Black Milk: On Writing, Motherhood, and the Harem Within

by Elif Shafak

  “I am a pacifist. I don’t take up arms,” says Dame Dervish. “‘Whenever you are confronted with an opponent, conquer him with love.’ That’s what Gandhi teaches.”

  “With all due respect, let’s not forget that Mr. Gandhi had not met Milady Ambitious Chekhovian,” I say.

  “‘Nevertheless, an elephant cannot swallow a hedgehog.’”

  “Was that Gandhi again?”

  “That was a slogan from the Prague Spring,” says Dame Dervish. “In 1968. If you can say that against the Soviet tanks, you can say it against any finger-woman you want.”

  She never ceases to surprise me, this Sufi of mine.

  “Look around you, Elif. What do you see?” asks Dame Dervish. Pedestrians hurrying up and down the street, commuters standing still in public buses that are full to the brim, peddlers selling replica designer bags, street children cleaning the windshields of the luxurious cars that stop at red lights, billboards advertising fast money and glitzy lifestyles, a city of endless contradictions . . . That is what I see when I look around in Istanbul.

  “All right, now look at yourself,” says Dame Dervish. “What do you see?”

  A woman who is split inside, half East, half West. A woman who loves the world of imagination more than the real world; who, year after year, has been worn down by useless paradoxes, wrong relationships, mistaken loves; who is still not over the hurt of growing up without a father; who breaks hearts and has her heart broken; who cares too much about what other people think; who is afraid that God may not really care for her and who can be happy or complete only when writing a novel. In short, “a personality under construction” is what I see when I look at myself. But my tongue won’t cooperate in making this confession.

  At my uneasy silence, Dame Dervish says, “You have to accept the universe as an open book that is waiting for its reader. One must read each day page by page.”

  Her voice sounds so calm and soothing, I feel embarrassed about my outburst a minute ago. “Then, tell me, how am I supposed to read this very day?”

  “There is a voyage knocking at your door,” says Dame Dervish, as if she were holding an invisible cup in her hand and telling my fortune from the configuration of the coffee grounds at the bottom. “If you don’t leave Istanbul, these three finger-women will not let you be. From morning till night, they will pick at you.”

  “Tell me about it,” I say, exhaling loudly.

  “I think one of these days you should sign a peace treaty with all of us,” says Dame Dervish. “The reason why the finger-women are quarreling so much among themselves is because you are quarreling with us. You think some of us are more worthy than others. While in truth, we are all reflections of you. All of us make up a whole.”

  “You want me to make no distinction between you and Milady Ambitious Chekhovian? But you two are completely different!”

  “We don’t have to be identical. She and I share the same essence. If only you could understand this. Until you realize that every voice inside you is part of the same circle, you will feel fragmented. Unite us all in One.”

  “You are talking about my embracing them, but those rascals instigated a coup d’état while I was asleep, for God’s sake. It is only a pacifist who trusts a despot. It’s never the other way around!”

  Dame Dervish gives me a nod, her smile as warm as a caress. “May be.”

  I look at her, awaiting an explanation. That is when she tells me this story.

  “Once upon a time, there was a dervish who spoke little. One day his horse ran away. When they heard the news, all the neighbors came to see him. ‘That is terrible,’ they remarked. The dervish said, ‘May be.’

  “The next day, they found the horse with a gorgeous stallion next to it. Everyone congratulated the dervish and said this was wonderful news. Again, he said only, ‘May be.’

  “A week later, while trying to ride the stallion, the dervish’s son fell off and broke his leg. The neighbors came to say how sorry they were. ‘How awful,’ they exclaimed in unison. The dervish replied, ‘May be.’

  “The next day, some state officials came to the village to draft young men to the war zone. All the boys had to go, except the dervish’s son, who lay in bed with a broken leg.”

  “You see what I mean?” asks Dame Dervish.

  “I guess so,” I answer.

  “I want you to see the fellowship in Massachusetts not as something imposed on you but as an opportunity. Turkey or the United States, it isn’t important, really. What matters is the journey within. You won’t be traveling to America, you will be traveling within yourself. Think of it that way.”

  There is a confident serenity about her, which I like. She might well be right. I have to learn to live peacefully, fully, every day with the voices inside me. I’m tired of constantly being at war with them.

  With a sudden urge and zest, I flag down a passing taxi. “Come on, then, let’s go,” I say as I open the door to the cab.

  “Where to?”

  “To the train station,” I announce, beaming.

  “Did you decide to go to America by train?” Dame Dervish asks as she chuckles to herself.

  I shake my head. “I just want to go and smell the trains. . . .”

  I just want to spend some time at the station—inhale its strange, pungent aroma, the odor of people rushing in all directions, the heavy tang of the destitute with their dreams of affluence, the refreshing hint of new destinations. Whenever I feel the need to contemplate a mystery or observe the world, whenever the nomad in me wakes up, I go there.

  Airports are too sterile, clean and controlled when compared with train stations, where the heart of the underprivileged still pulsates.

  Haydarpasha Station is an old, majestic building with too many memories. And like many old, majestic buildings, it, too, has its own djinn and fairies. They perch on the high windows and watch the passengers below. They watch couples split, lovers meet, families unite, friends break up. . . . They gaze at the thousand and one predicaments of the sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, and still find us puzzling.

  If you ever go there and walk right into the middle of the station, if you then stand still amid the hullabaloo with eyes firmly closed, listen, you can hear them whispering, the djinn and fairies of the station . . . uttering strange words like poetry, in a language long forgotten. . . .

  Perhaps, like the Greek poet Konstantinos Kavafis, they, too, are saying,New lands you will not find, you will not find other seas.

  The city will follow you . . .

  You will roam the same streets.

  Women Who Change Their Names

  I was eighteen years old when I decided to change my name. By and large, I was happy with my first name, Elif, which is a fairly common girl’s name in Turkey, meaning tall and lithe, like the first letter of the Ottoman alphabet, aleph. The word is encountered in Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and Turkish, although to my knowledge, it is only in the latter that it is used as a female name. That same year, I had read Borges’s “The Aleph” and I was familiar with his description of the word as a virtually untraceable point in space that contained all points. Not bad, I thought. Striding along with all the vanity of my youth, I did enjoy being likened to a letter, though I would have much preferred the entire alphabet.

  It was a different story, however, with my surname. It upset me that as women, we were expected to take first the family names of our fathers, then our husbands. Having grown up without seeing my father, I couldn’t understand, for the life of me, why I should carry his name. Since I was also determined to never get married and take my husband’s name, I concluded that the rule of surnames simply didn’t apply to me.

  I had been pondering this paradox for a while when a prestigious literary magazine in Turkey selected for publication a short story I had written. The editor, an intellectual in his midforties, gave me a call to congratulate and welcome me into the literary fold, which he said was “no different from a jungle with wild egos.” As he was
about to hang up, he told me to let them know if there were any last-minute changes I would like to make before the magazine went to press.

  “Yes,” I said urgently. “My last name. I am changing it.”

  “Are you getting married? Congratulations!”

  “No. Not like that,” I interjected. “I have decided to rename myself.”

  He chuckled, the way people tend to do when they don’t know what to say. Then he said, very slowly and loudly, as if talking to a child with a hearing impairment, “O-kay, and how do you want us to write your name?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I confessed. “It’s a lifetime decision. I’ll have to think about it.”

  There was an awkward silence at the end of the line, but then the editor gave another laugh. “Well, of course, go ahead and do it. What’s the harm? You are a woman, there’s no reason for you to take this too seriously. Even if you choose the most poetic surname for yourself, you’ll end up with your husband’s anyhow.”

  “Give me a day,” I said. “I will find the surname I will have forever, whether I get married someday or not.”

  Every name is a magic formula. The letters dance together, each with their own spin and charm, each an unknown as much as the other, and together they concoct the mystery that a name holds. Like sorcerers in the dark, adding letter upon letter, ingredient after ingredient, the language unit by which we are known puts a spell on us. There are names that help us soar high in the sky; there are names that weigh on our shoulders and slyly pull us down.

  Men live without ever feeling the need to change their family names. Their credentials are given to them at birth. Settled and stable. They inherit their surnames from their fathers and grandfathers, and pass it on to their children and grandchildren.

  As for women, whether they know it or not, they are name nomads. Their surnames are here today, gone tomorrow. Throughout their lives, women fill out official forms in different ways, apply for new passports and design several signatures. They have one last name when they are young girls, and another upon marriage. They go back to their maiden names if they get divorced—though sometimes they retain their ex-husbands’ family names for practical purposes, which doesn’t necessarily make things easier—and adopt an altogether different one if they get remarried.

  Men have one constant signature. Once they find the one that suits them, they can keep it till death without changing a single curve. As for women, they have at least one “old signature” and one “new signature,” and sometimes they confuse them. Signature of the bachelorette, signature of the married woman, signature of the divorcée.

  Women writers have also undergone a series of name-change operations. The late-nineteenth-century Ottoman novelist Fatma Aliye wrote her novels and novellas mostly in secret, as she did not want to upset her husband and family with her “independent ways.” One day she stopped using her name and published her next work under the pseudonym “A Woman.”

  For that’s what she was. A woman. Any woman. All women. Getting rid of her name was like casting off the heavy mooring that tied her to the mainland. Once she ceased to be Lady Fatma Aliye and became only “a woman,” she was free to sail anywhere.

  In the 1950s a romance novel called Young Girls appeared in Turkey, by a certain Vincent Ewing. The book quickly became a national best seller, finding good coverage in the media. Strangely, no one knew the writer. No journalist had managed to get any interviews from him. Only three things were known about the author: He was American, he was Christian, he was male. Turkish people read the book with that information in mind.

  Years went by. One day it was announced that the author of Young Girls was, in fact, a young Muslim Turkish woman. Nihal Yeğinobali was her name.

  When asked why she had chosen to hide her identity, her answer was intriguing:

  “I was a young girl myself when I wrote Young Girls. There was a considerable degree of eroticism in the novel that was considered inappropriate for a young woman such as myself. So I picked a male pseudonym. In those days there was more interest in translated novels. This is why we decided that the writer of my novel should be American. My publisher pretended it was translated from English.”

  Publishing a book under a specific male name, like “Vincent Ewing,” or a generic appellation, like “A Woman,” furnishes us with an armor to shield ourselves. We need the protection even more when we write about sexuality, femininity and the body. I don’t know of any male writer who agonizes about upsetting his mother (or grandmother or great-aunts or neighbors or any distant relatives) should he write a novel that touches on eroticism and graphic sex. If there are, they must be few in number. Yet, worrying about the permission to tell the story—be it personal or familial—is particular to women writers all around the world. This is the unspoken pressure Margaret Atwood writes about in her riveting essay regarding her great-aunts. “The pressure is most strongly felt, by women, from within the family, and more so when the family is a strong unit,” she says. From Turkey to Canada, from industrial to postindustrial society, women who take up writing traverse several invisible boundaries in marriage, family, class and society. Each crossing can be one more reason to modify a name and obscure its gender.

  It is not for naught that another well-known writer, perhaps the greatest novelist of the Victorian period, chose a male pseudonym—determined, smart, persevering Mary Ann Evans, otherwise known as George Eliot. Britain in the 1800s did have its share of female writers—only, most of them wrote about romance, love and heartache: topics deemed suitable for womankind. As for George Eliot, she openly disliked all such books. She wanted to write on an equal footing with male novelists. She wanted to write “like a man,” not “like a woman.”

  George Eliot’s distaste for “women’s literature” was so intense and unabashed that in 1856 she penned an article called “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” She divided fiction written by women into four categories in accordance with their degree of silliness, and named them as the frothy, the prosy, the pious and the pedantic. I enjoy reading this extremely interesting piece not only to get a glimpse into the Western literary tradition but also to see how cruelly a woman writer can badmouth her own sex.

  But Eliot was no stranger to standing out among other women. In a letter to Herbert Spencer, the biologist and philosopher, she boldly challenged conventional society and set herself apart from the members of her own sex: “I suppose no woman ever before wrote such a letter as this—but I am not ashamed of it, for I am conscious that in the light of reason and true refinement I am worthy of your respect and tenderness, whatever gross men or vulgar-minded women might think of me.”

  Similarly, the Brontë sisters, too, felt the need to remold their names. Selecting pseudonyms that retained their initials, Charlotte adopted Currer Bell while Anne took on the name Acton Bell and Emily became Ellis Bell. It was easier to evade prejudices against women when one had an androgynous name. The sisters played this mischievous game as long as they could, their only challenge being how to deceive the village postman when packages arrived. The dilemma was solved by making sure all correspondents sent their letters to a certain “Currer Bell in care of Miss Brontë.”

  Another female writer who chose a pseudonymous cross-dressing was the legendary George Sand, though one sometimes gets the impression that she might simply have wanted to get rid of the baggage of her long name: Amantine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin, Baroness Dudevant.

  George Sand married Baron M. Casimir Dudevant in 1822. They had two children together. But before long the couple split apart. Sand welcomed her unattached state as liberation from social bonds. Being divorced, single and wealthy gave her the chance to be much more daring than other women, and take steps that they could not dream of.

  Sand had also started wearing male clothing—a topic that the gossipers jumped upon with joy. As an aristocratic woman it was her civic duty to dress to the nines, paying great attention to her attire, speech and manners, but she did just the opposite by
choosing comfortable and serviceable male outfits. Her fondness for pipe smoking was an even bigger scandal. In an era in which women were expected to be agreeable, sociable ladies and nothing more, she walked around in men’s clothes with a pipe in her mouth and radical ideas in her head. Like a tall tree that attracts lightning, she drew attention and anger. In the end, her aristocratic title was taken away from her. But nobody could confiscate the name she had given herself. She was, and is today, George Sand.

  As Ivan Turgenyev once said, she was “a kind hearted woman, and a brave man!”

  Jane Austen fell in love once. She was someone who criticized women marrying for wealth, status or a sense of security, firmly believing that one could marry only for love. Yet, though she loved and was loved in return, due to class differences, the marriage was not allowed to happen. His name was Tom Lefroy—a young man who had nothing to his name but would one day become the chief justice of Ireland. In a letter dated January 1796 and addressed to her sister Cassandra, Austen confessed that Tom was the love of her life. But she quickly added, “When you receive this, it will be over. My tears flow at the melancholy idea.” Heartbroken, she retreated to her corner, to her writing.

  “I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and ill informed female who ever dared to be an authoress,” she said. It was not true, of course, and she knew it. Austen was very knowledgeable on a wide range of subjects, having been admirably educated by her father—a clergyman—brothers, aunt and then through her own uninterrupted reading. She had a sharp tongue and a penchant for playfulness and sarcasm.

  Years later, she was offered marriage again, this time by a respected man of great means. Though she was fond of her “solitary elegance,” as she once called her singleness, she accepted the offer. Finally she was going to become a wife, start a family and manage her own home. With these thoughts and hopes, she went to bed early. When she woke up the next morning, the first thing she did was to send a note of apology to her suitor. She had decided not to marry.