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

  As I do next to all women who glow with this kind of femininity, I feel like an impostor, a poor imitation of my gender. To her, womanhood comes naturally, like a yawn or sneeze, just as effortless. To me, womanhood is something I need to observe and study, learn and imitate, and still can never fully comprehend.

  If the woman next to me were a cat, she would be lying in a gorgeous basket beside a heater, her eyes narrowed to slits, or she would be curled up on the lap of her owner purring in delight, flicking her tail to a rhythm of her own. If I were a cat, I would be sitting anxiously by the windowsill all day long, watching the cars drive by and the pedestrians pass, and I would run from the house at the earliest opportunity into the wide world outside.

  On the other side of the woman, there is a boy around eight years old, and next to him, a younger boy who strikingly resembles his brother. Both boys are wearing the same jeans and navy striped T-shirt. They have the same toys in their hands. Muscular, dark green, fully equipped plastic commandos, armed in one hand with a grenade whose pin is ready to be pulled, in the other with a Kalashnikov. Both boys are chewing wads of gum as big as walnuts, blowing one bubble after another. Every time a bubble pops, I flinch—as if they have shot at someone with those plastic commandos. Another enemy gets cleared off the steamboat.

  Their toys may assault, but the boys are introverted. They don’t even lift their heads to look at their mother. They are particularly careful not to come eye to eye with her. I suppose it is not easy for boys of their age to have a mother who is that attractive.

  Convinced that neither the boys nor their mother can help me in my quest to find paper, I turn to the man on my left. He has metal-framed glasses, a serious expression, and though he must be forty at most, the top of his head is already balding. The man’s body language screams, “I AM A SALESMAN.” He is holding a leather bag, in which I’m certain there is paper somewhere. When I ask, he kindly offers me more than a few sheets, each sporting the letterhead SHOOTING STAR MARKETING LTD.

  Thanking the man, I start to write, watching the ink dry as I move on. The letters pour forth as if of their own accord: THE MANIFESTO OF THE SINGLE GIRL.

  I look at the paper in bewilderment. So this is what was on my mind.

  The woman beside me edges closer, her head craned toward the paper on my lap. On Istanbul’s steamboats you get used to people reading newspapers over your shoulder, but this woman is openly reading my notes. Though my first instinct is to try to cover what I’ve written, I soon accept the futility of looking for privacy in such a small, confined space and let her read.

  1. Saying that loneliness is reserved for God the Almighty, and thus expecting everyone to pair up for life is one of the biggest illusions invented by Man. Just because we embarked on Noah’s Ark in twos doesn’t mean we have to complete the entire trip in pairs.

  I’m writing and the woman is reading. At one point she leans so far onto my right shoulder that her hair touches my face. I inhale the scent of her shampoo, tangy and fruity. She seems to be having problems deciphering my notes, and, given my handwriting, I don’t blame her. I make an effort to write more clearly.

  2. How is it that in traditional societies, people who dedicated their lives to their faith and swore never to marry were revered by all, but in today’s culture being a “spinster” is almost a disgrace, a pitied condition?

  3. How is it that, even though marriage needs a woman and a man, and being unmarried is a condition that applies to both sexes equally, the term spinster has different—and more negative—connotations than bachelor?

  My neighbor pulls out a pack of trail mix from her bag, shares half of it with her sons and turns her attention back to my writing, munching as she reads. Amid salty peanuts, roasted yellow chickpeas and pumpkin seeds, I write and she looks on, happily entertained.

  4. Women who have been “left on the shelf” should have their dignity returned and be applauded for daring to live without a man to watch over them.

  5. Those who use the expression “the female bird builds the nest” don’t understand the bird. It is true that birds build nests, but with every new season they abandon the home they have made to erect a new one in a different place. There is no bird that stays in the same nest for the entirety of its life.

  I notice the woman briefly shudder. The hair on her arms stands up as if the day were not pulsing with heat.

  6. Change and changeability are life’s alphabet. The vow to stay together “till death do us part” is a fantasy that runs against the essence of life. Besides, we don’t die only once. It is worth remembering that human beings die many deaths before dying physically.

  7. Therefore one can promise only to love at this very moment and nothing beyond that.

  8. If I must resort to marriage as a metaphor, I can claim that literature is my husband and books are my children. The only way for me to get married is either to divorce literature or to take a second husband.

  9. Since divorcing literature is out of the question and since there is no man among mankind who would agree to become “husband number two,” in all likelihood, I will be single all my life.

  10. Herewith this piece of paper is my manifesto.

  I lean back and wait for the woman to finish reading. She is lagging behind, mouthing the words syllable by syllable like a schoolgirl who has just learned the alphabet. The gentle breeze that licks the deck carries the scent of the sea toward us and I taste salt on my tongue. After a few seconds the woman leans back and heaves a sigh, really loud.

  I can’t help but feel curious. What did she mean by that? Did she agree with me? Was it a sigh that meant, “You are so right, sister, but this is the way the world is and has always been”? Or did she rather want to say, “You write all this crap, honey, but real life works differently”? I have a feeling it is the latter.

  Suddenly I am seized by an urge to needle her. This woman is my Other. She is the kind of woman who has gladly dedicated her life to her home, to her husband and to her sons. Since youth she focused her energy on finding an ideal husband and starting her own family, became a mother before saying farewell to her girlhood, gained weight for the cause, has aged before her time, has allowed her desires to turn into regrets and become sour inside. This woman, with her canned dreams, comfortable social status and bygone aspirations, is my antithesis. Or so I want to believe.

  “For a woman, any woman, the right way to engender is through her uterus, not through her brain.”1 That is what some of the leading male novelists in my country believed. They claimed fiction writing as their terrain, an inherently manly task. The novel was a most rational construct, a cerebral work that required engineering and plotting, and since women were, by definition, emotional beings, they wouldn’t make good novelists. These famous writers saw themselves as “Father Novelists” and their readers as sons in need of guidance. Their heritage makes me suspect that in order to exist and excel in the territory of literature, I, too, might have to make a choice between uterus and brain. If it ever comes to that, I have no doubt as to which one I will choose.

  The steamboat is about to arrive at the shore. Unaware of my thoughts the woman next to me leaps to her feet. Gather the bags, pack the chickpeas, ready the boys, bundle the Kalashnikovs, squeeze feet back into shoes . . . In less than thirty seconds she is all packed. Pushing and shoving through the crowd with her boys by her side, she moves toward the exit, away from me.

  Only then, only when the woman gets up, do I notice something I should have detected before. The woman isn’t overweight. She isn’t even plump. She is heavily pregnant, that’s all. Her belly looks so huge, she could well be expecting twins or triplets.

  For some reason unbeknownst to me, this insignificant detail turns my head. But there is no time to muse. The steamboat is at the dock. Everybody springs to their feet in a hurry, swarming chaotically toward the doors. In that commotion, I come eye-to-eye with the man beside me.

  “Thank you for the paper. . . .” I say.
r />   “You are most welcome,” he says. “I am happy if I was able to help.”

  “Oh, you were,” I say. “Just curious, what is Shooting Star Marketing?”

  “We are a new company specializing in products for mothers and newborn babies,” he says. “Electronic milk pumps, bottle warmers and things like that. . . .”

  The man’s smile blossoms into a grin. Or maybe it just looks that way to me. Suddenly it feels like somewhere in that bright blue sky where the sun has now begun to descend, the angels are pointing their milky-white fingers at me, making fun. There is an irony, when I come to think of it, in writing a single-girl manifesto on the letterhead of a company that sells products for new mothers.

  Having noticed this irony, but not sure what to do with it, I stand there dumbstruck. A voice inside me says, “There are no coincidences in the universe, only signs. Can you see the signs?”

  I brush the voice away and put my manifesto in my pocket, no longer completely convinced of its credibility. In this state I disembark the steamboat Gypsy.

  Is this a sign I wasn’t seeing? For no reason at all I had written the single-girl manifesto. In that same breath I had seen the woman beside me as my Other. She was “the housekeeper-mother-wife” I would never let myself become. Thinking I was not only different from but also far better than she, I swore to be Miss Spinster Writer. Meanwhile, I wasn’t aware that above my manifesto glowed the name of a company that served new mothers. The universe was mocking my arrogance.

  There must have been signs, not one but many, because months after writing this manifesto I fell head over heels in love. I even got married. As used to assuming that I would descend from Noah’s Ark alone as I was, I awakened to the beauty of being part of a couple. Two years later I gave birth to my first child. During my pregnancy I often remembered how I had belittled the woman on the steamboat and I felt regret, piercing regret.

  There must have been other signs, not one but many, because a few weeks after giving birth—when it became apparent that my milk was not going to be sufficient and had to be increased in quantity—we called a number that friends had given us and rented an electronic milk pump. When the machine was delivered to our house, I noticed a familiar logo on the package: SHOOTING STAR MARKETING.

  Who knows, maybe it was the gentleman from the steamboat who dropped the milk pump at our house. . . . Who knows, maybe the no-longer-fat woman with her blue dress and sons, plastic commandos, roasted chickpeas and newborn twins or triplets was also there somewhere, hiding behind a bush, laughing at the change in my life, at this unexpected twist of fate.

  In the Beginning There Was Tea . . .

  A few weeks after the steamboat incident and long before the thought of getting married crosses my mind, I am having tea with a woman novelist. Little do I know that this encounter will motivate me to think harder about the choices we make between creating babies and creating books.

  “I would like to meet you, Miss Shafak. Why don’t you come over for tea?” she had said to me over the phone a few days earlier, and added with bright laughter: “The tea is only an excuse, of course. The real purpose is to talk. Come over and talk we shall.” Eighty-one years old and still as passionate about writing as she was in her youth, Adalet Agaoglu is one of the foremost literary voices of her generation. I am excited to meet her.

  Although she had given me meticulous directions to her home, on the evening of the meeting I spend some time looking for the address. As in many of Istanbul’s neighborhoods, this one, too, has a maze of alleys that snake up and down, wind and intertwine into new streets under different names. Finally, when I find the apartment, I still have ten more minutes until the appointment, so I wander around a bit. Up at the corner there is a makeshift flower stand next to which two Gypsy women are sitting cross-legged in their dazzlingly-colored baggy trousers, jingling the gold bracelets on their wrists, puffing cigarettes. I admire them, not only for the perfect smoke rings they blow out but also for their total indifference to social limitations. They are the kind of women who can smoke cigarettes on the streets in a culture where public space and the right to smoke in the open belong to men.

  Five minutes later, with a bouquet of yellow lilies in my hand and curiosity in my heart, I ring the bell. As I wait for the door to be opened, little do I know that this meeting will have far-reaching consequences in my life, triggering a series of reflections inside me about womanhood, motherhood and being a writer.

  Ms. Agaoglu opens the door. Her skin is slightly pale, her smile cautious and her short hair the style of a woman who doesn’t want to spend too much time with her hair.

  “Here you are! Come on in,” she says, her voice brimming with energy.

  I follow her into the large sitting room. The place is spacious, immaculate and tastefully decorated. Every object seems to have fallen into its niche in seamless harmony. Though we are still deep in the heart of summer, it is a gusty day, with Istanbul’s infamous northeast poyraz wind pounding on the windowpanes, penetrating the cracks in the doors. But her home is serene and smells of years of order and quiet.

  I perch myself on the closest armchair. But no sooner do I lean back than I realize this happens to be the highest chair in the room and it might not be appropriate for me to sit here. I leap to my feet and try the sofa on the opposite side. It is so soft that I almost sink into it. Sensing I won’t be comfortable there either, I slide over to the adjacent chair, which I instantly regret, because who would sit on a hard chair when there is a comfy sofa instead?

  Meanwhile, hands folded on her lap, Ms. Agaoglu sits erect and composed, watching my every move from behind her glasses with an amusement she doesn’t feel the need to hide. If it weren’t for the look on her face I could have changed places again, but I hold my breath and manage to stay still.

  “Finally we have met,” she says. “Women writers are not great fans of each other, but I wanted to meet you in person.”

  Not knowing what to say to that, I smile awkwardly and try a less contentious beginning. “How very quiet it is here.”

  “Thank God it is,” she says. “It is hard to admit this in a city as noisy as Istanbul, but I get disturbed by the slightest sound when I am writing fiction. It is crucial for me to have absolute peace and quiet while I work.”

  She pauses, measuring me with brightened interest, then continues, “But I understand you are not like that. I read your interview the other day. You seem to write on the move, enjoying disorder and displacement. I find that really . . .”

  “Strange?” I offer.

  She arches her thin eyebrows in dissent, searching for the exact word.

  “Incomprehensible?” I make another attempt.

  “Bizarre,” she says finally. “I find it really bizarre.”

  I give a small nod. How can I explain to her that the order and quiet she so values give me the creeps? To live in the same house for decades, to know the face of every store owner and neighbor in the area, to be rooted in the same street, same quarter, same city, is an idea that I find harrowing. Steadiness and stability are Russian and Chinese to me. While I know they are great languages with rich histories, I don’t speak them.

  Silence is the worst. Whenever a thick cloud of silence descends, the yapping voices inside me become all the more audible, rising to the surface one by one. I like to believe I know all the women in this inner harem of mine but perhaps there are those I have never met. Together they make a choir that does not know how to tone down. I call them the Choir of Discordant Voices.

  It is a bizarre choir, now that I think about it. Not only are they all off-key, none of them can read notes. In fact, there is no music at all in what they do. They all talk at the same time, each in a voice louder than the other, never listening to what is being said. They make me afraid of my own diversity, the fragmentation inside of me. That is why I do not like the quiet. I even find it unpleasant, unsettling. When working at home or in a hotel room, I make sure to turn on the radio, the TV or th
e CD player, and sometimes all three at the same time. Used to writing in hectic airports, crowded cafés or boisterous restaurants, I am at my best when surrounded by a rich ruckus.

  It suddenly occurs to me that this might be why I, unlike all my friends, never get upset with those drivers who roll down their windows and broadcast pop music over and beyond the seven hills of Istanbul. It’s my belief that those magandas2 are just as scared of the quiet as I am. They, too, are afraid to be left alone with their inner voices.

  Just like those showy types, I open my windows as I sit down to work on a novel. Surely my aim is not to invade the outside world with my personal music. I want the music of the outside world to invade my inner space. The cries of seagulls, the honking of cars, the siren of an ambulance, the quarrels of the couple living upstairs, the clamor of the children playing football across the street, the sounds of backgammon pieces coming from coffeehouses, the yelling of peddlers and the punk and postpunk music spinning on my CD player . . . Only in this hullabaloo is the revelry inside me briefly drowned out. Only then can I write in peace.

  “Would you like to see the desk where I have written most of my books?” asks Ms. Agaoglu suddenly.

  “Sure, I would love to.”

  It is an elegant mahogany desk topped with neatly organized manuscripts and books, decorated with carefully chosen memorabilia. A nice antique lamp radiates soft yellow light. She tells me she doesn’t let anyone else clean her desk, as she wants to make sure every single object on it remains in the right place. I wonder for a moment whether that restriction applies to the entire room since there are also many items and photographs scattered all over the bookshelves, as well as the coffee and end tables. A collector’s passion for objects, each loaded with meaning and memory, is something that I have always found perplexing.