Rohitha Naraharisetty reviews Elif Shafak's newest book, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World.
It is not often that a sex worker’s experience is legible as anything other
than a monetised sum of body parts. What it means to sell sex. What it says
about the person selling it. The images and words that these narratives conjure
are paternalistic at best, and violently misogynistic at worst. The most well
intentioned of artists, academics and commentators explore the idea of sex work
as sex and not as labour. Few attempt to locate it within intersecting
structures of gender, capitalism and the forms of wage labour they produce.
Eli Shafak’s 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange
World is anything but. Its protagonist, ‘Tequila’
Leila is a sex worker, but her
story is not about the nature of sex work and has sparse references to the
details of the trade. She exists in the liminal space between defiance and
shame. The book definitively avoids the narrative of the sex worker as viewed
through the lens of morbid fascination with marginality, held in place through
the moral economy of shame that both advocates and detractors of sex work
inadvertently participate in. It is at once humanising, tender, angry, violent,
full of despair and full of hope.
The work comes as a deeply urgent
intervention into the discourse on the sex worker as an exploited figure
lacking in agency or dignity. We learn in the very beginning that Leila is
dying in a dumpster in a desolate spot in Istanbul. Her brain remains active
for ten minutes and thirty eight seconds, with each minute unearthing a memory
that is triggered by associations with smells, sounds, and tastes. What follows
is a deeply empathetic and humane unravelling of her existence and its
definitive events as defined by Leila herself.
It seldom indulges in gratuitous
or voyeuristic depictions of her work, and instead constructs her world with
fragments of her entire life and everything it entails. The novel follows Leila
from her childhood in Van, to her journey to Istanbul where she lives in
precarity and amid chaos. Istanbul is described as a messy, violent, heady city
on the cusp of democracy, flitting uneasily between its modernity project on
the one hand and on the other, its ruthless evisceration of those who do not
fit state sanctioned notions of the ideal citizen. In this vast jumble of
incongruities, Leila finds her family and is at home here, having been
acquainted with violence far before she arrived in the dangerous world of
Istanbul.
Violence is located as dispersed and is not
individualized; much of it takes place around Leila by way of NATO
interventions, student revolts, brutal state repression, and other consequences
of geopolitical machinations. In the midst of chaotic events taking place
around her, Leila is arguably insulated until she becomes involved with someone
acquainted with it intimately. The world rushes onward, and Istanbul especially
is spatially and figuratively searching for itself in the global landscape,
being poised as it is between continents and ideologies. The most defining and
shattering kind of violence Leila has been subjected to, therefore, is not
anything she has encountered in her profession as a sex worker. This is significant,
as debates on sex work as a profession often take place among people who are
far removed from the lived experiences that are needed to have such
conversations, and almost always echo the language of moral panic and pity.
Molly Smith and Juno Mac, both of whom are sex workers themselves, discuss the
various articulations of these debates in Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight
for Sex Workers’ Rights. They argue that what anti-prostitution and pro-decriminalisation
advocates get wrong is that sex work, like any kind of waged work, cannot be
neatly contained in categories of ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
They ask whether sex is good or bad, and whether work is good or bad, and
contextualise the discourse within these framings to make a point about how
dignity and the question of rights gets lost in the noise. They point towards
how the language of empowerment and exploitation serves specific projects that
are meant to either defend sex work or decry it.
The plurality of experiences within sex
work that they describe are captured in Shafak’s novel, through the characters of Leila,
Jameela, ‘Nostalgia’ Nalan, and ‘Hollywood’ Humeira. These are characters with vastly differing experiences
preceding and defining their entry into sex work: ranging from trafficking,
domestic violence, social ostracisation, and sexual abuse. The most
marginalised people are the ones occupying the trade, and the novel does
justice to Smith’s and Mac’s plea that the conditions leading to marginality require introspection
and overhauling, rather than demonising or celebrating the trade. Sex work,
they argue, must be defined and seen as work, and sex workers seen as more than
just their bodies as working apparatuses.
They ask that the very idea of work
be deconstructed, and point out that much like every form of work, sex work can
neither be good or bad, or it can be either good or bad, for the person
performing this labour. This is exactly what the novel does, in serving as a
damning condemnation of the norms and structures responsible for marginalising
people in the first place and leaving its characters to judge their experiences
of their work for themselves. It reorients the moralistic gaze on sex work onto
society itself, and infuses its characters with humanity and agency, making
them more than their professions and telling us the story of their lives and
complexities as a whole. These are people who do not need rescuing;
instead, our rightful engagement with them should be to listen to the stories
they have to tell.
