Black Milk - Elif Shafak [52]
Fall goes by and the trees shed their first leaves, painting the entire campus in amber, red and brown. In the mornings, Little Miss Practical and I go jogging. One day on the way back we stop by the library.
We find Miss Highbrowed Cynic sitting on a shelf, hunched over an open book. Using a sharpened pencil as a pole, she vaults from one stack of books to the next. She also has a string ladder to climb to higher shelves. Every time she moves, the peace-sign earrings on her lobes and the bangles on her arms jingle. The black T-shirt she is wearing over her jeans has this message written across: “ANTI-WAR / ANTI-RACISM / ANTI-HATE.”
“Hi, Sister,” she says to me, and slightly frowns at Little Miss Practical. Since we have come to America the conflicts among the finger-women have surfaced again, their temporary coalition dissolving fast.
“What are you reading?” I ask.
“The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt,” she says.
Little Miss Practical casts a confused glance over my shoulder. “Another fisherman’s story?”
“A book by the French critic Julia Kristeva, who happens to be one of the leading thinkers of our times,” says Miss Highbrowed Cynic.
“Smart cookie, huh?” asks Little Miss Practical.
“She sees the Oedipus complex as a key to understanding women,” continues Miss Highbrowed Cynic, her tone not so much annoyed as haughty. “A young girl adores her mother, copying everything she does. But then she finds out that she does not have a penis, and feels flawed and incomplete, like a eunuch. To compensate for this deficiency, she attaches herself to her father. The mother who was loved and admired until then is now pushed aside, seen as a competitor. There are girls who from this stage onward develop a hatred for their mothers.”
Little Miss Practical and I listen, without a word, without a breath.
“Women writers are affected by the Oedipus complex more than you may think. Did you know, for instance, why Sevgi Soysal became a novelist? She began to write at age eight because she was jealous of her father’s affection for her mother. She saw her mother as a rival, and through her writing and imagination she wanted to win her father’s favor.”
“Oh, really?” I say.
“Oh, yes, she writes about this in her memoirs,” Miss Highbrowed Cynic says, with her know-it-all attitude. “Every child wants to rejoin her mother’s body. This is an impossible wish, of course. That ‘oneness’ is long gone, severed forever, but the child cannot help longing for it. The ‘symbolic order’ represented by the father awaits the individual who cannot rejoin his mother’s body.”
“Come again?” says Little Miss Practical.
Miss Highbrowed Cynic volleys on. “In order to survive in this order, we suppress our imagination, temper our desires and learn to be ‘normalized.’ No matter how hard we try, however, our imagination can never be stifled. In the most inopportune places and at the oddest times, it surfaces. The mother’s semiotic rises up against the father’s symbolic order.”
“Such confusing things!” says Little Miss Practical. “What’s the point of making life so complicated? These French thinkers are not practical in the least. No wonder French movies are so depressing.”
Miss Highbrowed Cynic stares at the other finger-woman with an air of condescension but says nothing. Instead she turns to me. “Kristeva talks about three ways for a child to create her identity. First, to identify with the father and the symbolic. Second, to identify with the mother and the semiotic. Third, to find a shaky balance in between.”
I pretend to follow what she is saying, but Miss Highbrowed Cynic doesn’t fall for it: “Don’t you get it? If you pursue the third option, you could use the father’s symbolic order and the mother’s semiotic in your work.”
“Hmm . . . Is there a writer who has ever done that?” I ask.
“Yes, Sis. Take a closer look at Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. She was writing precisely in that precarious balance.”
I don’t object. It might or might not be true. Writing