Black Milk - Elif Shafak [18]
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.
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