Abstract

This article employs Ibtissam Bouachrine’s feminist perspective to explore Elif Shafak’s stand on the notion of amnesia and identity in Three Daughters of Eve (2016). It focuses on Shafak’s sensitivity toward the concept of multiculturalism and using it as an “Ottoman Utopian” concept to tackle the modernization with its nationalist sensitivities that, she believes, is drying multidimensional notion of identity in Turkish cultural context. Based on this focus, this article argues that Shafak’s literary creation, though not immune to the Orientalism refuted by Bouachrine as androcentric, provides a practical frame or model for addressing sociocultural conflicts in Turkish society as a Muslim one. It claims that, despite her Western secular stand, Shafak is aware of the importance and advocates the preservation of traditional, Eastern, spiritual heritage for social growth in Turkish context, and her TDE beautifully depicts this. She achieves this through employing tolerant Ottoman multiculturalism and Islamic Sufi tradition inherent in Turkish history. This article investigates the success of this employment in challenging identity crisis in the novel from feminist view point. Doing so, the article focuses on time and geographical shifts between present and past and Oxford and Istanbul in TDE and explains how Shafak struggles to represent a constructive overlapping of past and present and the West and the East in offering a unified concept of identity in Turkish context. Comparing Bouachrin’e feminist approach with that of Shafak, this article concludes that opposed to Bouachrine, Elif Shafak does not give priority to Western tradition before Islamic one.