Honour Bound

~ Honor, by Elif Shafak ~

This is neither here nor there perhaps, but the 2012 Viking (hard backed) edition of this novel spells its title as “Honor” while within the pages of the novel, the word is always spelt with the British u, as “honour”. A strange discrepancy.

Whichever it is, Honor or Honour, this book is actually less about honour than about family relationships, and loves of different textures. In this novel about a Kurdish family who immigrate (some of them) to London, the way each member of the family is loved and loves in turn, impacts tremendously on their personalities and lives.

Pembe and Jamila are at the protagonists of this novel, twin girls born to their embittered mother, Naze, the 7th and 8th of 8 daughters. She tries to name them Bext and Bese (in Kurdish, Kader and Yeter in Turkish, Destiny and Enough) in order to send a message to the Almighty that the next time He owes her a son. Fearing the wrath of the Almighty, her husband Berzo renames them Pembe and Jamila, Pink and Beautiful, and they sometimes join their names up to make Pembe Kader and Jamila Yeter, Pink Destiny and Enough Beauty.

There is no doubt but that their little village in Turkey (“near the River Euphrates”) holds to strict gender roles and therefore strict rules of modesty and chastity for women. Pembe and Jamila’s eldest sister who elopes and returns is told by her father than for once, he is glad he has no son, because if he had, he’d have to tell his son to kill his eldest sister and then see his son suffer for the crime. Such is the code of Hono(u)r in this community.

Young Adem, still technically a teenager, comes to this village almost by chance, falls in love with one twin and marries the other. They have a son and daughter, Iskendar and Esma, move to Hackney, London, and then have one more son, Yusuf. Iskendar is the ‘sultan’ and ‘lion’ and apple of his mother’s eye; Esma is the rebel, and Yusuf, the philosopher and lover. And as for the twin who was not married, Jamila stays in her pocket of the world, becoming the Virgin Midwife, a healer who experiments with herbs and potions.

When Adem falls in love with another woman and leaves his family, Pembe slowly puts herself back together again, and in the process, finds love herself with a Greek chef. Once Pembe’s ‘crime’ is known to the community, Iskendar turns murderous. It is unclear where he has imbibed this notion from, but it seems to be a cultural notion which has seeped into his very being. The passages from Iskander’s POV are written from Shrewsbury prison where he is incarcerated for 14 years. This is not a thriller as such, not a whodunnit, and so there is no mystery to his being arrested and convicted. But there is a twist in the plot nevertheless.

Shafak is a charming storyteller, the plot running like a river, with interesting little eddies and swirls. Most of the characters have background stories and further side characters, also with their own thumbnail sketched backgrounds stories. She paints the picture of how the Turkish-Kurdish community hold onto their own culture in London, how the immigrants almost seem to bob like corks in the current of the mainstream British society. Shafak is a little bit of a tease, imparting her story piece by piece to the reader, not exactly misleading, but only revealing the full portrait one small section at the time. In this way, she successfully builds suspense, her narrative often told back to front, almost as if characters make sense of their lives by living them then re-examining them, a back to front viewing of events and discovery of reasons. 

Honor, by Elif Shafak. Viking, 2012