by Elif Shafak
So it is that all six members of the Choir of Discordant Voices find themselves trapped in a lockbox. The silence in the house is disconcerting.
“At last we are rid of the Thumbelinas!” says Lord Poton, the sweetness in his tone contradicting the sharpness of his glance. “They are all gone.”
“Yeah, they are,” I say.
“From now on there will be no one around to yammer at you. You will hear only my voice. Isn’t that great?”
I try to join his laughter, but it just doesn’t pass through my throat.
Quickly I assess the new situation: centralization of authority under a dictator, the suppression of alternate voices via violence, systematic usage of propaganda, absolute obedience to the leader . . . All the signs are here. Political scientists have widely analyzed the connection between fascism and economic depression. In my case, there is a connection between fascism and psychological depression.
Now I know that after oligarchy and martial law, after monarchy and anarchy, the days of fascism have arrived.
Womanhood as an Incomplete Narrative
Today Lou Andreas Salomé is less remembered as an author and intellectual in her own right than as the colorful and controversial woman behind several powerful men of letters. She is portrayed as the mysterious muse who inspired Rilke, Nietzsche and Freud to look more closely at womanhood and feminine creativity. Such descriptions, though no doubt intriguing, do not do justice to Salomé’s vision or versatility. In her time she was a famous author, which makes it hard to understand why her novels have been so widely forgotten today. In addition to fiction and plays, she wrote contemplative essays on a wide spectrum of topics such as Russian art, religious philosophy, theater and eroticism.
Born and raised in St. Petersburg, Salomé grew up with five brothers and was much loved and pampered by her father. As a child she had a special gift for telling stories, though she found it difficult to abandon her imaginary characters afterward. She felt guilty for leaving them. This tendency to blame herself for things for which she was not responsible would continue to haunt her throughout her entire life.
Salomé arrived in Zurich in 1880, only nineteen years old. She was beautiful, brilliant and dauntless. Almost instantly she was drawn to the avant-garde circles where she met Europe’s leading scholars and artists. With them she engaged in heated debates, surprising many with her self-confidence and zeal to learn. Women, in her eyes, could not be expected to just complement men, or be sidelined, silenced and strapped in housework and motherhood. A woman was an affirmative, inventive creator on her own—not an object to derive inspiration from, and thereby not necessarily a muse. Salomé believed that every attempt to control women would damage their natural, creative femininity.
Rilke adored her, seeing Salomé as the personification of sublime femininity. Inspired by her, he maintained that an artist, whether man or woman, had to bring out the feminine power within. Producing artwork was akin to childbearing, for through this process the artist gave birth to new ideas and visions. Rilke claimed that “one day . . . the woman will exist whose name will no longer signify merely the opposite of masculinity, but rather something in itself, something thought of in terms not of completion and limitation, but rather of life and existence.”
Yet it was rather ironic that it was Salomé who later convinced Rilke to modify his name on the grounds that it sounded “too effeminate.” The “Rene” in his name was changed to “Rainer,” though Rilke didn’t give up “Maria.” Thus he became Rainer Maria Rilke.
Salomé had a long affair with the author Paul Ree, and later got married to the linguistic scholar Carl Friedrich Andreas. Being a married woman didn’t seem to change her critical views on bourgeois marriage. She openly flirted with men, all of whom happened to be intellectuals or connoisseurs of the arts. The fact that she was married and had many lovers makes it difficult to understand how it was that she remained a virgin for long years. Her marriage was unconsummated. The powerful, independent writer and thinker was either scared of sexuality or unwilling to lose herself in an Other.
Nietzsche once said, “For the woman the man is a means: the end is always the child.” As compelling as it sounds, the statement did not apply to Lou Andreas Salomé. Not that she did not want to have children. She did. She even proclaimed motherhood as the highest calling for a woman. Her own childlessness was a source of regret and sorrow for her and she talked candidly, sometimes mordantly, about it. She interpreted the bond between the mother and the child as one that truly connected the Self to the Other.
Yet she also loved men. Those she treasured she did not see as a means to an end. In her eyes, each was a world unto himself. Like a housewife who took a special satisfaction in ironing out the wrinkles in a shirt, she patiently strived to smooth down the flaws in their personalities. She was an intuitive, insightful and controversial writer with strong opinions. Those who loved her—mostly men—loved her deeply; those who hated her—mostly women—did so with the same intensity.
Marguerite Duras—the diva of French literature according to many—was born in Saigon in 1914. Her parents were both teachers there, working for the French government. She lost her father at an early age, after which her mother remained in Indochina with her three children. The family did not have an easy life and there were financial problems deepened by quarrels and domestic violence. When Marguerite was a teenager she started having an affair with a wealthy Chinese man, a relationship she wrote extensively about in both her fiction and her memoirs.
At the age of seventeen she went to France, where she got married and wrote novels, plays, movie scripts, short stories and essays. She moved deftly between these different genres. When she wrote The Sea Wall, which was based on her childhood in Indochina, she and her mother had a huge quarrel about the way she had depicted her family. “Some people will find the book embarrassing,” she said. “That doesn’t bother me. I have nothing left to lose. Not even my sense of decency.”17 There is a scene in her memoirs where her mother reads the book for the first time upstairs and the writer waits anxiously for her approval downstairs. When she comes downstairs her mother’s face is stern, showing her dislike. She accuses Marguerite of distorting the truth and playing to the gallery of readers; Marguerite, in turn, defends her book and her right to blur fact and fiction.
If the past is a foreign land, Duras visited it often, coming back with different memories of the same events. “No other reason impels me to write of these memories, except that instinct to unearth,” she said. Her interpretation of the story originally told in The Lover, which was based on her affair as a teenager with a Chinese man twelve years her senior, subsequently changed from book to book. Though prolific and generous with her craft, Duras was a writer who did not shy from exploring the same themes over and over. After the turmoil of 1968, her writing took on a more political overtone. In tandem with the spirit of the period, the title of one of her books reads Destroy, She Said.
She lost her first child, carrying the loss and pain with her all through her life. She had a second child—a turning point after which she started running at breakneck speed from one task to another. Juggling motherhood, housework and writing books during the day, she would drink and socialize at night. She didn’t want to miss anything. Her marriage faltered under several pressures. She and her husband split but did not really separate—still spending time together, seeing to their son’s education. She had several other love affairs later on; she was a woman who could do neither without loving men nor without writing books.
Her passion for writing was commendable, yet her personality was overshadowed by self-obsession and self-absorption to the point of narcissism. She liked to be adored and praised, and retained a competitive, possessive spirit until the end. She did not speak to several members of her family and was widely criticized by critics and fellow writers for her egomania. Several times throughout her life, she lapsed into bouts of guilt, self-pity and alcoholism.
Rebecca W
est was a novelist, literary critic, travel writer and journalist. Born in 1892 as Cecily Isabel Fairfield, she adopted her nom de plume from a play by Ibsen, Rosmersholm. She began her writing career as a columnist for a suffragist weekly. As a young woman she embraced radical feminist and socialist views. Though she revised her views over the years, her concern for social justice and equality lasted a lifetime. In 1913 she met the famous science fiction writer H. G. Wells after writing an acerbic review of his novel Marriage. They fell in love, though Wells was twenty-six years her senior, and married. Their affair lasted ten years, and in 1914 their son, and her only child, Anthony, was born.
Striving as a single mother from then on, West started to write critical essays for various newspapers and magazines. She became one of the leading intellectuals of the time and a prolific novelist. Yet, in her private life, she was not always happy or successful. The relationship with Wells suffered from repeated ups and downs and she had several other affairs. In some ways she was like Lou Andreas Salomé, a sharpwitted woman in male intellectual and artistic circles, friend and lover.
Her relationship with her son was strained to the breaking point in later years. Anthony West, a gifted author himself, wrote a biography of his father that became very popular but made his mother very unhappy. Rebecca West accused her son of distorting reality, sharing private memories and, especially, unfairly degrading her as a bad mother. She sued him in order to prevent the publication of his semi-autobiographical novel Heritage. Perhaps what hurt her most was that she had raised him on her own while his father had been absent for most of the time and yet Anthony had written more favorably about his father than his mother. There were mutual accusations and the wounds were never fully healed. When Rebecca West died in 1983 her son was not with her. After her death, Anthony West published his Heritage and his tone toward his late mother remained critical, bitter.
Simone de Beauvoir once said a “woman is not a completed reality, but rather a becoming, and it is in her becoming that . . . her possibilities should be defined.” Lou Andreas Salomé, Marguerite Duras and Rebecca West, three headstrong women with different stories but similarly stormy lives, similarly dealing with issues of body, love and femininity, were women “becoming.”
Just like all of us.
Stranger in the Mirror
There should be a law forbidding people who are going through a depression to come anywhere near a mirror. They should be prevented, for their own good, from seeing their reflections until they are way out of their gloom. If for some reason a depressed person must look into a mirror, he or she ought to do so fleetingly. Mirrors are the worst objects you can have around when your self-esteem has hit rock bottom and there are dark clouds hovering above your soul.
Yet here I was, alone in the room, looking into a mirror for what felt like an eternity. It was a round mirror with budding and flowering roses carved in its silver frame and a reflection of a young woman staring back. Her hair was unwashed, her body was that of a rag doll and her eyes were immensely sad. Never lifting my gaze off her, I scrutinized this familiar stranger with a curiosity that verged on anger. As she was new to me, I couldn’t help wanting to know more about her. I was furious with her, too, because somehow she had replaced me. Of one thing I was sure: The woman in the mirror was sinking, and if she sank deeper, she would take me down with her.
In some parts of Turkey, elderly women believe that mirrors are not, and have never been, simple decorative objects. That is why they adorn not the fronts but the backs of mirrors and then hang them on the walls with their backs facing out. If and when a mirror has to be turned around, it is covered with a dark cloth—preferably black or red velvet. You move the cloth aside to take a peek at yourself when combing your hair or applying kohl, then you pull it back down. The surface of a mirror is thought to be too dangerous to leave exposed in the open for too long. It is an old Eastern tradition nowadays mostly forgotten, but there are still many grandmothers who see in every mirror a gateway to the unknown. If you look into a mirror for too long, there is a chance that the gate might suddenly open and suck you inside.
Around the globe there are several words that function like common currency. East or West, wherever you go, the words sound more or less the same in every language and culture. Television and telephone are the most well-known examples; Internet is yet another. And so is depression.
As common as the word depression is across languages, there are still noteworthy cultural differences. In Turkish, for instance, one says “I am at depression” instead of “I am depressed.” The word is used as if depression were less a state of mind than a specific area, a dark corridor with only a weak lightbulb to illuminate the place. The person who is depressed is thought to be not “here,” but in that “other space,” separated by glass walls.
Not only are the depressed in a different place but their relationship to time is also warped. Depression recognizes only one time slot—the past—and only one manner of speech: “If only.” People who are depressed have very little contact with the present moment. They live persistently in their memories, resurrecting all that has come and gone. Like a hamster on a wheel or a snake that has swallowed its tail, they are stuck in a roundabout of gloom.
That, pretty much, was my state of mind in the weeks that followed. Something had ripped inside of me, something I could not quite put my finger on, and through that opening in my soul all the anxieties and worries I had accumulated throughout the years were now pouring out in an unstoppable flood.
But what really made it worse was that I could not write anymore.
I was eight years old when I started writing fiction. My mother came home one evening with a turquoise notebook and asked me if I would like to keep a personal journal. In retrospect, I think she was slightly worried about my sanity. I was constantly telling stories, which was good, except that I told these to imaginary friends, which was not so good. So my mother thought it could do me good to write down my day-to-day experiences and emotions.
What she didn’t know was that I then thought my life was terribly boring. So the last thing I wanted to do was to write about myself. Instead I began writing about people other than me and things that never really happened. Thus began my lifelong passion for writing fiction, which from the very beginning I saw not so much as an autobiographical manifestation as a transcendental journey into other lives, other possibilities.
Now, however, I felt as if illiterate. Words that had been my lifelong companions abandoned me and dissolved into soggy letters, like noodles in alphabet soup.
Gradually, my condition became apparent to those around me.
Some people said, “You must be having a writer’s block or something. No big deal, it happens to everyone. It will pass.”
Others said, “It’s because you went through some pretty stressful days. You were brought to trial due to the words uttered by characters in your novel The Bastard of Istanbul. Being pregnant at the time, it was a taxing experience and took its toll.”
My maternal grandmother said, “Your depression must be the doing of the evil eye. May those malicious eyes close!”
A spiritual master I visited said, “Whatever the reason, you need to embrace your despair and remember, God never burdens us with more than we can bear.”
Finally, a doctor I consulted said, “Welcome to postpartum depression. Let’s start with two Cipralex a day and see how it goes. If you experience any mood changes down the road, you should immediately report them to me.”
“Thank you, Doc,” I said, putting the pills in my shirt pocket.
Cipralex, Xanax, Prozac . . . The trouble was, if I started taking them, my milk would have been affected, and I wanted to breast-feed.
That same afternoon, back at home, I thought hard about this dilemma and decided to give my Cipralex pills to the pink cyclamen in the kitchen. One in the morning and one in the evening, on an empty stomach. Every second day, the fuchsia in the sitting room got its share of Xanax. Four
times a week, I put Prozac into the gardenia’s soil and watered it to make it easier for the plant to gulp the pill down.
A month hadn’t passed when the cyclamen turned a color so dark it was almost purple and the fuchsia’s leaves went numb, unable to feel anything. The gardenia was perhaps the one that was most deeply transformed. What a blissful flower she had turned into—jovial and buoyant, cracking jokes, giggling from dawn to dusk.
My mood, on the other hand, remained the same.
Lord Poton and His Family
Today it is a well-known fact that many new mothers go through an emotional turbulence in the early stages of motherhood. Yet only a few actually get to meet Lord Poton. Most women come across his young, innocent nephew, and then there are a small number of women who, unfortunately, run into his nasty uncle.
1. Baby Blues (Poton’s nephew) Baby Blues is a low-key emotional imbalance that may occur immediately after the delivery. A harmless and frequent visitor to maternity wards, Poton’s nephew is not regarded as a serious problem.
2. Postnatal Psychosis (Poton’s uncle) This is the most dangerous and alarming psychological transformation that a new mother can go through. Those who come into contact with Lord Poton’s uncle can end up harming themselves, their children and their surroundings. It requires long-term and serious medical therapy to be rid of him.
3. Postpartum Depression (Lord Poton) As the lord of the djinn, he is estimated to appear to one out of ten new mothers. Usually he pays his first visit within four to six weeks after the delivery. He looks simple and innocuous at first, but gradually reveals his true colors.
Months into my depression, I began to read extensively on the subject, dying to learn the reason behind my condition, if there was one. I had stopped asking why this didn’t happen to other women. Now I wanted to understand why it happened to me. Thus I frequented Web sites, gathered brochures, devoured books and medical reports. Curiosity of this sort was pointless perhaps and yet it was essential for me to be able to move on.
