Part 2 (2/2)
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 a.s.suring. ”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 G.o.d. 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.
Yesterday she was a child/swimming in a sea of letters/she bled poetry
A stain grew on her nightgown/dark and mysterious
In a heartbeat/in a blink/she became a woman
Her name a forbidden fruit. . . .
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 konak by the Bosphorus watching the dark indigo waters. She gags but manages not to throw up this time, being seven weeks into her pregnancy. She hopes it will be a son to carry her husband's name across generations and to the ends of the Earth. Sometimes she utters poems but she doesn't write them down anymore. The words she breathes disperse in the wind like shards of a broken dream she once had but can no longer remember.
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 s.h.i.+hab 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 d.i.c.kinson, Virginia Woolf, Emily Bronte, Dorothy Parker, Lillian h.e.l.lman, 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 s.e.xual equality, a woman with a great heart, winner of the n.o.bel 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.
Last, there are also women writers who might have wanted to have children, but their husbands didn't, and therefore neither did they. Many believe that that was the case with the renowned British writer Iris Murdoch. There have been claims that her husband, John Bayley, never wanted to have kids and she went along with his wishes. A biography published after Murdoch's death outlined this lesser-known side of their relations.h.i.+p, causing quite a stir.
I try to find a formula, a golden formula, that could apply to most, if not all, women writers, but obviously there is none.
J. K. Rowling started writing the Harry Potter series after her son was born and dedicated the subsequent books to her newborn daughter. She says motherhood gives her inspiration. One a.s.sumes that a mother who writes about magic must be telling supernatural stories when she tucks her children into bed, but J. K. Rowling says she doesn't believe in witchcraft, only in religion. I don't know how smoothly her household runs, but Rowling seems to have a real knack for fusing motherhood and writing.
Then there is Toni Morrison, who had two small sons that she was raising by herself when she first began to write. For many years she could not work in the daylight hours, her rendezvous with pen and paper taking place before dawn, when the boys would wake up. As difficult as life was for her then, she says she drew inspiration from each hards.h.i.+p.
Sometimes the biggest award a woman writer hopes to receive is neither the Man Booker Prize nor the Orange Prize but a good-hearted, hardworking nanny. It is a dream shared by many, to hear those five magic words: ”And the Nanny goes to . . .” No wonder some of the grants Sylvia Plath won were written up as ”nanny grants”-money with which she could hire a professional caretaker so as to find the time and energy to write.
But then there is the other side of the coin. In her thought-provoking ”Notes to a Young(er) Writer,” Sandra Cisneros tackles head-on the question of cla.s.s, and women writers and poets having ”a maid of their own.” ”I wonder if Emily d.i.c.kinson's Irish housekeeper wrote poetry or if she ever had the secret desire to study and be anything besides a housekeeper,” Cisneros writes. ”Maybe Emily d.i.c.kinson's Irish housekeeper had to sacrifice her life so that Emily could live hers locked upstairs in the corner bedroom writing her 1,775 poems.”6 As much as the literary world avoids talking about such mundane things, money and social cla.s.s are still privileges that empower some more than others.
One should also pay attention to the children, not only to the mothers. Susan Sontag's son, David Rieff, followed in his mother's footsteps in becoming a writer and an editor. In fact, he was his mother's editor for a while. Kiran Desai speaks of the close writing relations.h.i.+p she has with her mother, Anita Desai. Likewise, Guy Johnson, the son of one of the most beloved voices of American poetry, Maya Angelou, also chose to become a poet.
”If these children had for some reason hated their mother's world, surely they would not have followed the same path,” I think to myself. ”I suppose female writers don't make such shabby mothers after all.”
But even as I say this I know that there are also examples to the contrary, cases that are much more difficult to talk about. There are women writers who had great talent but perhaps were not great mothers. We do not know a lot about them. Relations.h.i.+ps that seem enviable from the outside might tell a different truth behind closed doors. Beyond pretty photographs and bright facades there are bruised hearts that we seldom hear about.
One well-known example is Muriel Spark.
Spark is, no doubt, one of the most influential female authors of the past century. She wrote more than twenty novels and dozens of other works, including children's books, plays and storybooks. When she pa.s.sed on from this world at the age of eighty-eight, friends, relatives, publishers, editors, critics, readers and journalists attended her funeral. There was only one person who didn't: her son, Robin.
One wonders what must have transpired for a son, an only son, upon learning that his mother has pa.s.sed away, to decline to go to her funeral. How much hurt, how much suffering, does that take? And how could a mother, knowing she is going to die soon, spend her final days making sure her son is left out of her will? What sorrow, what pain, could have led her to make that decision?
Born in Edinburgh, Spark left her homeland shortly after getting married and moved to Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), where her husband had been offered a teaching position. In 1938 the couple had a son. I don't know if they were any unhappier than the families around them, but sometime later Muriel Spark decided to return to Britain. Alone. When she walked away from her six-year-old son, did she sense that it would be the hardest moment of her life, or did she believe, in all sincerity, that she would soon come back? In any case she never did. Robin was raised by his father and paternal grandmother.
As the years went by, the distance between mother and son widened. But it was not until the day Robin, now a grown-up man, announced his wish to become Jewish that whatever ties remained completely snapped. Spark, who had become a devout Catholic, reacted bitterly to her son's attempts to prove that his grandmother (and, therefore, mother) was, in fact, Jewish. She claimed that her son was seeking to create sensationalism and scandal just to get back at her. After that her relations.h.i.+p with her son was so strained that when a journalist asked her if she ever saw him, she answered: ”As long as he stays away from me he can do as he pleases.”
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