“Allow me to tell you a story first,” the nanny says, suddenly serious again.
And this is the story she tells: One day Nasreddin Hodja was working in a watermelon patch when he stopped for a break and sat under a walnut tree. Looking up, he murmured to himself, “God Almighty, I don’t understand Your ways. Why on earth did You grow huge watermelons on the thinnest stems and put those tiny little walnuts on those thick branches? Wouldn’t it have been better the other way around?”
Just as he finished speaking a strong wind blew and a walnut fell down from the tree, falling square on his head.
“Ouch!” Nasreddin Hodja yelled in pain. As he massaged his bruised head, he understood his mistake. “God forgive me and my silly tongue,” he said. “Now I understand why You didn’t place watermelons on a tree. If Thou had replaced watermelons for walnuts, I wouldn’t be alive now. Keep everything in its place, please. You know better!”
Firuze listens, hardly breathing. “What’s that got to do with me?”
“Crazy girl, don’t you see?” the nanny asks. “Who has ever heard of a female poet? There is a reason why God made everything as it is and we’d better respect that reason, lest we want watermelons raining on our heads.”
That afternoon Firuze walks into the backyard. She walks past the well straight to the hen coop in the corner. Opening the small wooden gate, she enters, inhaling the pungent smell of earth, dust and dirt. Neither the rooster nor the chickens pay attention to her. The hen coop is her room. This place, with its sharp odor and noisy residents, is her only breathing space.
Under the feeding bowls, inside a velvet box, she keeps her poems. Cleaning off the dust, she grabs the box and goes to see her brother.
“Hey, little sister, what are you doing?” Fuzuli says, surprised to see her standing by the door.
She hands her poems to him, the smile on her face as tight as an oud string. “Read them, will you?”
He does. Time slows down and moves to a different rhythm, like a sleepwalker. After what seems like an eternity, Fuzuli lifts his head, a new flicker in his eyes that wasn’t there before.
“Where did you find these poems?” he asks.
Firuze’s eyes flicker away from his face. She dares not say the truth. Besides, she wants to know whether her poems are any good. Does she really have talent?
“One of the neighbors came calling the other day. The poems belong to her son,” she says. “She implored you to take a look at them, and tell her, in all honesty, if her son has any talent.”
A shadow crosses Fuzuli’s face as if he were suspicious but when he speaks his voice is calm and assuring. “Tell that neighbor her son should come and see me. This young man has a great talent,” he says, stroking his long, brown beard.
Firuze is alight with joy. She plans to tell her brother the truth when the right moment comes along. If she can convince her brother, he can convince the whole family. They will understand how much words mean to her. Believing in poetry is believing in love. Believing in poetry is believing in God. How can anybody say no to that?
But the moment she waits for never comes. Only weeks after their conversation, Firuze is married off to a clerk eighteen years her senior.
With drums and tambourines they sing on her henna night. The women first dance and laugh with joy, then their faces crumble, awash with salty tears. On wedding days at the celebrations of women, and only then and there, happiness and sorrow become two different names for the same thing.
Due to her husband’s connections, it is decided that the couple shall settle down in Istanbul. Firuze is swept away from her home, her family and her childhood. As she leaves her house, she does not pay a last visit to the hen coop. She doesn’t care. Not anymore. Hidden in a hole under the feeding bowls, her poems go to waste. Her big secret turns to dust and the dust is swept away.
Months later in Istanbul, Firuze sits in a
Who knows how many women like Firuze lived throughout Middle Eastern history? Women who could have become poets or writers, but weren’t allowed… Women who hid their masterpieces in hen coops or dowry chests, where they rotted away. Many years later, while telling stories to their granddaughters, one of them might say,
“Once upon a time I used to write poems. Did you know that?”
“What is that, Grandma?”
“Poetry? It is a magical place beyond the Kaf Mountain.”
“Can I go there, too? Can I?”
“Yes, my dear, you may go but you cannot stay there. A short visit is all you are allowed.”
And she would say this in a whisper, as if that, too, were a fairy tale. Perhaps the question that needs to be asked is not: Why were there not more female poets or writers in the past? The real question is: How was it possible for a handful of women to make it in the literary world despite all the odds?
When it comes to giving an equal chance to women like Firuze, the world has not advanced so very much. Still today, as Virginia Woolf argued, “when one reads… of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.”
Still today there remains a rule in place: Male writers are thought of as “writers” first and then “men.” As for female writers, they are first “female” and only then “writers.”
One More Cup of Tea
“Are you all right?” Ms. Agaoglu asks. “You look like you’re miles away.” “Oh, do I?” I smile guiltily.
Glancing meaningfully across the table, she offers me another cup of tea and says, “Being a mother and a writer are not opponents, perhaps, not necessarily. But they are not best buddies either.”
My mind acts like a computer gone awry. Names and pictures bounce around on the screen, disconnected and displaced. I think of women writers who are also mothers: Nadine Gordimer, Margaret Atwood, Annie Proulx, Anita Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Naomi Shihab Nye, Anne Lamott, Mary Gordon, Anne Rice, the legendary Cristina di Belgioioso… A large number of female writers have one or two children. But there are also those, like Ursula K. Le Guin, who are mothers of three or more.
Yet at the same time, there are also many poets and writers who did not have children, for their own good reasons. Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Emily Bronte, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein, Patricia Highsmith, Jeanette Winterson, Amy Tan, Sandra Cisneros, Elizabeth Gilbert…
Then there are female writers who chose to both give birth and adopt. Of these, the most remarkable is a woman who was not only a prolific writer but also an advocate of racial and sexual equality, a woman with a great heart, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pearl S. Buck.
Noticing that the adoption system in America discriminated against Asian and black children in favor of white, in the early 1950s Buck decided to fight the system and help the disempowered. After a long struggle she founded the Welcome House-the first international, interracial center for adoption-and changed the lives of countless children. While doing all of this, she never gave up literature, or slowed down her writing. Quite to the contrary, her motherhood and activism seem to have propelled her career as a writer.
