri Spivak has embodied her idea about the marginalized, the others, or the outliers, in a way that caught the attention of both supporters and opponents. She seeks self-realization such as empowering women in their society and establishing identity for outsiders and ethnic minorities, in addition to liberation from patriarchal restrictions in most societies. Identity has gotten more complex and convoluted because of modernism in this late epoch. This phenomenon occurs because the complexity and insecurity of identity are commonly considered to be permeated by the huge changes in human life's social condition As a result, the quick flux of identity might be seen as endangering the stability of identity itself, especially in the age of contemporary technology, migration, urbanization, and globalization in which people today live. Identity and its relationship to social recall in heterogeneous culture is the central topic of The Bastard of Istanbul which depicts how Turkey has forgotten the societal memory of the Armenian Genocide, which is seen as a backdrop to Turkey's violent past, by showing people with contradictory identities as Turks and Armenian Americans who continue to deny on one hand, and on the other, they are looking for their affiliation. The goal of this study is to illustrate how to treat the forcibly displaced as they are outsiders according to their country and as they are others according to the countries they inhabit, depicting their lost between their roots and origins and the second identity they hold.