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

by Elif Shafak

  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 against 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.”

  “Hmm, makes sense to me,” he says, suddenly serious. “We will be like East and West Berlin, remarkably different and previously independent but now surprisingly united.”

  Little Women, Big Hearts

  One of my favorite fictional female characters as a young girl was Jo in Little Women. Jo the writer. Jo the dreamer. Jo the romantic, adventuresome, idealist and independent sister. When her sister Amy burned her manuscript—her only copy—in an act of pure revenge, I was horrified. It took me a long time to forgive Amy—even though Jo herself wasn’t that innocent; after all, she had not invited Amy to a play and almost drowned her while ice-skating. At any rate, the story of the four March sisters during the American Civil War was so unlike my life as the child of a Turkish single mother, and yet many things were familiar—absent father, struggling with financial ups and downs, nonconformity to gender roles. . . . That was the power of Louisa May Alcott’s words, to create a universal saga shared by millions everywhere. It takes no little magic to “zoom” a story written in the late nineteenth century to readers across the globe more than a hundred years later.

  A woman ahead of her time, a writer who held Goethe dear, Louisa May Alcott, too, favored Jo and was a bit like her: full of energy, ideas and motivation. The stories told in Little Women were highly reminiscent of her familial life as the second of four sisters. She keenly observed the people she met, absorbed the dialogues she heard and then incorporated them all in her stories. Always planning new books, living the plots in her head and scribbling whenever the inspiration struck, she was determined to earn her own money from writing. “I never had a study,” she once said. “Any paper and pen will do, and an old atlas on my knee is all I want.”

  When Little Women was published it brought its author fame and success beyond her modest expectations. Alcott wrote intensely, sometimes forgetting to eat or sleep. That her readers and critics wanted to see a sequel to the story must have both motivated and limited her. She had originally planned that Jo would not get married, earning her bread by the sweat of her own brow, but her publisher was of a different mind. Under constant pressure from him and others, a male character was introduced into Jo’s life: Professor Bhaer. And the reader knew Jo was torn between two impulses—her sense of responsibility toward her family and her desire to nurture her individuality and freedom. “I’ll try and be what he loves to call me, ‘a little woman,’ and not be rough and wild, but do my duty here instead of wanting to be somewhere else. . . .” Struggling with her family’s expectations of her, Jo eventually chose marriage and domestic life instead of a career in writing—a drastic decision Alcott herself would have never made.

  Alcott regarded the matrimonial institution with suspicion. It was clear to her that women who wanted to stand on their feet would have a hard time adapting to conjugal life. “Liberty is a better husband than love to many of us,” she said, insinuating that sometimes the only way for a woman writer to find freedom was to remain a spinster.

  Her sister May—a creative, prolific painter who had chosen to live abroad—was happily married. She seemed like a woman who had achieved it all—a succes
sful career and a good marriage. Louisa Alcott compared her loneliness with her sister’s fulfillment, saying, “she always had the cream of things and deserved it.” Unfortunately, May died shortly after giving birth to a baby girl. Her last wish was to send the baby—named Louisa May after her aunt and nicknamed Lulu—to her Aunt Louisa to be raised by her.

  So it was that Louisa Alcott, who never married, found herself raising the daughter of her sister. She gave her full love to this child and even wrote short stories for her, thus creating what later was to be named “Lulu’s Library.”

  There is a wonderful passage in the second volume of the Little Women series, which was titled Good Wives, where Alcott describes Jo’s, and I believe her own, urge to write fiction. I think it is one of the best descriptions ever written about the creative process and I can’t help but smile each time I read it: “She did not think herself a genius by any means, but when the writing fit came on, she gave herself up to it with entire abandon, and led a blissful life, unconscious of want, care, or bad weather, while she sat safe and happy in an imaginary world, full of friends almost as real and dear to her as any in the flesh.”12

  Always a hardworking writer and a Chekhovian by nature, she said, “I don’t want to live if I can’t be of use.” That’s how she died, when she couldn’t write anymore due to old age, in Boston in 1888.

  Mary Ann Evans, born on November 22, 1819, was a shy, introspective and emotional child who loved to read and study. The story of her life is one of transformation—a journey that turned her into the restless, headstrong and outspoken writer known to everyone as George Eliot. When she was thirty-two years old, she fell in love with the philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes. He was a married man, but his was an “open marriage”—even by today’s standards. His wife, Agnes, had an affair with another man, and when she bore his child, Lewes was happy to claim the baby as his own. Though the couple remained legally married, they had ceased to see each other as husband and wife. Mary Ann and George lived together. She adopted his sons as her own. It wasn’t unheard-of in Victorian society for people to have relations outside of wedlock, but their openness about their love was simply scandalous.

  At a time when women writers were few, she not only wrote fiction to her heart’s content but also became the assistant editor of the Westminster Review. She called herself Marian Evans for a while, molding her name, seeing how it felt to have a masculine moniker. In her attempt to distance herself from the female novelists who produced romances, she decided that she needed a male pen name. To honor her love for Lewes, she adopted his name, George, and then picked out Eliot because it fit well with the first name.

  In 1856 Lewes sent a story titled “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton” to his publisher, claiming that it was written by a “clerical friend.” The publisher wrote back saying he would publish the story and congratulating this new writer for being “worthy of the honors of print and pay.” Thus began a new stage in Eliot’s literary career. She wanted to remain incognito as long as she could, enjoying the advantages of being anonymous, and thereby unreachable. Her nom de plume enabled her to transcend Victorian gender roles, and carve for herself a greater zone of existence.

  One evening at a party, Lewes read aloud a spellbinding story by Eliot and asked his guests to guess what kind of a person the author was. All of them came to the conclusion that the story was written by a man—a Cambridge man, well educated, a clergyman married with children. (Similar reactions were received when Eliot’s stories were sent to other writers. Only Charles Dickens thought the author had to be a woman. Only he got it right.)

  I love to imagine this scene: in a high-ceilinged apartment, a dozen or so guests sitting comfortably on cushioned sofas and armchairs, sipping their drinks, eyeing one another furtively as they listen to a story by an unknown author, their eyes rapt in the flames in the fireplace, their minds miles away as they try to guess the gender of the writer, and fail.

  In her popular masterpiece Middlemarch, which Virginia Woolf famously described as “one of the only English novels written for grown-up people,” Eliot created an impressive character named Dorothea. She is intelligent, passionate, generous and ambitious—in all probability a representation of the author herself. It is a constant disappointment to feminist scholars that neither Dorothea nor Eliot’s other female characters ever achieved the sort of success or freedom that she enjoyed. But does a woman writer need to create fictional role models to inspire her female readers? Like all good storytellers, Eliot found pleasure in combining challenge and compassion. “If art does not enlarge men’s sympathies it does nothing morally,” she wrote. Contrary to the common belief, she wasn’t someone who despised all things deemed to be womanly. Though she had masculine features, a cherished male pen name, a certain bias toward women writers and chutzpah that was, at the time, deemed fit for a man, she also enjoyed her femininity to the fullest. It was this unusual blend that mesmerized those who met her in person.

  After the death of Lewes, she married a man twenty years her junior with whom she shared common intellectual ground. Like Zelda Fitzgerald she fell in love with brains first; like Ayn Rand she could be imposing in her private affairs. She died shortly afterward in 1880, at the age of sixty-one. She was buried in Highgate Cemetery in an area reserved for religious dissenters—even in death, not quite fitting in.

  Louisa May Alcott and George Eliot, two contemporary women writers with a common passion for storytelling, one of them regarded as the voice of feminine writing, and the other known as a defeminized author—both equally unconventional in their ways. They remind me, across centuries and cultures, that there are other paths for a woman than conventional marriage and motherhood. Perhaps marriage is less a legal arrangement or social institution than a book awaiting interpretation. Every reader brings his or her own gaze to the text, and ends up reading the story differently.

  One Blue, One Pink

  Two years after saying “I do” in Berlin, I’m shaking like a leaf on the bathroom floor in Istanbul. The tiles on the walls are painted emerald and streaked with dark green ivies that suit your mood perfectly when you feel like a leaf.

  I had spent the last year and a half teaching at the University of Arizona as a full-time tenure-track professor in Near Eastern studies. Moving from chilly Ann Arbor to sunny Tucson required a radical change in my wardrobe, which, thank God, consisted of two suitcases. During this entire time I had been commuting like crazy between Tucson and Istanbul, and now here I am, sitting with my back to the bathtub, taking deep breaths to calm my thumping heart.

  In my hand there is a tiny object. It feels odd to attribute so much importance to an object this small and plastic, but that is how it is. On the back of the box it came in it reads: “If two lines appear on the screen it shows pregnancy. One single blue line indicates lack of it.”

  But at the moment I avoid looking at the screen, focusing instead on every other trivial detail, such as the date of expiration and the place of manufacture. It is made in China. That is why it cost me one-third of the price of the other home pregnancy test kits at the drugstore. I wonder how reliable it is. Doesn’t it say in the newspapers that Chinese toys can cause allergies? How about Chinese test kits, could they give false positives?

  More curious about the reliability of the product in my hand than my own physical condition, my gaze slides down to the small white screen. Relief. Oh, good. There is only one line. Blue. I wasn’t ready for the second line. I can go now. But there is a nagging suspicion at the back of my mind, and something tells me not to hurry, not so soon. Then, just as I feared, taking its sweet time, the pink line appears.

  Why doesn’t the pink line come first and then the blue one? Or why don’t they appear simultaneously? There would be less anticipation that way and far less apprehension. Have the Chinese manufacturers designed it this way to make it more exciting for women?

  It takes me a few minutes to stop quarreling with the Chinese manufacturers
and acknowledge my situation. Slowly but surely my mind recognizes what my heart has already accepted: I am pregnant.

  Now what? I need to talk with someone but whom? The first thought that pops into my head is to consult with the finger-women. Yet I quickly abandon the idea. I can’t tell them anything yet. Especially not Milady Ambitious Chekhovian, who, I fear, will tear the walls down. Nor Miss Highbrowed Cynic, I definitely can’t tell her either. Even talking to Dame Dervish sounds like a lame idea. She will not give me advice to solve this predicament; instead she’ll want me to figure it out on my own. But I am far too panicked for that.

  Who can I speak to if I can’t speak to them?

  That’s when I recall Mama Rice Pudding. She is the only one among the Thumbelinas who knows anything about babies and pregnancies. But where is she now? How is she doing? I haven’t spoken to her since that night under the Brain Tree. I need to see her urgently. But will she talk to me? I’m sure she is still quite upset and will not respond if I send her an invitation. I guess I should go and find her.

  Once again, I take a flickering candle and descend into the labyrinth of my soul. Again, I find it very confusing down here, where there are no road signs, no traffic lights. I don’t know where Mama Rice Pudding lives and can’t imagine what her house looks like.

  After an hour of toiling I find her house. It is made out of a milk carton, complete with lace curtains and pots filled with tulips, carnations and hyacinths on its window ledge. I press the doorbell. It chirps a merry tune of singing birds.

  “What do you want?” she asks when she opens the door and sees me.

  She is wearing a rose-patterned dress and has her hair done up with multihued clips. She seems to have gained a bit more weight. On her feet are fuchsia-colored slippers with pompoms. She wears a red and white polka-dotted kitchen apron that has “Super Cook” written across the top. A divine smell wafts from inside the house. Something sweet and fruity.