can’t find anything but words to hand down to her. Perhaps I can leave one of my favorite Turkish words, which also exists in English:
I lie down on my bed. The solitude that I so enjoyed only this afternoon now darkens my mood. What am I doing here so far away from Istanbul, from my loved ones, from the place where my novels are set, from my friends, my mother and my mother tongue? Am I throwing myself into unknown waters just to see if I can swim?
What if I can’t?
I recall my mother telling me I was too good at being alone. “It is as if you don’t need anyone,” she had said. “But you should. Too much independence is not good. You should be dependent, even if a tiny little bit.”
This, coming from someone who had refused to remarry at the expense of being “a woman without a male protector” in the eyes of the society, had surprised me. But now I find myself thinking of her advice in another light.
Women of my age have husbands, children and picnic baskets. They don’t hop on Peter Pan buses and go roaming Neverland. You should do that in your early twenties, when you are fresh out of school and your “life” hasn’t started yet. But you don’t do it in your midthirties. There should have been some order and stability in my life by now. Women my age have scrambled eggs in the mornings with their families and social rituals they like repeating. I’m still being dragged around by the winds, like a kite whose string has snapped.
The members of the Choir of Discordant Voices seem pleased to be here, doing their own thing. Miss Highbrowed Cynic doesn’t look like she’s ever going to leave the library. When she has a spare moment she attends either a workshop or a conference. Little Miss Practical keeps taking computer classes-PowerPoint, Excel, Linux. The last time I saw Dame Dervish she was meditating in this place where nature is so beautiful. As for Milady Ambitious Chekhovian, she is always on the Internet writing, applying for this and that, finding things to do.
Everyone is in their own world. But where is Mama Rice Pudding?
I haven’t seen her since the airplane. Maybe she didn’t come to America. Maybe she couldn’t get through passport control after all. Or maybe she got lost somewhere in New York… Suddenly my heart aches. Can a person miss a side of her whom she doesn’t even know? I do.
As I fall asleep, I think of Mama Rice Pudding. I wish I knew her better.
Normal on the Outside
Courtney Love once said: “I like to behave in an extremely normal, wholesome manner for the most part in my daily life-even if mentally I am consumed with sick visions of violence, terror, sex and death.” Everything is normal, as long as we appear so on the outside. But what is normal? And who exactly is a normal woman? Which womanly attributes are natural? Which others are cultural? Are girls genetically predetermined to be maternal, nurturing and emotional, or do their families and societies mold them that way? Or else, are the natural and the cultural qualities so intricately interwoven that there is no telling which characteristics shape whom anymore?
Adjectives come in pairs. For every
I grew up seeing two different types of womanhood. On the one hand was my mother-a well-educated, modern, Westernized, secular Turkish woman. Always rational. Always to the point. On the other hand was my maternal grandmother, who also took care of me and was less educated, more spiritual and definitely less rational. This was a woman who read coffee grounds to see the future and melted lead into mysterious shapes to fend off the evil eye. Many people came to see her, people with severe acne on their faces or warts on their hands. My grandmother would utter some words in Arabic, take a red apple and stab it with as many rose thorns as the number of warts she wanted to remove. Then she would draw a circle around each thorn with dark ink.
Some of the most vivid memories of my childhood are about red apples, rose thorns and dark circles. The truth is, of all the people who visited my grandmother for their skin conditions, I didn’t see anyone walking away unhappy or unhealed. I asked her how she did this. Was it the power of praying? In response she said, “Yes, praying is effective, but also beware of the power of circles.” From her I learned, among other things, one crucial lesson: If you want to destroy something, be it a blemish, acne or the human soul, all you need to do is to surround it with walls.
It will dry up.
There are many similarly “irrational” lessons from my life that I greatly cherish today. To a strictly logical person they might seem pure nonsense, even crazy. Society and culture teach us what exactly is normal and acceptable. My grandmother’s cures were “commonplace” for many people in a middle-class neighborhood in Ankara in the early 1970s, although to someone in Vienna they might have looked pretty bizarre. But individuals also differ in their perceptions of normal and abnormal. My mother never believed in the superstitions my grandmother held dear. “Coffee is for drinking, not for reading,” Mom said. As for me, I deeply suspected that there were sprinkles of magic in life and love, and that someone who looked like a handsome prince at first glance could easily turn into an ugly frog.
As every writer of fiction knows, when we are developing a story we do not need to be constrained by the limits of logic. Just the opposite, we can dive headfirst into that bottomless lake of irrationality. We can write about superstitions, magic and fairies. There is room for all in literature. This despite the fact that in our daily lives we conform to a different set of rules, moving in a solid and rational world.
For many centuries all around the globe, girls and women have been expected to conform to one set of attributes, while men and boys measure up to another. If and when the traits of an individual included elements from both sets, life became much more complicated. Even today, a woman who is thought to be “manly” can face a bulwark of reactions, as can a man who is deemed “womanly.” The more conventional the society is, the less likely the two sets intersect-at least outwardly. But the exclusivist approach to gender relations is by no means specific to traditional societies. Though constantly changing, it is fundamentally universal. From ancient myths to modern graphic novels, from folklore to advertisements, this dualistic way of thinking has infiltrated many areas of our lives.
Oddly enough, women, too, are used to thinking of themselves in these terms. The relationships we build with one another, the talks we have among ourselves and the way we raise our own daughters are overshadowed by the dichotomy of gender patterns.
How much of my womanhood is biological, how much of it is socially learned? Of the will to become a mother, which part is innate, which part is imposed? Is it sheer coincidence that I have started contemplating motherhood in my midthirties? Is it because my biological clock is ticking? Or is it because the social chronometer, which continuously compels us women to measure ourselves against one another, is speeding ahead?
When everything is so culturally loaded, how am I going to know what is really natural and what is environmental?
Sitting on the Edge
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was born on July 24, 1900, in Alabama. She was a fearless, bouncy kid who received much love from her mother, perhaps at the risk of being fairly spoiled. As for her distant father, who was a formidable judge, she got far less affection and attention from him. Her childhood vacillated between these two emotional extremes. A vivid illustration of her personality lies in a small predicament she caused when she was just a child.
One morning the local police received a call that a child was walking across a rooftop. When the officers
