Black Milk (32 page)

O
ne sunny day in August, when the plums in the garden had ripened to purple perfection, Eyup came back from the military, looking thinner and darker. He didn’t say a word for a long time, only smiled. Then I heard him in the bathroom, talking lovingly to the shampoo bottles, perfumes and creams.

“You don’t say hi to your wife, but you chat with your shaving cream?” I asked.

He laughed. “In the army one gets to miss even the tiniest luxuries in life and learns to be grateful for what he has on hand.”

“Perhaps depression teaches us the same thing, too,” I said. “I’ve learned to look around with new, appreciative eyes.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be with you,” he murmured, pulling me toward him. Then he added pensively, “We could have handled this better.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why didn’t we ask for help from our families or friends while you were going through that turbulence? Why didn’t we hire a nanny to help you? You tried to do everything alone. Why?”

I nodded. “I thought I could manage. I thought I could rock the baby to sleep, feed her healthy food and write my novels. It never occurred to me I wouldn’t be able to do this alone. That was my strength and my weakness at the same time.”

“From now on, we will do it together,” he said tenderly.

“Good,” I exclaimed. “Are you going to take care of the baby while I write?”

He paused, a trace of panic flickering in his eyes. “Let’s start looking for a nanny.”

We did. In ten days we found a nanny from Azerbaijan, a woman larger than life—huge breasts, teeth capped with gold, a loud voice and a hearty laugh. A bewildering combination of Mary Poppins, Xena the Warrior Princess and Impedimenta—the stout, matriarchal wife of Chief Vitalstatistix and the first lady of the village in Asterix the Gaul. A woman who could say the sweetest words in Turkish, talk a blue streak in Russian, and believed the main problem with Stalin was that he hadn’t had a good nanny as a child. She taught us the basics about babies—how to burp them, rock them to sleep, feed them, and still have time for ourselves. She helped us greatly. We all helped one another.

 

The same month, there was the anniversary of a liberal newspaper’s literature supplement. When I went to the place of celebration, I found a crowd of novelists, poets, critics, local and foreign reporters, photographers and academics drinking wine out of paper cups, nibbling cheese cubes and milling about garrulously. As in most social activities in Istanbul there was a thick, gray haze that swirled around in lazy spirals, the smoke of all those cigarettes, cigars and pipes hovering in the atmosphere. But we were on a terrace and the air beyond and above us was crisp, the sky a deep ocean blue.

It was there that, after all this time, I ran into Mrs. Adalet Agaoglu. She broke into a smile when she saw me.

“Do you remember the talk we had a while ago?” she said.

“How can I forget?” I said.

“I think you did the right thing by becoming a mother in the end,” she said, holding my hand in her hand, my eyes in her stare.

I gently squeezed her hand, and offered humbly in return, “And I respect your decision not to become a mother so as to fully dedicate yourself to your writing.”

After all, as even the smallest glimpse into the lives of women writers—East and West, past and present—keenly shows, every case is different. There is no single formula for motherhood and writing that suits us all. Instead, there are many paths on this literary journey, all leading to the same destination, each equally valuable. Just as every writer learns to develop his or her own unique style and is yet inspired by the works of others, as women, as human beings, we all elaborate our personal answers to universal questions and needs, heartened by one another’s courage.

Later on, as I watched Mrs. Agaoglu walk away from the party and the evening come to a slow close, I realized the wheel of life had moved through one full turn.

I
hold the lockbox tightly in my lap, listening. Not a sound. Not a peep. My heart pummels wildly. Are they all right? I have missed them so much my eyes water.

A little bit of twisting and the lock opens with a click.

“Please come out,” I say.

Nothing moves for a full minute. Then, shielding their eyes from the sudden light, weary but otherwise in good shape, the finger-women start to emerge one by one.

“Finally, freedom!” says Mama Rice Pudding. “My back has gone stiff. What a terrible experience. No refrigerator, no microwave, no rice cooker. I couldn’t even brew tea for months!”

Miss Highbrowed Cynic’s head pops up next. Gathering the skirts of her hippie dress, she walks out, a haughty look on her small face.

“You speak for yourself. I’m pretty sure this existential torment we now left behind will generate an artistic breakthrough in me. The Greek philosophers thought melancholy wasn’t necessarily a bad experience. According to Plato, for instance, melancholy could increase the quality of artistic production. . . .”

“Oh, give me a break,” grumbles Milady Ambitious Chekhovian. With her tiny frame she struggles to climb atop the box and manages to sit herself on the lid, fixing her hair. “I can’t believe how much precious time we lost inside this penitentiary. That djinni literally stole eight months of our life! Oh, the things we could have achieved in all that time.”

“Yo, is that ogre gone?” asks Little Miss Practical as she gets out and glances around.

“Yes, don’t worry. He has gone,” I say.

Little Miss Practical smiles, something of her old mischief twinkling in the depths of her eyes. “Wait a sec. Did you rush here to release us first thing?”

“Yes, I did,” I say. “Because I missed you very much.”

“Did you miss me, too, darling?” asks Blue Belle Bovary, blowing me a kiss with her cherry-red lips. “Even me?”

“Also you,” I say. “There is no ‘even’ about it. I missed all of you equally.”

“What do you mean?” says Blue Belle Bovary. “You never treated us equally.”

“You’re right. It was a mistake and I apologize to all of you. From now on, I’m not going to censure any of you, you will all have an equal say. We are a democracy now.”

“At long last,” says Dame Dervish with a genuine smile. “That’s what I wanted all along. That’s fantastic!”

For the first time in my life, I realize, I see them as One—inseparable pieces of the same whole. When one is out in the cold, they all shiver. When one is hurt, they all bleed. When one is happy and fulfilled, all benefit from her bliss.

When Milady Ambitious Chekhovian and Miss Highbrowed Cynic launched a coup d’état that long-ago night, it was because I wanted to suppress my maternal side. I wasn’t ready to meet Mama Rice Pudding. And the oath I took under the Brain Tree was because I was not at peace with my body. I wasn’t open to Blue Belle Bovary. Mama Rice Pudding’s absolute monarchy during the pregnancy was a result of my belief that my other inner voices were not compatible with motherhood. At every turn, I would put one finger-woman on a pedestal at the expense of all the others.

I am all of them—with their faults and virtues, pluses and minuses, all their stories make up the book of me.

 

Hélène Cixous—scholar, essayist, literary critic, writer and one of the most original and critical voices of our times—says her text is written in white and black, in milk and night. Patriarchy, for her, does not exist outside the realm of aesthetics and poetics. She analyzes the Freudian approach that sees woman as “lack,” replacing it with “woman as excess.” She describes women’s writing by using metaphors of childbirth, breast-feeding and allusions to the female body. “It is important to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an importance that will remain, for this practice will never be theorized, enclosed, encoded—which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.”

For Cixous motherhood is a fulfilling experience, the most intense relationship that a human being has with another human being. Though she draws a line between the cultural and the biological, the latter is not insignificant for her. Female biology is an inspiration for her figurative way of writing. “I’m brimming over! My breasts are flowing. Milk. Ink. Nursing time. . . .” Cixous is a scholar who is both critical of and supportive toward women writers. She thinks instead of “undermining patriarchy from within,” many female authors have chosen to write like men, repeating the same codes and stereotypes. She advocates a new writing based on the libidinal economy of the feminine, an
écriture féminine,
that is critical of logocentrism and phallocentrism and operates outside and under these terrains, like underground tunnels made by moles.

There is no social change without linguistic change. Women need to break their silence. They need to write. “We should write as we dream,” she says.

Ursula K. Le Guin is one of my favorite women writers. When asked what she would be if she weren’t a writer, she answered: dead. From the day she started writing at the age of five to the present she has never slowed down. Though always prolific and creative in several genres, she said writing was never easy. “The difficulty of trying to be responsible, hour after hour, day after day for maybe twenty years, for the well-being of children and the excellence of books, is immense: it involves an endless expense of energy and an impossible weighing of competing priorities.” Despite the difficulties involved, she says the hand that rocks the cradle writes the book.

Placing the finger-women on my writing desk, I hug all six of them. Giggling, they hug me back.

Miss Highbrowed Cynic, Milady Ambitious Chekhovian, Little Miss Practical, Mama Rice Pudding, Dame Dervish, Blue Belle Bovary and voices that I have not yet met stand next to one another. No one tries to rule the others, no one is a dictator. No one is wearing a crown or carrying badges. Not anymore.

This is not to say that they agree on every issue. But by listening, not just talking, they are learning the art of coexistence. They now know that to exist freely and equally, they need one another, and that where even one voice is enslaved none can be free. Together we are learning how to live, write and love to the fullest by simply being all of who we are. Sometimes we manage this beautifully and artlessly; sometimes we fail ridiculously. When we fail we remember the moments of harmony and grace, and try again.

That, pretty much, is the pattern of my progress in life: Take a step forward, move on, fall down, stand up, go back to walking, trip over and fall down on my face again, pull myself up, keep walking . . .

T
he next year I finished my new novel,
The Forty Rules of Love,
which became a record best seller in Turkey. I went back to giving interviews, writing columns and essays, attending literary festivals and commuting between cultures like I always did. I stopped teaching at the University of Arizona, as it proved impossible to travel with a baby for so many hours. Instead we made a new beginning in London, spending half the year there, half the year in Istanbul. I learned to fuse a nomadic existence with the requirements of a settled life.

Our daughter’s name is Shehrazad Zelda—the former from the charming storyteller of the East, the latter from Zelda Fitzgerald. Eighteen months later we had a son, Emir Zahir—the former from the old traditions of the East, the latter from a story by Borges, “The Zahir,” and a book by Paulo Coelho,
The Zahir.

In everything I wrote and did, I was, and still am, greatly, gratefully, inspired by Zelda and Zahir, and by the beauties and intensities of motherhood.

The second pregnancy was an easy one, and neither after the delivery nor in the months following it did I run into Lord Poton—or any of his relatives. I hear he is getting old and stiff with arthritis. Perhaps he will soon stop bugging new mothers altogether, preferring to spend his time shining his lamp.