Black Milk (6 page)

“Be quiet,” says her mother, the tenderness in her gaze not matching the sharpness in her tone.

“But what is going on, Mother?” asks Firuze in a horrified whisper.

“It happens to all women,” replies her mother. “Just don’t tell anyone about it, especially your brothers. Here, take these cloths and go clean yourself.”

“It happens to all women,” Firuze repeats incredulously.

“That is right, and it means you are not a girl anymore. From now on you have to watch how you behave. You cannot run around or skip rope. You cannot talk loudly or giggle. You are a woman now.”

When? Why? How did she switch from girlhood to womanhood? She had always thought becoming a woman was like walking a long, winding road with trees on each side, learning your way step by step. Why had no one told her that it was, in fact, a trapdoor you stepped on and tumbled into without knowing it was there?

Firuze feels dirty and guilty, not due to something she has done, but due to what she
is
. Her grandmother tells her not to touch the Qur’an until her bleeding has stopped and she has thoroughly cleansed herself. It seems even God doesn’t want her anymore.

Firuze feels hurt. The color goes from her face, the smile from her eyes. That carefree girl whose laughter echoed in the house like a dozen tinkling bells is now replaced by a woman whose body weighs down on her. Her head bent low, her face clouded by thoughts, Firuze is in a foreign land even as she sits by the brazier with Reality.

The elders of the family do not take their eyes off her, whispering among themselves about possible suitors. Matchmakers come and go, bearing
lokum
wrapped in silk handkerchiefs. As her parents haggle for her bridal price, it becomes ever more important that Firuze be modest. But no matter how strictly they supervise her, they can’t stop her from running up to the second floor and pressing her nose into the latticed windows. She stays there until the holes leave marks on her face like chicken pox, inhaling the smell of the wild herbs carried by the wind from the valleys afar.

If only she could walk out of the house and find a caravan that would take her beyond the city of Karbala to the ends of the world. She wants to go to school like her brother Fuzuli, and study theology,
tafsir
⁴
, astronomy and alchemy. If only she could walk along the streets proudly carrying books and brick-thick dictionaries under her arms. If only her parents would say, “Well done, Firuze. May you become a great poet like your brother, God willing!”

Firuze has a secret she won’t reveal to anyone: For years now she has been writing poems. In the beginning she used to scribble down whatever was weighing on her heart, without any expectations, as if talking to herself. Before long she realized that this, to her, was more than a pastime. It was a passion.

Her writing progresses like an illness that has infected and invaded her body and soul. More often than not, inspiration comes at dawn. She rises before the morning breaks, puts a shawl on her thin shoulders and starts to write. Those who hear the soft tinkering from her room think she has risen to pray. They don’t know that in a way she has. Poetry to her is true prayer, rising from the depths of her soul, addressed to a force far higher and mightier. If there were no poetry, Firuze believes, God would be too lonely.

She reads the works of other poets, especially the Iranian Hafiz and the Turkish Nesimi. She also adores her brother’s poems, one of which she came across today and instantly memorized:

Though she loved the poem she couldn’t help thinking that only a man who had been well educated and versed in grammar and language could make such a statement. For Firuze, and all who had been excluded from school, knowledge was surely much more than gossip.

It was burning thirst.

 

There is an aged concubine, a woman with skin darker than ebony, who has been taking care of Firuze since the day she was born. When she walks she glides across the room as silent as silk; when she talks, she does so in whispers. One morning while crocheting a lace bedspread together, Firuze turns to her nanny and says, “I want to go to the madrassa
⁵
and be a famous poet.”

“Is that so?” The nanny chuckles, her large breasts jiggling.

“Why are you laughing?” says Firuze, sounding hurt.

“Allow me to tell you a story first,” the nanny says, suddenly serious again.

And this is the story she tells: One day Nasreddin Hodja was working in a watermelon patch when he stopped for a break and sat under a walnut tree. Looking up, he murmured to himself, “God Almighty, I don’t understand Your ways. Why on earth did You grow huge watermelons on the thinnest stems and put those tiny little walnuts on those thick branches? Wouldn’t it have been better the other way around?”

Just as he finished speaking a strong wind blew and a walnut fell down from the tree, falling square on his head.

“Ouch!” Nasreddin Hodja yelled in pain. As he massaged his bruised head, he understood his mistake. “God forgive me and my silly tongue,” he said. “Now I understand why You didn’t place watermelons on a tree. If Thou had replaced watermelons for walnuts, I wouldn’t be alive now. Keep everything in its place, please. You know better!”

Firuze listens, hardly breathing. “What’s that got to do with me?”

“Crazy girl, don’t you see?” the nanny asks. “Who has ever heard of a female poet? There is a reason why God made everything as it is and we’d better respect that reason, lest we want watermelons raining on our heads.”

That afternoon Firuze walks into the backyard. She walks past the well straight to the hen coop in the corner. Opening the small wooden gate, she enters, inhaling the pungent smell of earth, dust and dirt. Neither the rooster nor the chickens pay attention to her. The hen coop is her room. This place, with its sharp odor and noisy residents, is her only breathing space.

Under the feeding bowls, inside a velvet box, she keeps her poems. Cleaning off the dust, she grabs the box and goes to see her brother.

“Hey, little sister, what are you doing?” Fuzuli says, surprised to see her standing by the door.

She hands her poems to him, the smile on her face as tight as an oud string. “Read them, will you?”

He does. Time slows down and moves to a different rhythm, like a sleepwalker. After what seems like an eternity, Fuzuli lifts his head, a new flicker in his eyes that wasn’t there before.

“Where did you find these poems?” he asks.

Firuze’s eyes flicker away from his face. She dares not say the truth. Besides, she wants to know whether her poems are any good. Does she really have talent?

“One of the neighbors came calling the other day. The poems belong to her son,” she says. “She implored you to take a look at them, and tell her, in all honesty, if her son has any talent.”

A shadow crosses Fuzuli’s face as if he were suspicious but when he speaks his voice is calm and assuring. “Tell that neighbor her son should come and see me. This young man has a great talent,” he says, stroking his long, brown beard.

Firuze is alight with joy. She plans to tell her brother the truth when the right moment comes along. If she can convince her brother, he can convince the whole family. They will understand how much words mean to her. Believing in poetry is believing in love. Believing in poetry is believing in God. How can anybody say no to that?

But the moment she waits for never comes. Only weeks after their conversation, Firuze is married off to a clerk eighteen years her senior.

 

With drums and tambourines they sing on her henna night. The women first dance and laugh with joy, then their faces crumble, awash with salty tears. On wedding days at the celebrations of women, and only then and there, happiness and sorrow become two different names for the same thing.

Due to her husband’s connections, it is decided that the couple shall settle down in Istanbul. Firuze is swept away from her home, her family and her childhood. As she leaves her house, she does not pay a last visit to the hen coop. She doesn’t care. Not anymore. Hidden in a hole under the feeding bowls, her poems go to waste. Her big secret turns to dust and the dust is swept away.

Months later in Istanbul, Firuze sits in a
konak
by the Bosphorus watching the dark indigo waters. She gags but manages not to throw up this time, being seven weeks into her pregnancy. She hopes it will be a son to carry her husband’s name across generations and to the ends of the Earth. Sometimes she utters poems but she doesn’t write them down anymore. The words she breathes disperse in the wind like shards of a broken dream she once had but can no longer remember.

Who knows how many women like Firuze lived throughout Middle Eastern history? Women who could have become poets or writers, but weren’t allowed. . . . Women who hid their masterpieces in hen coops or dowry chests, where they rotted away. Many years later, while telling stories to their granddaughters, one of them might say,

“Once upon a time I used to write poems. Did you know that?”

“What is that, Grandma?”

“Poetry? It is a magical place beyond the Kaf Mountain.”

“Can I go there, too? Can I?”

“Yes, my dear, you may go but you cannot stay there. A short visit is all you are allowed.”

And she would say this in a whisper, as if that, too, were a fairy tale. Perhaps the question that needs to be asked is not: Why were there not more female poets or writers in the past? The real question is: How was it possible for a handful of women to make it in the literary world despite all the odds?

When it comes to giving an equal chance to women like Firuze, the world has not advanced so very much. Still today, as Virginia Woolf argued, “when one reads . . . of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.”

Still today there remains a rule in place: Male writers are thought of as “writers” first and then “men.” As for female writers, they are first “female” and only then “writers.”

“A
re you all right?” Ms. Agaoglu asks. “You look like you’re miles away.” “Oh, do I?” I smile guiltily.

Glancing meaningfully across the table, she offers me another cup of tea and says, “Being a mother and a writer are not opponents, perhaps, not necessarily. But they are not best buddies either.”

My mind acts like a computer gone awry. Names and pictures bounce around on the screen, disconnected and displaced. I think of women writers who are also mothers: Nadine Gordimer, Margaret Atwood, Annie Proulx, Anita Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Naomi Shihab Nye, Anne Lamott, Mary Gordon, Anne Rice, the legendary Cristina di Belgioioso. . . . A large number of female writers have one or two children. But there are also those, like Ursula K. Le Guin, who are mothers of three or more.

Yet at the same time, there are also many poets and writers who did not have children, for their own good reasons. Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Emily Brontë, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein, Patricia Highsmith, Jeanette Winterson, Amy Tan, Sandra Cisneros, Elizabeth Gilbert . . .

Then there are female writers who chose to both give birth and adopt. Of these, the most remarkable is a woman who was not only a prolific writer but also an advocate of racial and sexual equality, a woman with a great heart, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pearl S. Buck.

Noticing that the adoption system in America discriminated against Asian and black children in favor of white, in the early 1950s Buck decided to fight the system and help the disempowered. After a long struggle she founded the Welcome House—the first international, interracial center for adoption—and changed the lives of countless children. While doing all of this, she never gave up literature, or slowed down her writing. Quite to the contrary, her motherhood and activism seem to have propelled her career as a writer.

Last, there are also women writers who
might
have wanted to have children, but their husbands didn’t, and therefore neither did they. Many believe that that was the case with the renowned British writer Iris Murdoch. There have been claims that her husband, John Bayley, never wanted to have kids and she went along with his wishes. A biography published after Murdoch’s death outlined this lesser-known side of their relationship, causing quite a stir.

I try to find a formula, a golden formula, that could apply to most, if not all, women writers, but obviously there is none.

J. K. Rowling started writing the Harry Potter series after her son was born and dedicated the subsequent books to her newborn daughter. She says motherhood gives her inspiration. One assumes that a mother who writes about magic must be telling supernatural stories when she tucks her children into bed, but J. K. Rowling says she doesn’t believe in witchcraft, only in religion. I don’t know how smoothly her household runs, but Rowling seems to have a real knack for fusing motherhood and writing.

Then there is Toni Morrison, who had two small sons that she was raising by herself when she first began to write. For many years she could not work in the daylight hours, her rendezvous with pen and paper taking place before dawn, when the boys would wake up. As difficult as life was for her then, she says she drew inspiration from each hardship.