Women Who Blow on Knots

by Ece Temelkuran

  Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  About the Translator

  Quotes

  Women Who Blow On Knots

  Tunisia

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  Libya

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  Egypt

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  Lebanon

  32

  33

  34

  Copyright

  Praise

  Ece Temelkuran is one of the Turkey’s best known novelists and political commentators. She has contributed to the Guardian, Newstatesman, New Left Review, Le Monde Diplomatique, Frankfurter Rundschau, Der Spiegel,The New York Times and Berliner Zeitung.

  Her books of investigative journalism broach subjects that are highly controversial in Turkey, such as the Kurdish and Armenian issues and freedom of expression.

  Her novel Düğümlere Üfleyen Kadınlar (Women Who Blow on Knots) won a PEN Translates award, sold over 120,000 copies in Turkey and has been published in translation in Germany, Croatia, Poland, Bosnia and France with editions also forthcoming in China, Italy and the USA.

  Temelkuran was born into a political family in Izmir, known to be the most liberal city in the country. Educated as a lawyer in the capital city Ankara, she never practiced the profession except once to defend Kurdish children in a political class action as a symbolic act. Bored by Law School, she started to work for the newspaper Cumhuriyet during her second year at the university in 1993.

  Her first novel, Women Are All Confused, was published in 1996, while she was working as a journalist. 20 years later the book is a touring stage play and performed in several cities in Turkey.

  Then, as her journalism at the time was focusing on political prisoners and the Kurdish issue, she wrote My Son My Daughter My State – Mothers of Political Prisoners (1997). Afterwards, she moved to Istanbul to work for CNN International and carried on publishing her literary work including The Book of Inside (2000) and The Book of Edge (2010).

  When she became a columnist for Milliyet, reality occupied her life, prevailing over literary truth. She started publishing her collection of articles and reportage, The Words from the Edge. She travelled to Venezuela when Chavez came to power in order to write, We are Making a Revolution Here, Señorita! which became a bestseller. She followed the piqueteros movement in Buenos Aires after the economic crisis and World Social Forums in Brazil and in India.

  In 2006, while she was travelling to report from Malaysian, Russian, Iranian, Lebanese and European cities, her friend Hrant Dink encouraged her to travel to Armenia for reportage on the Armenian dispute, considered to be the toughest taboo in Turkey. After Armenia she travelled to France and to the US to meet the Armenian diaspora. The Armenian journalist Dink was assassinated in 2007. To fulfil her promise to him she wrote The Deep Mountain – Across the Turkish-Armenian Divide. The book is dedicated to Dink and she spent a year in Oxford as a visiting fellow of Saint Anthony’s College to write it.

  Temelkuran went to Beirut in 2008, a city she fell in love with while she was reporting from Lebanon after the 2006 Israel attack. She was planning to write a non-fiction book on Hezbollah but then, realising that it was time to turn back to literature, she started writing Banana Sounds, a love story combined with the unmentionable love of war, as romantic as it sounds.

  She stayed in Beirut for almost a year to finish the novel, which has now been published in several languages. Due to political reasons, continuing with journalism became harder in the country. In 2012 she was fired from her job because of two articles she wrote about a massacre that left dozens of Kurdish children dead on the Turkish-Iraqi border, and the story was covered by the international media including The Wall Street Journal.

  By then she had moved to Tunisia to write her novel, Women Who Blow on Knots. The novel has been published in several countries with the title What good is a revolution if I cannot dance to it. The original title is taken from the Koran and refers to witches practising witchcraft by blowing on knots.

  Although she decided not to go back to journalism after the Gezi uprising in 2013, she edited the socialist newspaper Birgün for several months as a supportive act. She gave speeches about the Gezi uprising in the House of Commons and at the Geneva Film Festival among several other venues. Since then her articles have appeared in several international media platforms including the Guardian and Der Spiegel. She was invited to Amsterdam as a writer in residence and gave the Freedom Lecture for the year 2013.

  The lively political climate in the country stimulated her to write her political novel on Turkey, Time of Mute Swans, set in Ankara in the summer of 1980. It has been published in Germany and the US. Her political narrative non-fiction on Turkey – Turkey: The Insane and Melancholy (Euphorie und Wehmut / Zed Books) – has been reviewed widely in the German and British media.

  She divides her time between Istanbul and Zagreb.

  Praise for Ece Temelkuran:

  ‘Temelkuran opens a battle against uniformed Muslim literary female characters.’ – Özlem Ezer, Professor of Literature, Literary Critic

  ‘This is an extraordinary novel, a stunning road story, a bitter fairytale and an awakening dream.’ – Gülenay Börekçi – Literary Critic

  ‘I applaud Temelkuran for creating this piece of world literature which is ultimate magic.’ – Onur Bilge Kula – Professor of Literature

  “Ece Temelkuran’s second novel is like a firework. It is the book where Twitter and the Thousand and One Nights fairy tales meet.” – Professor Hannes Kraus, KulturWest, 2014 (Germany)

  “Women Who Blow On Knots is an extremely inspiring novel and it is the resistance of an independent intellectual” – Jean Baptiste Hamelin, Pages des Libraries, France

  “A loving, feminist and fairytale-like ‘partners in crime’ novel which is a breathtaking thriller at the same time.” – Le Progres Social, France

  "If you cannot think of a better road story with heroines other than Thelma & Louise, you should read this novel. Temelkuran opens a battle against uniformed Muslim literary female characters." – Özlem Ezer – Professor of Literature

  "This is an extraordinary novel, a stunning road story, a bitter fairytale and an awakening dream." – Gülenay Börekçi

  “The novel seems like a fairytale but actually it is also a first-class geopolitical analysis of today’s world.” – L’Alsace, Switzerland

  “Ece Temelkuran has ten thousand eyes to look at the world.” – Sabit Fikir,

  Author website: www.ecetemelkuran.com

  Twitter: @ETemelkuran

  Women Who Blow on Knots

  Translated by Alexander Dawe

  Ece Temelkuran

  About the Translator:

  Alexander Dawe studied French and Classical Guitar Performance at Oberlin College and Conservatory. He has translated several contemporary Turkish novels, including Endgame by Ahmet Altan. In collaboration with Maureen Freely he has translated A Useless Man by Sait Faik Abasıyanık, The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar and The Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali. In 2010, he received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant to translate the short stories of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar. Currently he is tra
nslating a collection of short stories by Ercan Kesal. He lives and works in Turkey, on the Prince Islands Archipelago, in the sea of Marmara near Istanbul.

  “Say, I seek refuge in the Lord at daybreak. From the evil of that which He created. And from the evil of darkness when it settles. And from the evil in the blowers of knots. And from the evil of an envier when he envies.”

  Al-Falaq Verse 1-5

  (The Holy Koran, Sahih International)

  “But audiences no longer react well to heavy historical self-ironisation. They might at a pinch accept it from a man, but not from a woman.

  Elizabeth Costello, J.M. Coetzee

  “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”

  Emily Dickinson

  Women Who Blow On Knots

  Tunisia

  We are on the run. Barrelling south in a white car at a hundred and forty kilometres an hour. I’m in the back. On my left a woman with a yellow wig aslant on her head, as still as stone. On my right a bald woman wearing a white headscarf, her leg bouncing up and down. An old one-eyed man is at the wheel. An old grey-haired woman dressed in lilac silk is riding shotgun with her face to the wind, without a care in the world.

  The bald woman says, “Where are we going?”

  The old woman says, “South.”

  Angry, the bald woman digs in. “Just how far south?”

  The old woman replies, “Way down south.”

  Not long ago I was about to make my way back to Istanbul. Now I am on the brink of the most terrifying and wonderful trip I have ever taken. I remember how it all began but to this day I still have a hard time believing it ever really happened.

  1

  I was trying to fall asleep when I heard slippers on the stone steps in the hotel. I heard footsteps. Even over all the noise from the wedding. The howling and fireworks. It had to be a woman’s step. Light and young. Then another woman climbed the stairs. I heard her, too. I heard her little feet. I heard her nightdress, the sound of cloth. Thin cotton cloth. From her small steps I could even hear how tightly it clung to her body – and I knew the dress was white. But that night I wanted to be alone. Fired from my job at the paper I had no desire for life.

  I was hungry and exhausted. After I’d complained to the receptionist for mixing up my registration, she’d got her own back and by the time I realized what was happening it was too late. It was the middle of the night but she’d said, “Of course” and only later would I understand that blank look in her eyes: she was a little devil.

  After an awkward silence I’d asked her if the restaurants were open in the old city. “Of course,” she’d said and I’d slipped into a dark labyrinth, shadows swirling out of every corner. Shadows you always see when you arrive in a city for the first time and wander off in the wrong direction. In the morning I knew I would wake up to realize that if I’d only walked the other way I would have ended up in the heart of town. But a traveller at night is no match for misfortune. Hunted down by all kinds of shadows, I made it back to my room at the Dar el-Medina, the window looking inwards. I skimmed hopelessly through Saudi channels brimming with discussions about the Koran. I struggled in vain to get online and I resigned myself to the fact that I would never kill the lone mosquito buzzing about the room … so I tried falling asleep. That’s when I heard the slippers.

  Laughter: I started, as if a deer had just darted across my path. I heard a woman press her foot against her thigh, like a stork. I heard her slipper drop. I heard broken conversation. Then fingers over the jasmine blooming in the courtyard. I heard a flower being picked, branches bending. I suppose you only listen carefully to the sounds of the night when you’re looking for adventure. Grabbing the bottle of whisky I’d bought last minute at the airport, I pinched three glasses between my fingers.

  They stopped talking when they heard me coming. Two women leaning against the low white terrace walls of an old Tunisian villa now the Dar el-Medina Hotel, elbows on the low walls, hips pushed out. On our faces that stupid smile a tourist gets when she asks for her differences to be forgiven.

  Their nightgowns really were white. And yes, the one with bigger hips had pressed her alluring foot against her thigh, just like a stork – she was more confident and more flirtatious than the other woman. “I can’t sleep with all this noise,” I said in English. Clearly we were all from the lower hemisphere but I didn’t want to make things difficult by choosing one Arabic dialect over another. “The wedding, right? Come join us,” said the one with the hips. “Come,” echoed the other. They both spoke in Arabic. A word was enough to tip me off as to where they were from. The bubbly little one with the big hips was Tunisian – she hadn’t used the feminine ending on her invitation. The other spoke with a stronger accent; she was a bold, shadowy, mysterious Egyptian, with the taut, tall body of a man. The Tunisian was the perfect little lady, sweet and more womanly. Then a firework cracked over our heads and we suddenly felt freed from the usual social niceties. I moved closer, putting the glasses on the low white wall. I looked at them to be sure … yes, everyone was drinking.

  “You can’t really see the wedding from here,” said the bold Egyptian.

  “Look from here,” said the Tunisian, pointing to one side.

  Searching for the wedding, I said, “So this must be one of the wonders of Tunis. All the terraces are hidden from each other, no?”

  “That’s right,” said the Tunisian with the hips. “The genius of the our country’s architecture. Somehow we found a way to live side by side without actually seeing each other.”

  I turned away to look for the wedding and give the two women the chance to study my face. Bending over the wall, I finally spotted the celebration on a terrace below, in a cluster of rectangles and squares. The terrace was sliced into triangles by strings of colourful bulbs; old women were dancing and young girls were giggling with shame after every cry, covering their faces with hennaed hands. In her billowing gown the bride looked like she had parachuted into enemy lines with no hope but to surrender. The guests all danced around her like savages who’d stumbled on a tasty dinner.

  “The bride looks miserable. I suppose it’s the fear of the first night,” I said, just making small talk.

  The Tunisian burst out laughing. The same peal of laughter I’d heard from my room.

  “That’s what I was saying. She’s in trouble tonight. Shock treatment!”

  The Egyptian cracked an awkward smile.

  “Maybe there is something to that old tradition among Tunisian Jews. You keep the bride absolutely still for twenty days, feeding her to fatten her up before consummation. Helps her withstand the brutal conditions of the first night.” To downplay the sudden confidence with her new friend, she added, “We just met.” A pause. Maybe she’d already forgotten the Tunisian’s name.

  “Where are you from?” said the Egyptian, adopting a serious tone. But the Tunisian steamrolled over the sudden formality: “It feels like we’ve known each other for years.”

  Ignoring her comment, the Egyptian turned to me. “You’re a journalist, right?”

  “You can tell in the dark?” I said.

  Letting out an exaggerated laugh, the Tunisian said, “No, but I get a sense of your taste in underwear.”

  I was quiet. A subtle tension crackled in the air. I didn’t appreciate the intimacy. But the Tunisian didn’t seem particularly bothered. Turning to the Egyptian in the hope of encouraging a little decorum, I said, “I was. Now I’m out of a job. So I thought I’d come here to write a book about the Arab Spring.”

  Then I asked, “And I suppose you’re an academic?”

  All of sudden the Egyptian was a little girl laughing at something funny that had happened to her on the way home from school. Her tough-guy persona retreated a little.

  “I’m Maryam,” she said. “I came to Tunisia today. And yes, Cairo American University History Department, at your service.”

  Although I was unimpressed by how freely the Tunisian was flashing her curves, I decided to give
her a chance.

  “I don’t take you for an academic.”

  “I came here tonight. From New York.” Pressing her glass of whisky to her lips, she smiled, drawing out the silence to set the stage for her opening act. And in neon lights, she said, “I’m Amira.” And nothing more.

  Another burst of fireworks exploded in the sky. We looked up. From up there the city must have looked like a giant dark crossword puzzle of terraces in the shapes of rectangles and squares. On one of the illuminated pieces was the first letter of the word for wedding and to finish the word you would have to switch on the lights of the surrounding terraces. We were three women standing on one of those dark squares, hidden from the naked eye. And only when the brightest firework burst open in the sky did we see each other’s faces for a moment in that drunken square; from the sky to our faces and from our faces to our bellies, we could make out our shoulders, breasts, arms and wrists in the cascading light. If it weren’t for her nightgown, Egyptian Maryam might have been mistaken for a boy. When she spoke you could feel the strength of her voice. Amira was shimmering in her nightgown like a fish. And when she shivered in a cool breeze it was like she was being kissed. Before I arrived it would have seemed like Maryam was the man and Amira the woman. Their opposing features highlighting their roles even more. We had stepped out onto this dark square of a giant puzzle to take refuge and watch the world from the dark.

  When the fireworks ended, curiosity drove me to ask Amira, “Why are you staying here?”

  Flashing me a wry smile she turned to the wedding, and in a voice stripped of any emotion, with no sign of the previous laughter, she said, “There was a revolution and my dad died. I’m in no mood to go home.”

  Maryam expressed her condolences in Arabic and I was silent. Looking up, Amira nodded at Maryam, and, unwinding the silence, she said.

  “It’s weird being a tourist in your own city. When you leave home and stay in a hotel, you become someone else. Like walking into your own life through another door … it’s nice in that way…” Nodding her head, she muttered under her breath, “…nice that way, nice that way.”