When Elif Shafak’s mother married, she dropped out of university to focus on being a wife. Later, she got divorced and returned to university to finish her studies, leaving her daughter temporarily in the care of her mother. After passing her exams, she thanked her mother for helping to raise Elif. “Don’t thank me,” came the reply. “You focus on improving your daughter’s life. We inherit our circumstances, we improve them for the next generation. Now you need to make sure your daughter has more than you had.”

Through stories we start to imagine lives beyond the one we are living, we recognize the complexity and richness of identities and the damage we to ourselves and to others when we seek to reduce them into a singe defining characteristic.” Two of the most intriguing walk-on characters in Elif Shafak’s How to Stay Sane are the little Egyptian girl named “Facebook” by her parents in that brief, optimistic phase of the Arab spring – and another baby given the name “Like” in Israel just a few months later. They are poignant reminders of another age in which social media looked set to deliver a new and better world. It is hard not to wonder, as Shafak does, what has become of this pair. “Do they view the buoyancy that presided when they were born as a relic of the past … ?” Or to put it more simply, “what on earth have they done with their names?” Discarded them at the earliest opportunity would be my guess – whether because of the misplaced optimism with which their parents had branded them, or simple embarrassment in the playground.Sinds ik Elif Shafak hoorde spreken op het Festival van de Gelijkheid in Gent (2019), ben ik fan van deze auteur. Niet alleen schrijft ze prachtige boeken - 10 minuten 38 seconden in deze vreemde wereld vond ik fantastisch - ook is ze een bevlogen sociaal-maatschappelijke schrijver die ijvert voor een betere wereld. How to stay sane in an age of division is het eerste non-fictie boek dat ik van Shafak las. A better title for this book would be, "How to Reiterate Ideas We're All Likely to Agree With for Fun and Profit". (The one in English is, "How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division".)

Her writing is emotional and hope filled in a way we are not so accustomed anymore; how many people do we still know who can convincingly (and without irony) plead for the value of liberal democracy? u doba u kojem je previše informacija, manje znanja i još manje mudrosti... Znanje zahtijeva čitanje. Knjige. Dubinske analize. Istraživačko novinarstvo. Zamislite načas: svijet bez knjiga, bez pripovijedanju, svijet bez empatije bio bi mnogo podjeljenije i samotnije mjesto za život. " It is not, of course, quite so simple. If (to reverse the logic of her argument) having the privilege of being able to tell your own story were a sufficient qualification for being a good listener and nuanced debater, then many of those on the current Tory frontbench should be some of the best listeners we have. They are not. And historians may bridle at her sweeping claims about “power and wealth” now being “increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few”, or about the “growing number of citizens” who feel excluded. Try telling that to a 17th-century slave or peasant: for all its faults, the culture of the last hundred years has spread power more widely than almost ever before.Naar aanleiding van de coronacrisis schreef de Turkse activiste dit zeer persoonlijke essay. De hoofdvraag lijkt te zijn: Als dit allemaal voorbij is, hoe wil je dat de wereld er dan uitziet?