The Accidental Anthologist: Reluctant expat from Berkeley writer finds her feminist voice in Istanbul with a literary harem

Thursday 02 September 2010

The Accidental Anthologist: Reluctant expat from Berkeley writer finds her feminist voice in Istanbul with a literary harem

* This article was submitted by Anastasia Ashman, Expat Harem Productions - www.expatharem.com

Turkey often makes the news for suppressing its authors. Ironically, as an American expatriate in Istanbul I found my feminist voice - and stumbled into editing a surprise international bestseller, creating a literary harem of my expat peers.

When my Turkish husband and I arrived from New York City in 2003 I planned to isolate myself with a self-involved travel memoir. No long days spent in language labs, trying to find my footing. Istanbul life would be all about me, an extended writing retreat. This vision had been percolating since I'd last been an expat.

Five years I spent rotting away in the Malaysian tropics like a less-prolific and sober Somerset Maugham. The first thing to decay in the equatorial heat was my personality - the core of my writing voice. When I told people I was a writer they'd reply, Horses? I was also mistaken for a very different Western woman in Asia, like when a crew of Indonesian laborers working at my home wondered when I was going to drink beer and take off my shirt.

Instead, whooping cough silenced me, and my ego. In the 6 months-long hush, Turkey suggested an empowering new metaphor for my expatriatism -- and my writing: The Expat Harem. This contemporary gathering of foreign women could be a repository of knowledge and power just as it was in the 15th century days of the Ottoman sultans.

Embedded here, we're destined to be alien - I brainstormed in an email to my coeditor fellow American Jennifer Gokmen.

But that's okay - the Expat Harem is a place of female power, she shot back, linking us to an Eastern feminist continuum little known in the Western world.

"Yes! Ethnocentric prison or refuge of peers - sometimes it's hard to tell which way the door is swinging!" I replied, giddy with our anachronistic metaphor.

Like a secret password, news spread as we called for submissions. Fascinating women from fourteen nations poured their stories into our in-box. Many had never before been published and all were minority voices in a Muslim country with a reputation for censorship. Alternate realities flooded over me, representing a depth of involvement with the country I couldn't imagine myself embracing. But it didn't matter. If my previous expatriate adventures made me reluctant, the Expat Harem turned my personal truculence into a benefit: I could give others a stage. Their struggles to assimilate also nudged me to forgive my own resistance.

The award-winning collection Tales from the Expat Harem laid foundations for a richer life and a more insightful next book. The joys of working with writers all over globe from my home office on the Bosphorus clarified contradicting aspects of my character - like how I can be both a prickly introvert and a woman who craves connection with people and the planet.

It seems Turkey not only connected me to a worldwide band of my peers, it raised my voice in the cultural conversation. It's also brought me into contact with women writers I admire, like the celebrated Turkish novelist Elif Shafak, who wrote the foreword to the two Turkish editions of my book. Now my literary career and conflicted mindset about life abroad have a promising new cultural context. ... more