Cages on Opposite Shores

By Janset Berkok Shami

Book Overview

Set in Istanbul, this novel tells the story of Meral, a modern-day Turkish woman searching for identity and renewal after leaving her husband of 11 years and realizing for the first time her... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1566561655
• ISBN13: 9781566561655
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Interlink Publishing Group
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.6" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Skillful fusion of ethical and aesthetic principles

Cages on Opposite Shores By Janset Berkok ShamiThere are many kinds of "cages" in Janset Berkok Shami's novel. Some of them are whole houses, or simply rooms--spaces which can be prisons, cozy retreats or cordial meeting places, depending on the occupants' state of mind. Other "cages" are the social or ethnic compartments into which society divides its members, often with tragic consequences. Still others--those which seem to concern the author most--are the psychological barriers which human beings erect around themselves out of selfishness or out of pain, shame and desperation.Born in Turkey of Circassian descent, Janset Berkok Shami is a long-time resident of Jordan. During the 90's, she has published over 20 short stories in American and other literary journals, most of them about Jordanians, Circassians and Palestinians. However, for Cages on Opposite Shores, her first novel, she chose to return to her native Istanbul, though not to her Circassian roots. Instead, the historical past, which impinges on the novel's present, is the massacre and expulsion of Armenians which took place in Turkey during World War I.Meral, the main character, is a modern woman in transition--in the process of getting divorced, coming to terms with the death of her mother who had always kept her at a distance, and feeling alternately attached and detached from her friends. Meral "did not miss her old life. But something stopped her from moving into her future. She was not given a key to her future, because she did not have the key of her past" (p.62). Caged in an indeterminate present, Meral discovers her mother's diaries which reveal her grandmother's Armenian identity, and how her grandmother's suffering had affected her mother's upbringing and, inversely, her own. Knowledge, however, is not enough. Meral has to reach out to others with her newly found understanding.Today, in the West, finding one's roots and "identity politics" are fashionable, but Shami gives deeper meaning to these concepts than simply celebrating difference. The roots she traces are first and foremost emotional--feelings that can be experienced by any human being rather than being the exclusive property of one ethnic group. Although it is not mentioned, the story can be understood as a statement on the tragic consequences of the conflict that persists in Turkey with the Kurds, and among national or ethnic groups in the former socialist countries.The real achievement of this novel is its skillful fusion of ethical and aesthetic principles, of past and present and of the physical and emotional worlds in which the characters moved. At times, Shami's prose approximates the simultaneous lightness and depth found in poetry. Her ability to create powerful images, with few words, is also reminiscent of poetry. Istanbul, divided by the Straits of Bosphorus into a European and Asian part, embodies the separations enforced on the lives of many of th