Edible Wounds, Embodied Histories: The Aftertaste of Ancestry in The Bastard of Istanbul

Abstract

This paper explores how the female body, food practices, and trauma are entangled in Elif Shafak’s novel The Bastard of Istanbul. It claims that the female body is a battleground and an archive where individual pain and history are stored, transmitted, and contested by female characters in the novel. In the home, the culinary labour, recipes, and communal meals are a narrative language where women control silence, sorrow, and inherited traumas. Shafak shows how the food is not just an ornamentation of culture. It is a form of memory, an affectual technology, which transforms the unspeakable into the sensual, into taste, smell, appetite, and disgust. Reading the scenes of cooking, eating, and bodily response and the depictions of gendered shame, family secret, and intergenerational violence, this study demonstrates how the trauma can be made palpable on and through the bodies of women. The discussion also demonstrates how food routines in everyday life may offer precarious repairing practices, which allow women to bargain their place among disjointed lineages and disputed histories. This article has shown through close textual reading that Shafak uses food and culinary space as a gendered location of witnessing, in which embodied experience is filled with the burden of historical discontinuity, and in which women’s everyday practices can be both the reproduction and resistance of patriarchal and nationalist discourses.