Black Milk - Elif Shafak [107]
“Yes, I did,” I say. “Because I missed you very much.”
“Did you miss me, too, darling?” asks Blue Belle Bovary, blowing me a kiss with her cherry-red lips. “Even me?”
“Also you,” I say. “There is no ‘even’ about it. I missed all of you equally.”
“What do you mean?” says Blue Belle Bovary. “You never treated us equally.”
“You’re right. It was a mistake and I apologize to all of you. From now on, I’m not going to censure any of you, you will all have an equal say. We are a democracy now.”
“At long last,” says Dame Dervish with a genuine smile. “That’s what I wanted all along. That’s fantastic!”
For the first time in my life, I realize, I see them as One—inseparable pieces of the same whole. When one is out in the cold, they all shiver. When one is hurt, they all bleed. When one is happy and fulfilled, all benefit from her bliss.
When Milady Ambitious Chekhovian and Miss Highbrowed Cynic launched a coup d’état that long-ago night, it was because I wanted to suppress my maternal side. I wasn’t ready to meet Mama Rice Pudding. And the oath I took under the Brain Tree was because I was not at peace with my body. I wasn’t open to Blue Belle Bovary. Mama Rice Pudding’s absolute monarchy during the pregnancy was a result of my belief that my other inner voices were not compatible with motherhood. At every turn, I would put one finger-woman on a pedestal at the expense of all the others.
I am all of them—with their faults and virtues, pluses and minuses, all their stories make up the book of me.
Hélène Cixous—scholar, essayist, literary critic, writer and one of the most original and critical voices of our times—says her text is written in white and black, in milk and night. Patriarchy, for her, does not exist outside the realm of aesthetics and poetics. She analyzes the Freudian approach that sees woman as “lack,” replacing it with “woman as excess.” She describes women’s writing by using metaphors of childbirth, breast-feeding and allusions to the female body. “It is important to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an importance that will remain, for this practice will never be theorized, enclosed, encoded—which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.”
For Cixous motherhood is a fulfilling experience, the most intense relationship that a human being has with another human being. Though she draws a line between the cultural and the biological, the latter is not insignificant for her. Female biology is an inspiration for her figurative way of writing. “I’m brimming over! My breasts are flowing. Milk. Ink. Nursing time. . . .” Cixous is a scholar who is both critical of and supportive toward women writers. She thinks instead of “undermining patriarchy from within,” many female authors have chosen to write like men, repeating the same codes and stereotypes. She advocates a new writing based on the libidinal economy of the feminine, an écriture féminine, that is critical of logocentrism and phallocentrism and operates outside and under these terrains, like underground tunnels made by moles.
There is no social change without linguistic change. Women need to break their silence. They need to write. “We should write as we dream,” she says.
Ursula K. Le Guin is one of my favorite women writers. When asked what she would be if she weren’t a writer, she answered: dead. From the day she started writing at the age of five to the present she has never slowed down. Though always prolific and creative in several genres, she said writing was never easy. “The difficulty of trying to be responsible, hour after hour, day after day for maybe twenty years, for the well-being of children and the excellence of books, is immense: it involves an endless expense of energy and an impossible weighing of competing priorities.” Despite the difficulties involved, she says the hand that rocks the cradle writes the book.
Placing the finger-women on my writing desk, I hug all six of them. Giggling, they