Djinn as the “Embodiment of Knowledge”

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul as a “site of memory” deals with the Armenian Genocide and the transition of the Ottoman Empire into the Republic of Turkey. The historical transition not only changed the region’s cartography but also changed the mnemonic culture of the newly formed Turkish nation. This article explores how Shafak’s historiographic metafiction reimagines the Armenian Genocide and questions the discourse of denial surrounding the historical event. It rummages through the “blank pages” of Turkish historiography and, interestingly, establishes how Shafak fills these gaps through the voices of her female characters, who have been burdened with the nightmares of unreconciled history. This article explores how Shafak’s text represents an alternative perspective on the Armenian Genocide, narrated through the eyes of a djinn, a supernatural creature that lies at the center of Middle Eastern folklore. It further analyzes the notion of deliberate forgetting and how it facilitated the repression of Ottoman Armenians’ (his)tories and memories of the genocide as represented in the text.