Black Milk

the women’s movement of the twentieth century. Though she was a prolific writer who produced novels, short stories and literary criticism, it was her diaries-most of which were published during her lifetime-that were most widely celebrated. Critics said most, if not all, the female characters in her fiction were her, a comment she heartily denied. One of the many intriguing things about her was how she, tired of dealing with the rules of the publishing world, decided to publish her own books. She bought a hand-fed printing press, learned how to run it and began to typeset. It was heavy labor, as she called it, especially for a woman who weighed no more than a hundred pounds. Later on when she talked about this experience, she said that printing her own books-setting each sentence into type-taught her, as a writer, how to be more succinct and less wordy.

Circumstances help us to learn how to be content with less.

Similarly, moving around has taught me how to survive with a minimal amount of furniture. What I buy in one city I abandon before leaving for the next. It is as if with every step I take and every gain I make, I lose something else somewhere. There is, however, one item in my hand baggage I have been able to take with me wherever I have gone. A satchel as old as the Dead Sea but as light as a feather, and not subject to customs anywhere in the world: the art of storytelling.

Even my most treasured books I could not keep together, piled as they are in cardboard boxes divided among the basements of relatives and friends. My Russian literature collection is in Ankara at my mother’s house; all my books in Spanish, including Don Quixote de la Mancha, rest in the garage of a friend in a suburb of Istanbul; and Arabian Nights, all one thousand and one of them, still wait for me at Mount Holyoke College, where I was once a fellow.

In a strange way, such disorganization helps to bolster my memory. When you cannot keep your books with you, you have no choice but to memorize as many of the stories and passages as best as you can. That is how I have fragments of dialogue from Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and poems from Rumi’s Mathnawi carved in my mind. I cannot carry them with me, not books that thick or volumes that many, but I can always recite a few lines from Rumi off the top of my head. “Without Love’s jewel inside of me, let the bazaar of my existence be destroyed stone by stone.”

“Do you have a similar writing space you deem sacred?” Ms. Agaoglu asks.

“No, not really, but I have a laptop,” I reply, knowing it sounds pathetic but saying it anyhow.

She gazes at me with eyes of wonder but then lets the subject drop. “Let’s have tea now, shall we?”

I smile with relief. “Yes, please, thank you.”

Back in the sitting room, as I wait for my host to return, a fact I have always known but never really faced plants itself in front of me: I have always clung, or maybe I wanted to cling, to bits and pieces of existence here and there, with no coherence, no center, no continuity in my life. There is a shorter way of saying this: I am a mess.

I see, in that precise moment, that however settled Ms. Agaoglu is, I am peripatetic to the same degree. However disciplined she is, I am disordered to the same extent. However hard I try to attach myself to an object, a home, an address or a relationship, the glue I use is never strong enough, and yet, odd though it is, such displacement has been both a curse and a blessing.

In a little while, Ms. Agaoglu reappears with a tray topped with porcelain teacups and plates. On my plate are pastries, the salty biscuits on the left, the sweet cookies on the right, all lined up in perfect symmetry and in equal number.

During the next half hour she tells me how it was for women writers in the past and, in her view, what has changed today. I listen, enjoying the conversation. There is no rush. No appointments to keep or tasks to accomplish. We speak of art and literature, of writers who have come and gone, and then of being a female writer in a patriarchal society.

Just then, out of the blue, Ms. Agaoglu catches me off guard by broaching a new topic. “I think at some point in their lives, women writers feel like they have to make a choice,” she says. “At least that is what happened to me. I decided not to have children in order to dedicate myself to writing.”

She tells me, in a voice calm but firm, that to be able to stand on her feet as a woman novelist and to write freely and copiously, she chose not to have any children of her own.

“I was lucky,” she says, “because my husband backed me in this difficult decision. There is no way I could have done it without his support.”

My stomach clenches. Please don’t ask me. But she does.

“How about you? Is motherhood something you are considering?” The manifesto I penned on the steamboat flashes in front of my eyes in gaudy capital letters. This might be the right time to recite some parts of it. But before I get a chance, the Choir of Discordant Voices begins to sing, as if an on button has been pressed.

“Shhh, be quiet,” I whisper into my collar. “Shut up, girls, for God’s sake.”

“Did you say something?” Ms. Agaoglu asks.

“No, no… I mean, yes, but I was just murmuring to myself… It’s nothing really…” I say, feeling the color rush to my face.

“And what were you murmuring to yourself?” Ms. Agaoglu asks, not letting me off the hook.

I swallow so hard that we both hear the gulp go down my throat. I dare not say: “I was just reprimanding the four women inside me. You see, they hold opposing views on motherhood, as with all the important topics in my life.”

I dare not say: “There is a mini harem deep down in my soul. A gang of females who constantly fight for nothing and bicker, looking for an opportunity to trip one another up. They are teeny-tiny creatures, each no taller than Thumbelina. Around four to five inches in height, ten to fourteen ounces in weight, that is how big they are. They make my life miserable and yet I don’t know how to live without them. They can come out or stay put as they like. Each has declared a different corner of my soul her residence. I cannot mention them to anyone. If I did they would have me institutionalized for schizophrenia. But isn’t the personality schizophrenic by definition?”

I dare not say: “Each member of the Choir of Discordant Voices claims to be the real me and therefore sees the others as rivals. So deep is their distaste of one another, if given a chance, they would scratch one another’s eyes out. They are flesh-and-blood sisters but they function under Sultan Fatih’s Code of Law. [3] Should one of them ascend to the throne, I am afraid the first thing she would do would be to get rid of her siblings once and for all.

“Chronologically speaking, I don’t know which finger-sized woman came first and who followed whom. Some of them sound wiser than others but that is less because of their ages than because of their temperaments. I guess I got used to hearing them quarrel inside my mind all the time.”

I dare not say any of this. Instead I throw a question into the fray, taking the easy way out:

“Tell me, Ms. Agaoglu, if Shakespeare had a sister who was a very talented writer or if Fuzuli had a sister who happened to be a poet as gifted as he was, what would have happened to those women? Would they write books or would they raise children? I guess what I am wondering is, could they have done both?”

“That is a question I have tackled long ago…” she says, her voice trailing off. “The answer I came up with was a clear no. But now, my dear, it is your turn to answer. Do you think a woman could manage motherhood and a career at the same time and equally well?”

A Talented Sister

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf makes the claim that it would have been impossible for a woman, any woman, to write the plays of Shakespeare during his age. To clarify her point she brings up an imaginary woman whom she introduces as Shakespeare’s sister. She names her Judith.

Let’s assume for a moment that this Judith was as passionate about theater as Shakespeare was, and just as gifted. What would have been her fate? Could she have dedicated her life to developing her talent like Shakespeare had done? Not even a chance, says Woolf.

The answer is no because a different set of rules holds for men than for women. Judith can be as talented as she likes, as fond of art and literature as she likes, but her path as a writer will be strewn with obstacles, small and large. She will have a hard time finding wiggle room in the “sociable-wife, meticulous-housewife, faithful-mother”