Black Milk - Elif Shafak [45]
I was a Turkish girl who had never been to America and yet the stories of lonely people in the American South moved me deeply. But there was more to it than that. Twenty pages into the book, I was dying to know the person who could write like this.
She was born Lula Carson Smith. By shortening her name to Carson she was not only trying to be noticeable but also standing on an ambiguous ground where it was hard for her readers to guess her gender. She was someone who did not easily blend with her peers and could be, at times, quite unfriendly. Instead of dressing up in stockings and shoes with high heels and slender skirts, as was the fashion in the 1930s, she preferred to walk around in high socks and tennis shoes, happy to startle her classmates. Despite her indifference to the established codes of beauty, I find it interesting that when she met the love of her life, Reeves McCullers, the first thing that struck her were his looks. “There was the shock, the shock of pure beauty, when I first saw him.” Though their relationship was beset with doubts and difficulties—they divorced at one point and then remarried—they remained inseparable for nearly twenty years—until the day he died.
So it is that world literary history is full of women who have changed their minds, their destinies and, yes, their names.
The next morning I gave the editor a call.
“Hi, Elif. . . . It is nice to hear from you,” he said briskly, but then paused. “Or did you change your name already? Shall I call you by a different name?”
“Actually, that’s the reason why I called,” I said. “I found my name. And I want you to use this new one when you print my story.”
“O-kay,” he said, once again, very slowly and loudly. By now I had figured out that was how he spoke when he couldn’t see where the conversation was heading. “How does it feel to shed your old name?”
“That part is easy,” I said. “The difficult part is to find a new one.”
“Hm . . . umm,” he said in sympathy.
“I have been researching the lives of writers, perusing words in dictionaries, reading literary anecdotes, looking for an unusual name. I mean, not as unusual as David Bowie’s child Zowie; or Frank Zappa, of course, who named one of his children Moon Unit. But perhaps it is a bit easier when you are trying to name a newborn baby with endless potentials and unknowns than to name your old, familiar, limited self.”
“David Bowie has a child named Zowie Bowie?” he asked.
“Yup,” I said.
“All right, go on, please.”
“Well, I once had a boyfriend who wanted everyone to call him ‘A Glass Half Full’ because he said that was his philosophy in life. He even wrote the name on his exam papers, getting funny reactions from the professors. But then he graduated and went into the military. When he came back, he didn’t want anything to do with A Glass Half Full. He had gone back to his old name, Kaya—the Rock.”
“O-kay,” the editor said.
“Anyhow, I decided I didn’t have to go that far. Actually, I didn’t have to go anywhere. Better to look at what I have with me here and now,” I said. “Instead of carrying my father’s surname, I decided to adopt my mother’s first name as my last name.”
“I’m not sure I am following,” he said.
“Dawn,” I explained. “Shafak is my mother’s first name. I will make it my surname from this day on.”
A month later when the magazine was published, I saw my new name for the first time in print. It didn’t feel strange. It didn’t feel wrong. It felt just right, as if in a world of endless shadows and echoes, my name and I had finally found each other.
The Fugitive Passenger
On the first day of September 2002, the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul to New York takes off with me on it. The plane is jam-packed with undergraduate and graduate students, businessmen and businesswomen, trained professionals, journalists, academics, tourists and a newlywed couple on honeymoon. . . . Besides Turks and Americans, there are Indians, Russians, Bulgarians, Arabs and Japanese who have come from connecting flights. This will be my first visit to America. I think about Anaïs Nin