Black Milk

by Elif Shafak

  At times, she was her own mother, and at times, her own daughter. She saw herself as a link in an endless chain, as part of a “continuum of women.” Bridging differences across the boundaries, challenging racism, sexism and homophobia, Lorde encouraged what she saw as “the transformation of silence into language.” Through words we understood ourselves and each other, and brought out the inner wisdom that existed in each and every one of us. Connecting was one of the things she did best-writer and reader, white and black, sister and sister. “I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or chisel to remind you of your me-ness, as I discover you in myself.” [14]

  In her autobiographical novel, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Lorde took a closer look at her childhood in Harlem and her coming-of-age as a black lesbian feminist. She said she had always wanted to be both man and woman, adding into her personality the strongest and richest qualities of both her mother and her father. Her writing was suffused with the belief that the synthesis between seeming opposites was perhaps what made us ourselves. In every woman there were masculine traits and in every man, the feminine. As such, treating the two sexes as if they were mutually exclusive was a big deception and a step away from understanding humanness in all its complexity and fullness.

  Strikingly, motherhood is redefined in Lorde’s work and glorified without being sanctified. It is divine but there is nothing sacred about it. Lorde believed that there was a black mother in all of us, whether we were mothers or not. Men, too, had this quality inside, although quite often they chose not to deal with it. Lorde’s metaphor of the black mother was the voice of intuition, creativity and unbridled passion. “The white fathers told us ‘I think, therefore I am,’ and the Black mother within each of us-the poet-whispers in our dream, ‘I feel, therefore I can be free.’”

  Lorde did not reject rationality or empiricism outright, but wanted to make it clear, once and for all, how limiting each was in grasping the world. Too much analytical thinking and worship of abstract theory did not sit well with her. Her connection with language and her hand on the pulse of the universe was unashamedly sensual. She regarded self hood-and, therefore, womanhood and motherhood- as essentially multilayered. Thus she refused to be pigeonholed into any single and static category. She was always many things at once, and after her death, she remains so.

  If Audre Lorde were alive today and we had met, she would probably have laughed at my six finger-women and then brought out her own numerous finger-women so that they could all dance together under a warm summer rain.

  Sandra Cisneros is an eloquent writer and an outspoken scholar who calls herself “nobody’s mother and nobody’s wife.” She has always talked candidly and courageously about the difficulties-and beauties-of being a single woman from a patriarchal background and a writer on the border of two cultures, Mexican and American. She says, “I think writers are always split between living their life and watching themselves live it.”

  Born in Chicago in 1954, the only daughter in a family of six sons, Cisneros closely observed the making of manhood and how painful it could be for those who did not fit into given gender roles. Though she grew up in a crowded, noisy house, she received a lot of love from both parents and was given her own space. “I am the product of a fierce woman who was brave enough to raise her daughter in a nontraditional way,” she says.

  Cisneros says she wants to tell the kind of stories that do not get told. The House on Mango Street is the riveting story of Esperanza, a Mexican-American girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago. The book deals openly with machismo, chauvinism and the struggle of a woman of color to find her own voice. Esperanza soon discovers that writing heals her wounds, frees her soul. It helps her to develop her natural talents, find out who she really is and resist all kinds of indoctrination that limit her choices in life due to her gender, culture or class.

  Questioning both Mexican and American constructions of femininity, Cisneros wants to explore alternative models of womanhood. Her views on marriage and motherhood have always been controversial. In an interview she says in many ways she still feels like a child. And precisely because of this, because she is still one of them, she doesn’t pick up children and fuss over them. That is not what one child does to another. Cisneros explains how throughout her twenties and thirties she put off marrying and starting a family in order to focus on her writing and work. When she reached her forties, however, she felt like she had to get married soon, not because she wanted to but because her father wanted her to. It took her some more years to realize she didn’t need to do this-a realization that brought her to a final decision: She would not get married. When asked why she chose not to start a family of her own, her response is intriguing: “My writing is my child and I don’t want anything to come between us.”

  Dorothy Parker, Audre Lorde and Sandra Cisneros-women who refused to identify female creativity with reproduction and pursued their writing with passion. We learn from them to look with a new perspective into the making of womanhood, sisterhood and manhood, respectively. Reading their works wakes up our souls, pierces the shell of our daily habits. Learning more about their lives makes us realize that the cultural predispositions that have been bred in each and every one of us since early childhood are neither incontestable nor unchangeable. True, the three of them led different personal lives and came from diverse backgrounds. But there is one thing they have in common: They did not take gender roles and barriers for granted. They questioned the established norms and, most important, changed the world by changing themselves first.

  A Sea without a Shore

  The baby is sleeping in the crib. Whoever came up with the expression “to sleep like a baby” doesn’t know what he is talking about. Babies doze in bits and pieces, waking every so often as if to check whether you are still there and the birth were not only a dream.

  As for me, I don’t sleep at all. The second I close my eyes, unpleasant thoughts and discomforting images barrage my brain. Who knew that my head was such an arsenal of anxieties? I haven’t been able to sleep properly for days. Around my eyes there are circles as dark beige and round as the simits [15] of Istanbul. Never had it entered my mind that my heart could hold so bleak an anguish.

  I am wearing a long, lavender nightgown with sporadic shapes across the breast line. One of the shoulder straps has snapped and been tied into a hasty knot. But because one strap is now shorter than the other, the neckline-from a distance-looks sloped, giving the impression that I am sliding to one side, like a sinking ship. Perhaps I am. As for the shapes on the gown, though they seem to be the creation of a crazy fashion designer, they are in fact breast milk and puke stains.

  It has been seven weeks since I gave birth.

  I want to be a brilliant, perfect mother but I end up doing everything wrong. I am all thumbs when it comes to changing diapers, burping the baby or figuring out how to end bouts of hiccups. My self-confidence has become a scoop of ice cream melting fast under the duress of motherhood. It would have helped if Eyup were by my side, but he has gone to serve his compulsory military duty. For the next six months he will get military training in a small division in North Cyprus, and I will be on my own.

  Five nights a week a television channel shows reruns of Wheel of Fortune for those who cannot sleep. Two blond women in skimpy miniskirts and glittery tops turn the letters on the manually operated puzzle board. I sit and watch. The letters spell D_ PR_ _ _ ION, but I refuse to read it aloud.

  Meanwhile, a giant wheel of fortune is spinning inside my brain, flashing its gaudy bulbs. I apportion my daily tasks into slots of different colors and give points to each, except they are all negative.

  At the end of each day, I add up my points, always ending in the red. My record of motherhood so far resembles a plummeting stock-exchange index. I have a deep suspicion that other women were told to spend years preparing themselves for the transition that comes with the birth of a baby, and I missed the memo. How am I-who could not
even manage womanhood naturally and effortlessly-now going to manage motherhood?

  I know I need help but it never occurs to me to ask for it.

  I think of Doris Lessing-a remarkable writer and pursuer of ideas. Born in Persia in 1919, the Nobel laureate spent her childhood on a farm in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). She was raised by a domineering mother and sent to a Catholic school, where she was taught to be a proper and pious lady. She remembers much of her colonial childhood today as a time with “little joy and much sadness.” Lessing dropped out of school when she turned thirteen, ran away from her home and from her mother two years later and basically had to raise herself.

  She was a girl-woman who mothered herself.

  When she turned nineteen, Lessing got married and had two children, a son and a daughter-a revolutionary experience that she talks about in great detail in her two-volume autobiography, Under My Skin and Walking in the Shade. She writes candidly about the conflicting feelings she had during this period-a longing to spend more time with other new mothers, talking about babies and mashed food, and an equally strong desire to run away from them all. Lessing is highly critical of the ways in which many capable women seem to change after giving birth. She believes such women are happily domesticated for a while, but then sooner or later they start getting restless, demanding and even neurotic. “There is no boredom like that of an intelligent young woman who spends all day with a very small child,” she says. Looking back at the early years of motherhood, she is surprised to see how hard she worked and how tired she was all the time. “I wonder how I did it. I swear young mothers are equipped with some sort of juice or hormone that enables them to bear it.” [16]

  The triple role of housekeeper, mother and wife did not make Lessing happy. In 1943 she left her husband and two children to get married to Gottfried Lessing, a Communist activist. They had a son, Peter. The marriage ended in 1949. By this time she was unable to bear life in Rhodesia, particularly the racism of the white ruling class. Taking her son, some money and many ghosts with her, she moved back to Britain. It was a big, painful decision and one that required her to leave her two children with her first ex-husband. She came to England with the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass Is Singing. The book was published a year later and henceforth Lessing dedicated herself fully to writing.

  A cauldron boils in my mind. What if I fail to become a good mother and a good wife? I do not want to betray myself or to pretend to be someone I am not. What scares me most is the possibility of an adverse chemical reaction between authorship and domestic responsibilities. Novelists are self-enamored people who do not like to draw attention to that fact. Mothers, on the other hand, are supposed to be selfless creatures-at least for a while-who give more than they take. Perhaps I am worrying too much, but worrying comes with thinking.

  How can I tell my brain not to think?

  Eyup calls whenever he can between field exercises. The line is always crackly and there is stomping and marching, shouting and yelling, in the background, which is the complete opposite of my life in Istanbul, where I watch Baby TV and listen to the rain fall on the begonias.

  “Hello, sweetheart,” Eyup says.

  “Hi there,” I say. “How’s it going, my love?”

  “I lost eight pounds,” he says, “but I’m surviving. We do a hundred push-ups, a hundred lift-ups and run two miles every morning. I now have biceps like Chuck Norris and my face is so tanned from exposure to the sun that I would stand out even in a dark alley.”

  I smile-as if he could see me.

  “I’ve missed you sorely,” he says, his voice wavering a little.

  “I’ve missed you, too.”

  “What were you doing when I phoned?”

  “I was putting ten droplets of gripe water onto a spoon for the baby’s hiccups and thinking about Doris Lessing.”

  “Does it help?”

  “Not really, perhaps it makes it worse.”

  “Which one? Gripe water or Doris Lessing?”

  “Both,” I say.

  There is a brief silence at the end of the line. Then, softly, Eyup says, “Honey, you are thinking too much. That makes things harder for you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Many people do not constantly analyze and reanalyze every little thing, you know, they just go along with the daily routine,” he remarks. “Like when you know you have to do a hundred push-ups, you just accept and do it.”

  “You want me to start doing push-ups?” I ask.

  “Come on, you know what I mean,” he says with a gentle laugh. “Can’t you do without thinking for a while?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Let me think about that.”

  Why Are We Depressed When We Want to Be Happy?

  The next day in the evening, the Choir of Discordant Voices begins to yammer inside me. I ask all of them the same question: How is it possible to feel so down when I am, in fact, happy and grateful?

  1. “Yo, it’s ’cause of the hormones,” says Little Miss Practical. “Everything will be just fine. We can run a few tests and see what the problem is. Take some happy pills. You know what they call them: ‘bottled smiles.’ The mighty hand of Western science will fix the problem in a jiffy. Call the doctor and ask for help. Let them solve this. Be practical!”

  She could be right. I should call my doctor. But my pride-or vanity-won’t let me do it. I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me or make assumptions about my sanity. My doctor has always been friendly and fatherly, and we have a superb relationship; I don’t want him to see me in my freak-on-wheels moment.

  “Let me pull myself together first, then I’ll talk to him,” I say.

  So I make a plan: I will go to see a professional when I am much better and no longer need to go to see a professional.

  2. “Forget about doctors and pills. What you need is books,” prompts Miss Highbrowed Cynic. “You feel demoralized because you are not reading enough. You have missed the intellectual world. You have missed me. All this baby food and diaper changing have numbed your brain. You need to reactivate your intellect, that’s all.”

  She could be right. My mind might settle into some kind of order if I start reading novels again. If I focus on other people’s stories, I’ll stop running in circles around my own. Proust will save me.

  But there is something I can’t confess to Miss Highbrowed Cynic. I have started to suspect that in the months following birth a new mother’s brain doesn’t work like it used to. I couldn’t read even if I wanted to. Forget Proust, I can’t even focus on a tomato soup recipe.

  3. “You don’t need books, what you need is to take that horrible nightgown off and put on something sexy,” suggests Blue Belle Bovary. “If only you paid a little attention to your appearance it would push that depression right out the door. Let me take you to a hairdresser. Don’t you know that the first thing women should do when they are down is to change their hair? A new cut and a new color will cure the deepest melancholy, darling.”

  She could be right. I might feel better after a visit to the hairdresser, and from there, to the shopping mall. But I just don’t feel like it. Quite to the contrary, I want to cling more firmly to my oily hair, my pallid skin, my tattered clothes. In a world that feels increasingly foreign, only this nightgown is familiar and comforting.

  4. “Pure nonsense,” objects Milady Ambitious Chekhovian. “The only reason why you are down in the dumps is because you are producing below your full capacity. I have to get you out of here immediately. Let’s arrange a book tour for you. We need to get back to work.”

  She could be right. If there was a literary festival or a book signing now, I could possibly ditch this gloomy mood. It is always a morale boost to meet my readers, listen to their sincere comments, answer their questions and do more readings. But I have little, if any, ambition or desire these days. How can I sign books when my hands are tucked into my armpits for warmth all the time? As Jane Smiley beautifully shows in her 13 Ways of Looking at
the Novel, there is a difference between the novelist as a literary person and the novelist as a literary persona.

  Smiley says the literary persona is always a more mature personality, more polished and worked upon and with a different set of duties and responsibilities. It is shaped by three major inspirations-literature, life and language-and is therefore not fully in the author’s control.

  If Smiley is right, and I think she is, then the gap between my literary persona and me as a living person has never been wider. There is a huge postpartum canyon stretching between the two sides now.

  5. “What Milady says is sheer gibberish!” snorts Mama Rice Pudding. “You’re feeling this way because you are not focused enough on being a mother, that’s all. This is the time when you have to put everything else aside, all that artistic and literary gobbledygook, and be a full-time mom. Only then will you come out of this depression.”

  She could be right. Spending time with my lovely daughter makes me feel good, elated and blessed. Perhaps I should close myself off to the outside world and just be a mom from now on. Perhaps I am depressed because I haven’t fully enacted that decision yet.

  But there is something I can’t explain to Mama Rice Pudding, something that I know she would never understand: In a society where motherhood is regarded as the best thing that can happen to a woman and with an upbringing that tells us to settle for nothing less than excellence, how can I not compare myself to other mothers? And when I weigh myself against other moms, how can I not be envious of their accomplishments and ashamed of my deficiencies? I am not proud of feeling this way but this is what I experience deep down. It is not my love for my baby that I doubt. Love is there, pure and tender, enveloping my soul in its pearly glow. It is my talents as a mother that I find lacking.