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

by Elif Shafak

  “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.

  6. “Try to see this as a test,” says Dame Dervish. “God likes to try us from time to time. He does so through failure and vulnerability sometimes, success and power at other times, and believe me, we don’t always know which case is worse. But remember one thing: Where there is difficulty there follows ease.”

  She could be right. I must not forget that this is a temporary phase and probably some good will come out of it, though I cannot see that now. Later on when I look back with hindsight, I will judge things from a different and brighter perspective.

  But there are some things I cannot reveal to Dame Dervish. I know there are thousands of people out there who try hard to have children, who put themselves through all sorts of medical procedures, make huge sacrifices and suffer endless frustrations, individually and as a couple, and yet still cannot reach their goal. I know how appreciative I should be, and I am, but my embarrassment for not being happy enough, thankful enough or good enough is so profound, I cannot even talk to God anymore.

  All I know is that after a period of oligarchy and a short interval of military rule, this monarchy, too, has come to an end. Now there is only anarchy in the Land of Me.

  The Celestial Eye

  When I was a little girl, maybe six or seven years old, I stayed with my paternal grandmother for a few weeks in Smyrna. The idea was to make sure I got to see my father and spend quality time with him, but I ended up seeing more of my grandma than my dad. She was a stern woman who wore large glasses that magnified her eyes and spoke in sharp, curt sentences that usually boiled down to “Do that! Don’t do this!” She often talked about the fires of hell, which she described in vivid and frightful detail. To her, Allah was an unblinking Celestial Eye that saw everything I did and recorded every single one of my sins, even the ones I only thought about.

  I came back from her house with a glowing imagery of blazing flames and boiling cauldrons, and the idea of God as an austere father frowning down at His creation. I don’t know if this experience had any role in my choices later on, but as soon as I was old enough to know what the word agnostic meant—that is, around the time I was seventeen years old—I decided I was
going to be one. I have never felt close to atheism—for I found it too arrogant in its outright rejection of God—but agnosticism seemed befitting of people who were perpetually bewildered about things, including religion. For an atheist, faith is not a very important matter. For an agnostic, however, it is. An atheist is sure of his convictions, and speaks in sentences that end with a full stop. An agnostic puts only a comma at the end of his remarks, to be continued. . . . He will keep pondering, wondering, doubting. That is why he is an agnostic.

  I went to college to major in international relations. At the time, I was a rebellious young woman who liked to wrap several shawls of “-isms” around her shoulders: I was a leftist, feminist, nihilist, environmentalist, anarcho-pacifist. . . . Though taking questions of faith seriously, I wasn’t interested in any specific religion, and the difference between “religiosity” and “spirituality” was lost on me. Nevertheless, having also spent several years of my childhood with my maternal grandmother, I had a feeling there was more to this universe than I could take in with my five limited senses. But the truth is, I wasn’t interested in understanding the world. I wanted only to change it.

  Then one day Dame Dervish came into my life. She introduced herself as my spiritual side and explained to me that the Creator was not a nucleus of “fear,” but a Fountain of Limitless Love. A kind of wonder possessed me. At first, her very presence in my life was more intriguing than anything she said. Around her was an aura of light and calmness, like the moonlight shining on a gently rolling sea. Motivated by her, I started to read about Sufism. One book led to another. The more I read the more I unlearned. Because that is what Sufism does to you, it makes you “erase” what you know and what you are so sure of. Then you start thinking again. Not with your mind this time, but with your heart.

  Of all the Sufi poets and philosophers that I read about during those years there were two that moved me deeply: Rumi and his legendary spiritual companion, Shams of Tabriz. Living in thirteenth-century Anatolia, in an age of deeply embedded bigotries and clashes, they had stood for a universal spirituality, opening their doors to people of all backgrounds equally. They spoke of love as the essence of life, their universal philosophy connecting all humanity across centuries, cultures and cities. As I kept reading the Mathnawi, Rumi’s words began to tenderly remove the shawls I had always wrapped around myself, layer upon layer, as if I were always in need of some warmth coming from outside. I understood that no matter what I chose to be—“leftist,” “feminist” or anything else—what I most needed was an intimate connection with the light inside me. The light of Truth that exists inside all of us.

  Thus began my interest in Sufism and spirituality. Over the years it would ebb and flow. Sometimes it was more vivid and visible, at other times it receded to the background, faint and dusky, like the remains of a candle still burning, but at no stage in my life did it ever disappear.

  Then why is it that now, after having devoured so many books on spirituality and religious philosophy, after having been through thick and thin with Dame Dervish, I once again feel like that timid girl in Smyrna? These days I cannot raise my eyes to the sky for fear that God might be looking down at me with his brows drawn over his eyes. Is that what depression is about—the sinking feeling that your connection to God is broken and you are left to float on your own in a liquid black space, like an astronaut who has been cut loose from his spaceship and all that linked him to Earth?

  PART SIX

  Dark Sweetness

  The pen puts its head down

  To give a dark sweetness to the page.

  —Rumi

  A Djinni in the Room

  One morning in November when I wake up, I sense a strange presence in the room. The baby is two months old and is sleeping better now. There is a dusky light penetrating through the curtains, a whispery sound in the background and a perfumed smell in the air. I shiver as if being pushed into a Murakami novel where everything is surreal.

  There is a creature in the corner—not human, not animal, not like anything I have seen before. He is as dark gray as storm clouds, as tall as a tower, as elusive as a will-o’-the-wisp. He has a long, black ponytail, though he has dyed a clump of it white and let it hang across his face. A diamond the size of a hazelnut glitters on one ear. His face is small, his goatee is tiny, but his fiery eyes appear enormous behind his metal-rimmed spectacles. One second he stretches up, his head reaching the ceiling; the next he widens, spreading from one end of the room to the other. Like thick cigar smoke he drifts in the air. In his hand he carries a beautiful cane and on his head is a silk top hat.

  I immediately recognize him as one of the djinn my maternal grandmother warned me against in my childhood. I don’t know anything about their sexual orientation, but this one seems gay to me.

  “Who are you?” I ask fretfully.

  “Ah, but don’t you recognize me?” he says, chivalrous and poised, as if he were a brave knight and I, a damsel in distress.

  “No, what do you want?”

  “Please, cheri,” he says snippily. “Have you never heard of the djinni who haunts new mothers?”

  I give a sobbing breath and my face gets hot. “My grandma says there is a djinni named Alkar1s1, known to molest women who have recently given birth.”

  He cracks a laugh. “The times are changing fast, cheri. Alkar1s1 is so old-school. She retired long ago, that minx. Today nobody knows about her anymore. She wouldn’t make it to the top ten.”

  I am surprised to hear the djinn have a top ten list, but instead of asking about this, I remark, “I didn’t know you guys could age.”

  Taking a napkin from his pocket, he begins to wipe his glasses. “Of course we do age, though we haven’t lost our minds over Botox creams, like your kind. At least not yet—”

  I look at him more closely, only now suspecting that he might not be as young as he looks.

  Putting his glasses back on, he continues: “Of course, we don’t age as quickly as you poor sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. Your ten years are approximately”—he makes some calculations in his head—“equal to 112 years in djinn time. So a hundred-year-old djinni is just a kid where we come from. As for Alkar1s1, how should I put it? Her name is synonymous with nostalgia.”

  “Do djinn have nostalgia?”

  “Not us, you guys do! Don’t you ever watch Disney movies? They use us as decor. I mean, what is that thing about the djinni in a lamp? We are living in the twenty-first century, hello! No one hangs out in lamps anymore!”

  “Do djinn find Disney movies politically incorrect?” I ask, mesmerized.

  “You, too, would feel the same way if your kind were portrayed as pudgy-bellied, five-chinned, blue ogres with baggy trousers and fezzes on their heads,” he flares. “Don’t you see we’ve all adjusted to the times? I go to the gym four days a week and I don’t have an extra ounce of fat on my body.”

  “Who are you, for God’s sake?!”

  Like a good gentleman he tips his hat and bows to me with a roguish smile. “My sincere apologies if I forgot to introduce myself. I am your obedient servant, the Djinni of Postpartum Depression. Otherwise known as Lord Poton.”

  I feel a chill go down my spine. “What do you want?” I ask, although I am not sure I want to hear the answer.

  “What do I want?” he prompts. “It is a good question because, as it happens, my wish is your command.”

  “Hmm, shouldn’t it be the other way round?”

  “As I said, forget those clichés. Let’s get to know each other better.”

  Lord Poton is such a shifty being that I don’t immediately realize how creepy he can be. For the first couple of days I watch him more out of curiosity than worry. Little do I realize that he is settling in during that time, making himself at home. Then one day, he produces a lockbox.

  “What is that?”

  “It’s my gift to you,” he says, grinning. “Don’t you always complain about how your finger-women tire you out with their endless
quarrels?”

  “Yes, but—” I say tentatively.

  “Good, I will lock them all away so that they won’t bother you anymore.”

  “Wait a minute,” I object. “I want no such thing.”

  But he doesn’t listen to me. “My wish is your command, remember,” he whispers, as if to himself. Then he stretches out his manicured nails and pulls the members of the Choir of Discordant Voices out of me, one by one.

  The first to get caught is Milady Ambitious Chekhovian.

  “What do you think you are doing, mister?” she admonishes him as he holds her by the nape of her neck and forces her into the box. “I have important things to do! Let go of me!”

  Next comes Little Miss Practical. I would have expected her to follow the course of least resistance and surrender, but apparently she finds swearing more practical. Smoldering with anger, she yells, “Yo, who do you think you are? You moron! Get your hands off me!”

  “Please don’t bother, I will go where I need to go,” says Dame Dervish as she walks with dignity into the box.

  “Poton, darling, why the rush? Why don’t we talk first tête-à-tête? Just the two of us. May I call you Potie?” says Blue Belle Bovary, pouting her lips, tilting her head to one side, trying to use her feminine wiles to get herself off the hook. Despite her best efforts, she, too, is sent into the box.

  “But I have lentil soup on the stove, you cannot arrest me now,” begs Mama Rice Pudding.

  Finally comes Miss Highbrowed Cynic. “You call yourself ‘Lord’ and you think you represent the black sun of melancholy. But you seem to have forgotten that that sun is not solely a destructive force. As Julia Kristeva said, ‘melancholy is amorous passion’s somber lining.’”

  “Ughh?” asks Lord Poton, sounding seriously confused, but he tucks her into the box anyhow.