Strasbourg, Ankara, Madrid: none felt like home, but in books I discovered my people | Elif Shafak
As a child I moved from France to Turkey to Spain – then I finally found roots and belonging in stories
Where is home? The question has always intrigued and puzzled me, ever since I was a child. I was born in Strasbourg, France. Of those early years I do not remember much. Fragments of memories, like ribbons attached to a kite, drifting in the air, caught between the pull of a place and the possibility of an elsewhere.
There was a small flat, that much I know. In a high-rise building in a banlieue on the outskirts of the city. University students of multiple nationalities would cook together and hang around – Turkish, Kurdish, Lebanese, Algerian, Egyptian, Tunisian, Albanian, Greek – the smell of strong coffee, cardamom and roasted chickpeas; red wine in tea glasses, the scent of Gauloises.
Elif Shafak is a novelist and political scientist
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