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

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART ONE - Life before Marriage

  Signs

  In the Beginning There Was Tea . . .

  A Talented Sister

  One More Cup of Tea

  The Harem Within

  Moon Woman

  PART TWO - Winds of Change

  What the Fishermen Know

  Of Poets and Babies

  The Midnight Coup d’État

  PART THREE - Brain Versus Body

  Where the Fairies Hang Out

  Women Who Change Their Names

  The Fugitive Passenger

  A Festive Banquet

  In Search of the Mother Goddess

  Normal on the Outside

  Sitting on the Edge

  Brain Tree

  A Mystery Called Brain

  PART FOUR - Never Say Never

  Sweet Love

  Madame Onion

  In Praise of Selfishness

  When the Grand Bazaar Smiles

  Little Women, Big Hearts

  One Blue, One Pink

  PART FIVE - Beautiful Surrender

  Pregnancy Journal

  Books and Babies

  A Sea without a Shore

  Why Are We Depressed When We Want to Be Happy?

  The Celestial Eye

  PART SIX - Dark Sweetness

  A Djinni in the Room

  Womanhood as an Incomplete Narrative

  Stranger in the Mirror

  Lord Poton and His Family

  Lord Poton and You

  Writer-Mothers and Their Children

  A Crystal Heart

  Farewell to a Djinni

  PART SEVEN - Daybreak

  The Calm after the Storm

  Rule of the Thumbelinas by the Thumbelinas

  Epilogue

  ALSO BY ELIF SHAFAK

  The Forty Rules of Love

  The Bastard of Istanbul

  The Saint of Incipient Insanities

  The Gaze

  The Flea Palace

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Elif Shafak, 2007

  Translation copyright © Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2011

  All rights reserved

  Originally published in Turkish as Siyah Sut by Dogan Egmont Yayincilik ve Yapimcilik Tic, A.S., Istanbul.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shafak, Elif, 1971–

  Black milk : on writing, motherhood, and the harem within / Elif Shafak ; translated by Hande Zapsu.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-51410-8

  1. Shafak, Elif, 1971–2. Authors, Turkish—21st century—Biography. I. Zapsu, Hande, 1983–II. Title.

  PL248.S474Z46 2011

  894'.3534—dc22

  [B] 2010045818

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For three females,

  Beyza, Aurora and Zelda

  For seventy years I have been steadily lowering and lowering my opinion of women, and I must still lower it more. The woman question! How could there not be a woman question! Only not about how women should control life, but how they should stop ruining it.

  —Tolstoy the Misogynist

  The goal of our life should not be to find joy in marriage, but to bring more love and truth into the world. We marry to assist each other in this task.

  —Tolstoy the Feminist

  I feel great tenderness for her [his daughter Masha]. Her only. She makes up for the others, I might say.

  —Tolstoy again

  Note to the Reader

  I was in Istanbul when the earthquake hit in 1999. At the time I lived in one of the most vibrant and diverse neighborhoods in the city, where the quality of houses varied as widely as the stories of the people who inhabited them. When I ran out of the building with everyone else at three in the morning amid shouts and screams, I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. Across the street was the local grocer—a grumpy old man who didn’t sell alcohol and didn’t speak to marginals—sitting next to a transvestite with a long, black wig and mascara running down her cheeks. I watched the man open up a pack of cigarettes, his hands shaking, his face as white as a ghost, and offer one to her. That was, and still is, the image of that night that has stayed most entrenched in my mind: a conservative grocer and a crying transvestite smoking side by side. In the face of disaster and death, our mundane differences evaporated and we were all One, even if for only a few hours.

  But I have always believed that stories, too, have a similar effect on us. I am not saying that fiction has the magnitude of an earthquake, but when we are inside a good novel we leave our cozy, small apartments behind and, through fictional characters, find ourselves getting to know people we had never met before, and perhaps had even disliked as our Others.

  Years later I would recall that night in a completely different context: After the birth of my first child I experienced a strong depression that separated me from the one passion in life that until then I had held above everything: writing fiction.

  It was an emotional tremor for me. When I ran out of the building of the Self that I had carefully constructed all those years, there in the darkness, scared and shaken, I encountered a group of Thumbelinas—six tiny finger-women, each of whom looked like a different version of me—sitting side by side. I knew four of them already. The two others I was meeting for the first time. I understood that if it weren’t for the extraordinary situation of my postpartum depression, I would have never seen them in a new light, and they would have kept living in my body and soul without ever listening
to one another, like neighbors who share the same air but never a peaceful greeting.

  Perhaps all women live with a mini harem inside and the discrepancy, tension and hard-achieved harmony among our conflicting selves is what really makes us ourselves.

  It took me a while to get to know and love all of the six Thumbelinas.

  This book is the story of how I faced my inner diversity and then learned to be One.

  I am a writer.

  I am a nomad.

  I am a cosmopolite.

  I am a lover of Sufism.

  I am a pacifist.

  I am a vegetarian and I am a woman, more or less in that order.

  That is how I would have defined myself until I reached the age of thirty-five.

  Up to that moment, first and foremost I saw myself as a teller of tales. Once upon a time, people like me shared their stories around a campfire, under a sky so wide you could never be sure where it ended, if it ever did. In Paris, they scraped together the rent by writing for newspapers. In the palace of a despotic sultan each story earned them the right to live one more day. Be it the Anonymous Narrator, Balzac or the beautiful Shehrazat, I felt connected to those storytellers of old. The truth is, like many other novelists, I felt closer to dead writers than to contemporary ones, and perhaps related more easily to imaginary people than to those who were real—well, too real.

  That was how I lived. That was how I planned to go on living. But then something totally unexpected, miraculous and bewildering happened to me: motherhood.

  It changed everything, changed me.

  I blinked at my new role, as baffled as a bat wakened by sunlight.

  The day I learned I was pregnant the writer in me panicked, the woman in me became happily confused, the pacifist in me remained passive, the cosmopolite in me began to think of international baby names, the Sufi in me welcomed the news, the vegetarian in me worried about having to have to eat meat and the nomad in me just wanted to take to her heels and run as fast as she could. But that is what happens when you are pregnant. You can run away from everything and everyone but not from the changes in your body.

  When the postpartum depression hit, it caught me completely unguarded. Stretching out in front of me like a dark tunnel that seemed to have no end, it scared me out of my wits. As I tried to cross through it, I fell down several times and my personality was shattered into pieces so small there was no way I could glue them back together again. Yet, at the same time, the experience helped me to look within and meet anew every member of the mini harem I had carried inside of me all those years. A depression can be a golden opportunity given to us by life to face head-on issues that matter greatly to our hearts, but which, out of haste or ignorance, have been swept under the carpet.

  I am not sure what came first and what followed. Did I exit from my depression and then start writing this book? Or did I complete the book and in that way manage to crawl out of the tunnel? The truth is, I cannot tell. My memories of those days are vivid and intense, but they are far from being chronological.

  I do know for certain, however, that this book was written with black milk and white ink—a cocktail of storytelling, motherhood, wanderlust and depression, distilled for several months at room temperature.

  Every book is a journey, a map into the complexities of the human mind and soul. This one is no different. Every reader therefore is a traveler of a sort. Some tours introduce one to cultural heritage sites, while others focus on outdoor adventures and wildlife. In the pages that follow, I want to take you on two tours at the same time, one into the Valley of Babies, the other into the Forest of Books.

  In the Valley of Babies, I will invite you to take a closer look at the many roles that make up our lives, starting with womanhood, motherhood and authorship. In the Forest of Books, I will discuss the lives and works of various women writers, past and present, East and West, to see how they have dealt with similar topics, successfully or unsuccessfully.

  This book was written not only for women who may have shared, or will share, a similar depression but also for anyone—man or woman, single or married, parent or childless, writer or reader—who finds it difficult, at times, to balance the multiplicity of roles and responsibilities in their lives.

  The Sufis believe that every human being is a mirror that reflects the universe at large. They say each of us is a walking microcosm. To be human, therefore, means to live with an orchestra of conflicting voices and mixed emotions. This could be a rewarding and enriching experience were we not inclined to praise some members of that inner orchestra at the expense of others. We suppress many aspects of our personalities in order to conform to the perfect image we try to live up to. In this way, there is rarely—if ever—a democracy inside of us, but instead a solid oligarchy where some voices reign over the rest.

  Black Milk is an attempt to topple that oligarchy through peaceful means, to move forward into a full-fledged, healthy inner democracy. While it would be naïve to assume that a democratic regime is a bed of roses, it is still preferable to any kind of despotism. Only when we can harmonize and synchronize the voices within can we become better mothers, better fathers and yes, probably better writers.

  But I am getting ahead of myself here and I shouldn’t. I need to do a U-turn and go back in time, and look for the moment when everything started.

  Lucky Dishwasher

  There we were, my mother and I, caught in a bittersweet maze of feelings that only mothers and daughters are capable of getting caught in. But my heart was full of gratitude for the way she had responded to the sudden news and I thanked her for being so supportive.

  “Oh, I am not being supportive at all, honey. I am just like a poor dishwasher who by chance finds a lottery ticket on the sidewalk and learns that he won the jackpot.”

  As accustomed to my mother’s codes and ciphers as I am, I didn’t get this one right away. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “But it is so clear, sweetheart. You feared I would be upset when I heard you secretly got married in another country, and when you saw I wasn’t upset in the slightest, you felt grateful. Is that right?”

  I nodded. “Right.”

  “You see, only a mother who is certain that her daughter will get married someday would be disappointed upon learning that she has done it without notice. Frankly, I never had any expectations of you in that regard. It seemed like you would be the last person on earth to get hitched. So I didn’t go and buy a lottery ticket every week and pin my hopes on it. Does that make sense?”

  It was beginning to.

  Happy to have my full attention, my mother continued enthusiastically. “So I accepted the situation as it was and went on with my life. Then one day out of the blue I found this ticket on the sidewalk and learned that I had won the lottery. That is how I felt when I heard the news of your nuptials, as astounded as a lucky dishwasher!”

  I had recently gotten married in Berlin. It was no coincidence that we had chosen this city to tie the knot because our marriage, at least to us, seemed no less surprising than the unexpected reunification of Germany. Like East and West Berlin, we, too, had been together once, then separated, and were now getting back together. My husband and I also had—and still have—personalities as different as capitalism and communism. Eyup is a gentle and generous soul, an always-rational man bestowed with an amazing inner balance and the patience of the prophet Job, from whom he got his name. As for me, I would have to tick off pretty much everything opposite from his qualities, starting with “impatient,” “impulsive,” “irrational,” “emotional” and “walking chaos.”

  We refrained from having a wedding as neither of us was fond of ceremonies. So we simply walked into the Turkish Embassy on Kbaum Avenue and announced our intention to get married. There was a homeless man sitting on a bench next to the entrance, his head full of lice and thoughts, his face turned up to the sky, happily basking under the sun. I thought he would make a perfect witness but when I tried to ask him if he
would come inside with us, he spoke no English, I spoke no German, and the sign language we invented there and then was not creative enough to cover a subject this unusual. Instead we offered him a pack of Marlboro Lights, and in return he seemed to bless us with a toothless smile. He also gave us a shiny golden chocolate wrapper that he had carefully smoothed out. I accepted the gift with delight. It seemed like a good omen.

  I didn’t wear a wedding gown not only because of my distaste for such a ritual but also because I don’t ever wear white. I have always had a hard time understanding how other people can. For years I could not even sit on a couch if it was too white, but I was gradually cured of this habit. My friends have several theories as to why I don’t like white. They think I might have fallen into a cauldron of rice pudding when I was a baby (unlike Obelix falling into the Magic Potion, this gave me no supernatural powers) and ended up hating the color, but not the pudding. However, I have no such recollection, and their second theory about me being biased against doctors, dentists or lab technicians—people who wear white—isn’t true either.

  In any case, on that day in May, I adorned myself in my preferred color of choice: black. As for Eyup, he wore dark pants and a white shirt, to honor tradition to some extent. That is how we said “I do.” Without fuss and on a whim. Although Eyup’s parents and five sisters, and my mother and grandmother, would have loved it had we had a typical Turkish wedding with food, dance and music, when they found out that we had gotten married, they were kind enough to respect the way we chose to go about it.