Black Milk - Elif Shafak [36]
With the money she got from literary prizes or grants she would pay for a nanny. While writing her first and only novel, The Bell Jar, in an attempt to establish a deeper connection with her past and soul, she deliberately prodded the places of fear in herself—fear of sanity, of being like thousands of others; and fear of insanity, of being so fundamentally different there was no hope of mingling with society. She wrote in detail about mental breakdown, electroconvulsive therapy and the suffocating monotony of modern life: “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world is the bad dream.” When the book was published in January 1963, readers were divided and Plath herself was deeply distressed by the tone of the reviews it received.
As she ran out of steam, unable to meet the extremely high demands she had placed on herself, Plath decided that she would rather die than live in the way it had been prescribed for her by others. The creative person with unbridled passion that she was, she wanted everything or nothing at all. . . . She had tried suicide before, an overdose of sleeping pills at the age of twenty. Yet at the time she had wanted both to die at her own hands and to be rescued. This time she wanted only the former.
It was a cold morning, February 11, 1963, one that reeked of tedium and induced a sense of isolation. After checking on her two children in their beds, and leaving milk and bread on their bedside table, she closed their door and sealed the cracks. She went into the kitchen, turned on the oven’s gas and took a dozen sleeping pills, swallowing them one by one. Then she stuck her head in the oven, and as the gas licked at her face, she fell into eternal sleep. She was only thirty years old.
To this day, Plath’s legendary heritage is unsurpassed. In Turkey, I have met numerous female college students who admire her work so much they organize special reading nights on campuses for her. In America, there is a colorful, intriguing blog called “Playgroup with Sylvia Plath.” In Germany, I once talked to a Filipino woman who had named her daughter Ariel after her. In France, at an international women’s organization, I met a chic businesswoman who asked us all to “toast to Sylvia.”
No other literary suicide has been talked and written about so much. No other woman writer, after her death, turned into such an icon beyond place and time.
The Midnight Coup d’État
One night toward the end of the summer, I hear voices in my sleep. A door opens and closes somewhere in the house, footsteps on the stairs, whispers in the dark. Thinking I’m having a nightmare, I toss and turn in bed. Then someone pokes me on the shoulder, shouting, “Hey, wake up!”
I try to ignore the voice, hoping the moment will pass, as all moments tend to do, but there follows a second command, this time louder.
“Get up! Wake up already!”
I open my eyes and find Miss Ambitious Chekhovian literally right in front of my nose. She has climbed up my shoulder and crawled her way to my face, where she now stands on my chin, legs and arms akimbo. She is looking at me with a kind of triumph I find more puzzling than disturbing in my present state. Her makeup is perfect, her bun of hair is tight, as always. Even at this hour she looks prim and proper. It takes me an extra second to notice she is wearing a military uniform with a badge of rank on her shoulders. Before I get a chance to ask her why on earth she has dressed up like that, she speaks in a tone I can barely recognize.
“There is a matter of great importance. You better get up!”
“Well, can’t it wait till morning?” I grumble. “I was sleeping, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“No, it cannot possibly wait,” she says. “The best time for a military takeover is the wee hours of the night, when everyone is asleep and resistance is slim.”
I sit up in bed and stare at her, stunned, like an animal caught in the headlights. “What did you say?”
To my dazed expression she responds with a glacial look. In all these years we have known each other,