Black Milk

words like poetry, in a language long forgotten…

Perhaps, like the Greek poet Konstantinos Kavafis, they, too, are saying,

New lands you will not find, you will not find other seas.

The city will follow you…

You will roam the same streets.

Women Who Change Their Names

I was eighteen years old when I decided to change my name. By and large, I was happy with my first name, Elif, which is a fairly common girl’s name in Turkey, meaning tall and lithe, like the first letter of the Ottoman alphabet, aleph. The word is encountered in Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and Turkish, although to my knowledge, it is only in the latter that it is used as a female name. That same year, I had read Borges’s “The Aleph” and I was familiar with his description of the word as a virtually untraceable point in space that contained all points. Not bad, I thought. Striding along with all the vanity of my youth, I did enjoy being likened to a letter, though I would have much preferred the entire alphabet.

It was a different story, however, with my surname. It upset me that as women, we were expected to take first the family names of our fathers, then our husbands. Having grown up without seeing my father, I couldn’t understand, for the life of me, why I should carry his name. Since I was also determined to never get married and take my husband’s name, I concluded that the rule of surnames simply didn’t apply to me.

I had been pondering this paradox for a while when a prestigious literary magazine in Turkey selected for publication a short story I had written. The editor, an intellectual in his midforties, gave me a call to congratulate and welcome me into the literary fold, which he said was “no different from a jungle with wild egos.” As he was about to hang up, he told me to let them know if there were any last-minute changes I would like to make before the magazine went to press.

“Yes,” I said urgently. “My last name. I am changing it.”

“Are you getting married? Congratulations!”

“No. Not like that,” I interjected. “I have decided to rename myself.”

He chuckled, the way people tend to do when they don’t know what to say. Then he said, very slowly and loudly, as if talking to a child with a hearing impairment, “O-kay, and how do you want us to write your name?”

“I don’t know yet,” I confessed. “It’s a lifetime decision. I’ll have to think about it.”

There was an awkward silence at the end of the line, but then the editor gave another laugh. “Well, of course, go ahead and do it. What’s the harm? You are a woman, there’s no reason for you to take this too seriously. Even if you choose the most poetic surname for yourself, you’ll end up with your husband’s anyhow.”

“Give me a day,” I said. “I will find the surname I will have forever, whether I get married someday or not.”

Every name is a magic formula. The letters dance together, each with their own spin and charm, each an unknown as much as the other, and together they concoct the mystery that a name holds. Like sorcerers in the dark, adding letter upon letter, ingredient after ingredient, the language unit by which we are known puts a spell on us. There are names that help us soar high in the sky; there are names that weigh on our shoulders and slyly pull us down.

Men live without ever feeling the need to change their family names. Their credentials are given to them at birth. Settled and stable. They inherit their surnames from their fathers and grandfathers, and pass it on to their children and grandchildren.

As for women, whether they know it or not, they are name nomads. Their surnames are here today, gone tomorrow. Throughout their lives, women fill out official forms in different ways, apply for new passports and design several signatures. They have one last name when they are young girls, and another upon marriage. They go back to their maiden names if they get divorced-though sometimes they retain their ex-husbands’ family names for practical purposes, which doesn’t necessarily make things easier-and adopt an altogether different one if they get remarried.

Men have one constant signature. Once they find the one that suits them, they can keep it till death without changing a single curve. As for women, they have at least one “old signature” and one “new signature,” and sometimes they confuse them. Signature of the bachelorette, signature of the married woman, signature of the divorcee.

Women writers have also undergone a series of name-change operations. The late-nineteenth-century Ottoman novelist Fatma Aliye wrote her novels and novellas mostly in secret, as she did not want to upset her husband and family with her “independent ways.” One day she stopped using her name and published her next work under the pseudonym “A Woman.”

For that’s what she was. A woman. Any woman. All women. Getting rid of her name was like casting off the heavy mooring that tied her to the mainland. Once she ceased to be Lady Fatma Aliye and became only “a woman,” she was free to sail anywhere.

In the 1950s a romance novel called Young Girls appeared in Turkey, by a certain Vincent Ewing. The book quickly became a national best seller, finding good coverage in the media. Strangely, no one knew the writer. No journalist had managed to get any interviews from him. Only three things were known about the author: He was American, he was Christian, he was male. Turkish people read the book with that information in mind.

Years went by. One day it was announced that the author of Young Girls was, in fact, a young Muslim Turkish woman. Nihal Yeginobali was her name.

When asked why she had chosen to hide her identity, her answer was intriguing:

“I was a young girl myself when I wrote Young Girls. There was a considerable degree of eroticism in the novel that was considered inappropriate for a young woman such as myself. So I picked a male pseudonym. In those days there was more interest in translated novels. This is why we decided that the writer of my novel should be American. My publisher pretended it was translated from English.”

Publishing a book under a specific male name, like “Vincent Ewing,” or a generic appellation, like “A Woman,” furnishes us with an armor to shield ourselves. We need the protection even more when we write about sexuality, femininity and the body. I don’t know of any male writer who agonizes about upsetting his mother (or grandmother or great-aunts or neighbors or any distant relatives) should he write a novel that touches on eroticism and graphic sex. If there are, they must be few in number. Yet, worrying about the permission to tell the story-be it personal or familial-is particular to women writers all around the world. This is the unspoken pressure Margaret Atwood writes about in her riveting essay regarding her great-aunts. “The pressure is most strongly felt, by women, from within the family, and more so when the family is a strong unit,” she says. From Turkey to Canada, from industrial to postindustrial society, women who take up writing traverse several invisible boundaries in marriage, family, class and society. Each crossing can be one more reason to modify a name and obscure its gender.

It is not for naught that another well-known writer, perhaps the greatest novelist of the Victorian period, chose a male pseudonym-determined, smart, persevering Mary Ann Evans, otherwise known as George Eliot. Britain in the 1800s did have its share of female writers-only, most of them wrote about romance, love and heartache: topics deemed suitable for womankind. As for George Eliot, she openly disliked all such books. She wanted to write on an equal footing with male novelists. She wanted to write “like a man,” not “like a woman.”

George Eliot’s distaste for “women’s literature” was so intense and unabashed that in 1856 she penned an article called “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” She divided fiction written by women into four categories in accordance with their degree of silliness, and named them as the frothy, the prosy, the pious and the pedantic. I enjoy reading this extremely interesting piece not only to get a glimpse into the Western literary tradition but also to see how cruelly a woman writer can badmouth her own sex.

But Eliot was no stranger to standing out among other women. In a letter to Herbert Spencer, the biologist and philosopher, she boldly challenged conventional society and set herself apart from the members of her own sex: “I suppose no woman ever before wrote such a letter as this-but I am not ashamed of it, for I am conscious that in