Black Milk

by Elif Shafak

  Blue Belle Bovary pauses in case I have anything to add, and when she sees that I don’t, she goes on, just as fervently.

  “As for you, I am sorry to say you don’t fulfill any of these conditions. Seriously, darling, you are in some kind of a fix. You never write openly about the body. Of course, I am the one who bears the brunt. My entire existence is censored!”

  She could have a point. But there is something she doesn’t recognize. It’s not only me or us female writers who as a matter of self-protection shy away from the depiction of graphic sexuality in our books. The same goes for female academics, female reporters, female politicians and those women who tread into the business world. We all are a little desexualized, a little defeminized. We can’t carry our bodies comfortably in a society that is so bent against women. In order to be a “brain” in the public realm, we control our “bodies.”

  I remember Halide Edip Adivar-Ottoman Turkish feminist, political activist and novelist, the diva of Turkish literature. Though she passionately believed in gender equality and worked to improve women’s lives, Adivar often reiterated the good-woman/bad-woman dichotomy in her novels and desexualized the former. Her female characters were intelligent, strong-willed and so modest they did not undress even in front of their husbands. Rabia-the leading protagonist in her novel The Clown and His Daughter-changed into her nightgown inside the closet, and then came to bed where her husband awaited her.

  In traditional Muslim society, where Rabia serves as an ideal woman, women can meet our bodies only inside closets or behind closed doors. The same impulse is reflected in our storytelling. More often than we care to admit, we women writers, especially those of us from non-Western backgrounds, are uncomfortable about writing on sexuality.

  Could I ever be like Blue Belle Bovary? Could I wear ostentatious lipstick, teeny-tiny skirts and low-cut necklines like she does? Could I flip my hair as if I were in a shampoo commercial? Probably not. Two steps forward, and one of my heels would surely get stuck in a crack and break. I would never make it.

  “Have you ever tried being sexy, darling?” she asks, as if she has read my thoughts.

  It is a provocative question, when you come to think of it.

  That same evening I ask Eyup to meet me for dinner at an elegant fish restaurant by the Bosphorus. I have never been there before, but it was highly recommended by a friend who called the place “as chic as Kate Moss.”

  Eyup goes there at seven P.M. and starts to wait for me. Actually, I, too, am at the restaurant, except I am hiding in the bathroom, trying to muster the courage to walk out.

  How did I end up here, in hiding? I went to a hairdresser this afternoon and had my hair dyed, my nails manicured and my eyebrows plucked. It was fun for the first ten minutes, but then I got so bored I could have run out with a towel on my head and my hands dripping soapy water. There are very few things to read at a salon, only hairstyle magazines that contain hundreds of photos but roughly only twenty words.

  Yet I made it. And here I am, my hair nicely shaped, my face shining under layers of makeup, and though I did not dare to wear the crimson dress Blue Belle Bovary was wearing, I managed to get into a tight, long gown-black, of course-with a feather boa.

  Thirty-five minutes later I walk out of the ladies’ room, not because I am ready but because there is an increasing number of women coming in and going out of the restroom, all of whom stop and eye me with a curiosity they don’t bother to hide. So I leave my shelter and, trying not to trip on the hem of my dress or break my four-inch heels, ask the waiter to take me to the table where Eyup is waiting patiently, having eaten three rolls of bread and half of the butter.

  Under the inquiring eyes of the customers, the waiter and I cross the restaurant from one end to the other, he marching steadily, me hobbling behind, totally out of sync but with the same unnaturally serious expression carved on our faces.

  Eyup looks up and sees me coming. His eyes pop open, his jaw slightly drops as if he has just witnessed wizardry.

  “I warn you, my self-confidence is pretty low now, so please don’t say anything bad,” I say as soon as I sit.

  “I wasn’t going to-” he says, suppressing a smile.

  I feel the need to explain a little bit. “I am trying to resolve my internal conflicts, you know. I need to bury the hatchet and sign a cease-fire with my body.”

  He bites his bottom lip but can’t help it, a chuckle escapes. “Is that why you are dressed up like this?”

  That is when it occurs to me to look at the other customers more carefully. Though it is an elegant restaurant to be sure, posh and pricey, it is clear to me and everyone else that I am overdressed. I look like a wannabe actress who lost her way on the red carpet.

  “Maybe I should ask for a shawl or-” I mumble, desperately needing something to hide my cleavage, and these silly feathers. I eye the tablecloth-but it wouldn’t do. It’s much too thick, too white.

  “Don’t worry,” Eyup says. “Just sit back. Take a deep breath. I hear the butter isn’t bad.”

  That’s what I do. I forget all my internal struggles, those I know well and those I am yet to see, and enjoy the moment. It is the best butter I have ever tasted.

  In Praise of Selfishness

  Ayn Rand is one of those rare female writers who has dedicated readers all over the globe, whose fame is of the lasting kind. In addition to being a novelist, she was also an essayist, a playwright, a screenwriter and a philosopher. Since the 1940s numerous developments have contributed to the proliferation of her philosophy worldwide, the recent financial crisis being one of them. She is among the most loved and most hated writers in the literary world.

  Born in 1905 in St. Petersburg to a Russian Jewish couple, Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum was a smart, gifted child. She had little interest in the world of her girlfriends and female relatives, preferring reading books to playing with dolls or worrying about her looks. In 1926, after graduating from the University of Petrograd with a degree in history, she moved to the United States with little money in her pocket and an urgent need to reinvent herself. She never returned to her country and never saw her family again. As if cutting a ravel of yarn, she thrust aside the past in no uncertain terms. Shortly after, she renamed herself, taking her surname from the typewriter she used-Remington Rand. “Ayn Rand” was the name she gave herself, the name with which she was reborn in the New World.

  Rand was a passionate anticommunist, but, then, she was passionate about all her views. She married an actor named Charles Francis éO’Connor and wrote many low-budget Hollywood screenplays. Though her first semiautobiographical novel, We the Living, had attracted considerable attention, her real breakthrough came in 1943 with her best-selling novel The Fountainhead, which took her seven years to write. Her magnum opus was Atlas Shrugged, a science-fiction romance and a novel of ideas. It was here that she introduced what she saw as a new moral philosophy-the morality of rational self-interest.

  Not a great fan of Kant, she called him “the most evil man in mankind’s history.” Her response to those who accused her of caricaturizing the fountainhead of Western philosophy was even harsher: “I didn’t caricature Kant. Nobody can do that. He did it himself.”

  In time her name became synonymous with individualism, capitalism and rationalism. Firmly believing that a person had to choose his values by using his reason, she defended the individual’s rights against the community and the state, and opposed all sorts of governmental interference (hence her popularity today among those who oppose bank bailouts).

  “No man can use his brain to think for another,” Ayn Rand was fond of saying. “All functions of the body and spirit are private. Therefore they cannot be shared or transferred.” Strikingly, she regarded “reason” not only as the basis for our individual choices but also as the foundation of love between opposite sexes. Even physical attraction, for her, was the working of the brain. Love, sex and desire might seem to be selfish if left untamed by society, but despite that, or p
erhaps precisely because of it, they rendered the human individual an object worthy of attraction and appreciation. As it was maintained in The Fountainhead, “To say ‘I love you,’ one must know first how to say the ‘I.’”

  Her views on female sexuality could be regarded as problematic, to say the least. On the one hand, she was one of the few female novelists who could write about carnal desires and sexual fetishism without self-censure. On the other hand, her tone was visibly discriminatory at times, and the “beautiful woman” in her works was often “blond, fairskinned and long-legged”-the type of woman she was not and could never be. In almost all the sex scenes throughout her novels, there is a recurrent pattern: The woman first resists, the man insists, sometimes to the point of using physical force, and finally the woman surrenders.

  Never a compliant personality, Ayn Rand loved to scandalize feminists with her views on women, especially her comments on how a female should admire her male. Ironically, such was not the pattern in her own marriage.

  Increasingly over the years, Rand’s husband, Frank O’Connor, was overshadowed by his wife’s fame. Not an exceptionally talented actor or one who was popular with producers, he was often unemployed. From the moment they got married, the fact that she was the more famous and successful of the two was a burden on him. As if making fun of his predicament, he would often introduce himself as “Mr. Ayn Rand.”

  In 1951, the year after they moved to New York, Ayn Rand met a nineteen-year-old psychology student named Nathaniel Branden. He appreciated, admired and, perhaps, feared her. Such was his adoration that he founded an institution to spread her ideas far and wide. What started as an intellectual attraction soon turned physical. It was a kind of magnetic pull that intensified between a middle-aged, celebrated and intelligent woman and a young, ambitious and emotional man. Without hiding the situation from her husband, Rand gradually built a love triangle, situating herself right at the center. Atlas Shrugged was dedicated to both Branden and O’Connor.

  Though it was a complicated scheme that made no one happy, it lasted fourteen years. When Ayn Rand turned sixty-one, Nathaniel left her for a young model. The famous writer who perceived even a sexual relationship fundamentally as an “intellectual exchange,” could not possibly come to grips with her long-term lover’s choice of “body” over “mind.”

  She never forgave him. Perhaps his renouncement of her philosophy hurt her more than the physical abandonment. In a bitter article in The Objectivist, she announced to everyone that they were on separate paths. They never saw each other again.

  Ayn Rand was one of those female writers who chose, from the very start, not to have children. Just as children did not play a part in her life, they did not factor into her novels either. [11] She was criticized for not writing about children and not even trying to understand them, but there is nothing in her notes to make us think that she paid this any heed. The only children she ever wanted to have were her books.

  She was a writer with scintillating ideas and a woman of spectacular contradictions-as is her legacy. It is no coincidence that even after her death, both those who admired her and those who disliked her have dug in their heels. Though she defended capitalism ardently, in her personal life she preferred to have relationships that bordered on totalitarianism. In theory she was on the side of individual freedom and critical thinking. But in reality, she absolutely hated being criticized; she cast out and held in contempt anyone who did not agree with her. She expected obedience and loyalty from her inner circle. Despite the fact that she was a headstrong woman, and that her novels were full of independent female characters, she argued that a woman had to surrender herself to her man. The fact that she did no such thing in her private life was a different matter.

  Always a fighter, when she got cancer she didn’t want anyone to know about it. She saw even her illness as a mistake that needed to be corrected. And she did “correct it,” managing to beat the cancer. For her it was another victory of the brain over the body. A confirmation of her viewpoint.

  But in 1982, she suddenly and unexpectedly died of a heart attack.

  Today, literature enthusiasts from all around the world post their views on the Internet by asking questions such as “What kind of a psycho would I turn out to be if Ayn Rand had been my mother?” or “What would my life be like if I were married to Ayn Rand?”

  Maybe they are right. Ayn Rand hadn’t been born to be a mother or a wife. If she had been a mother she would very likely have been a dominant one, seeing each of her children as a different scientific experiment. But perhaps we are all badly mistaken. She may have found motherhood to be a “wonderfully intense intellectual excitement”-the way she described school and classes as a young girl in her diary. I am curious to know what she would have done when her child turned into a rebellious teenager.

  It is equally plausible that early on she realized that in the motherchild relationship, the child always wins. Perhaps that was the real reason why she didn’t want children. Ayn Rand liked to win.

  Giving birth to books was enough for her.

  When the Grand Bazaar Smiles

  Exactly a year later we are sitting in a café at the Grand Bazaar, Eyup and I.

  The finger-women are nowhere to be seen and I suspect each is shopping in a separate store. After Mount Holyoke I was a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I taught courses in women’s studies, and slowly I started writing my new novel, The Bastard of Istanbul.

  Now it is summer again. I am back in the city. We are sitting here, my love and I, between silver bracelets, smoke pipes, carpets and brass lamps that remind me of Aladdin’s. A rumpus is going on around us. Young men pushing carts loaded with merchandise, old men playing backgammon, merchants haggling in every language known to humankind, tourists struggling to keep pushy sellers at bay, apprentices carrying tea glasses on silver trays, cats meowing in front of restaurants, children feeding the cats when their parents are not looking-everyone is in their own world.

  Suddenly, Eyup holds my hand and asks, his voice raised over the din in the background, “Honey, I was just wondering. Are you still against marriage?”

  “I certainly am,” I say with conviction, but then add, “theoretically.”

  “And what exactly does theoretically mean?” he asks sweetly.

  “It means, generally speaking. As an abstract idea. As a philosophical model-” I try to explain.

  “In plain language, please?” he says, swirling the spoon in his tea glass.

  “I mean, I am against human beings getting married, at least most of them, because they really shouldn’t, but that said-”

  “That said?” he repeats.

  “I am not against me marrying you, for instance.”

  Eyup laughs-his laughter like a sword being pulled out of a silken sheath before the final thrust.

  “I think you just made the most roundabout marriage proposal that a man has ever received from a woman,” he says.

  “Did I?”

  He nods mischievously. “You can take it back, of course.”

  “But I don’t,” I say, because that is how I feel. “I am asking you to marry me.”

  The Grand Bazaar doubles up laughing at my endless contradictions, jingling its wind chimes, clinking its teaspoons and tinkling its bells. With a record such as mine, who am I to judge Ayn Rand’s inconsistencies?

  Eyup’s eyes grow large and sympathetic. “It is a joke.”

  “But I am damn serious,” I say and wait, hardly breathing.

  His eyes rake my eyes for a long moment, as if searching for something, and then his face brightens, like the sun reflecting on a silver dome.

  “And I gladly accept,” he says. “I do.”

  Oscar Wilde once said, “Men marry because they are tired, women because they are curious.” But if there is anyone who is tired here, most probably it is I. I’ve grown tired of my own biases. I’ve grown tired of failing to see the beauty in small things, of being agai
nst marriage and domestic life, of wearing myself thin, of carrying around suitcases from city to city and country to country.

  But will I stop commuting when I tie the knot?

  In English the word matrimony comes from the Latin word for “mother.” The Turkish word for it, evlilik, is connected with “setting up a house.” Laying down roots is a prerequisite for marriage.

  “You know I have a problem staying in one place,” I say guiltily.

  “I noticed,” Eyup says.

  “Is this not a problem for you?” I ask, afraid to hear the answer.

  “Honey, I stopped expecting anything normal from you the day you quoted Neil Gaiman as your motto on love,” he says.

  “I see.”

  He bows his head and adds in a softer tone, “We will do the best we can. You will be the nomad, I will be the settler. You will bring me magic fruits from lands afar, I will grow oranges for you in the backyard. We will find a balance.”

  I turn my head. Genuine kindness always makes my eyes tear, which I can hide, I think, but it is a different story with my nose, which reddens instantly. Eyup hands me a napkin and asks, “And since you are the worldwide traveler, tell me, where on earth would you like to say ‘I do’?”

  “Somewhere where brides are not expected to wear white,” is my answer.

  Using his teaspoon as a baton to emphasize his point, Eyup says, “That leaves us with three options: a nunnery, preferably medieval; a bar frequented by a gang of rockers on motorbikes; or the set for a movie on Johnny Cash. These are the places where you can wear a black bridal gown without anyone finding it odd.”

  I briefly consider each option, and then ask, “How about Berlin?”

  “What about Berlin?”

  “I have been offered a fellowship by the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. If I accept, I will be there for a while next year.”