Black Milk - Elif Shafak [42]
“Yes,” I said urgently. “My last name. I am changing it.”
“Are you getting married? Congratulations!”
“No. Not like that,” I interjected. “I have decided to rename myself.”
He chuckled, the way people tend to do when they don’t know what to say. Then he said, very slowly and loudly, as if talking to a child with a hearing impairment, “O-kay, and how do you want us to write your name?”
“I don’t know yet,” I confessed. “It’s a lifetime decision. I’ll have to think about it.”
There was an awkward silence at the end of the line, but then the editor gave another laugh. “Well, of course, go ahead and do it. What’s the harm? You are a woman, there’s no reason for you to take this too seriously. Even if you choose the most poetic surname for yourself, you’ll end up with your husband’s anyhow.”
“Give me a day,” I said. “I will find the surname I will have forever, whether I get married someday or not.”
Every name is a magic formula. The letters dance together, each with their own spin and charm, each an unknown as much as the other, and together they concoct the mystery that a name holds. Like sorcerers in the dark, adding letter upon letter, ingredient after ingredient, the language unit by which we are known puts a spell on us. There are names that help us soar high in the sky; there are names that weigh on our shoulders and slyly pull us down.
Men live without ever feeling the need to change their family names. Their credentials are given to them at birth. Settled and stable. They inherit their surnames from their fathers and grandfathers, and pass it on to their children and grandchildren.
As for women, whether they know it or not, they are name nomads. Their surnames are here today, gone tomorrow. Throughout their lives, women fill out official forms in different ways, apply for new passports and design several signatures. They have one last name when they are young girls, and another upon marriage. They go back to their maiden names if they get divorced—though sometimes they retain their ex-husbands’ family names for practical purposes, which doesn’t necessarily make things easier—and adopt an altogether different one if they get remarried.
Men have one constant signature. Once they find the one that suits them, they can keep it till death without changing a single curve. As for women, they have at least one “old signature” and one “new signature,” and sometimes they confuse them. Signature of the bachelorette, signature of the married woman, signature of the divorcée.
Women writers have also undergone a series of name-change operations. The late-nineteenth-century Ottoman novelist Fatma Aliye wrote her novels and novellas mostly in secret, as she did not want to upset her husband and family with her “independent ways.” One day she stopped using her name and published her next work under the pseudonym “A Woman.”
For that’s what she was. A woman. Any woman. All women. Getting rid of her name was like casting off the heavy mooring that tied her to the mainland. Once she ceased to be Lady Fatma Aliye and became only “a woman,” she was free to sail anywhere.
In the 1950s a romance novel called Young Girls appeared in Turkey, by a certain Vincent Ewing. The book quickly became a national best seller, finding good coverage in the media. Strangely, no one knew the writer. No journalist had managed to get any interviews from him. Only three things were known about the author: He was American, he was Christian, he was male. Turkish people read the book with that information in mind.
Years went by. One day it was announced that the author of Young Girls was, in fact, a young Muslim Turkish woman. Nihal