Black Milk - Elif Shafak [68]
“And the third condition?” I ask.
“Or else, you have to be reckless—ready to be the talk of the town, to be grain for the gossip mills. You have to be brazen enough so as not to care what people will think of you when they read your passages on sex.”
I think of what Erica Jong did in Fear of Flying. Once she said to a journalist that she had accepted fear as an inseparable part of life, especially the fear of change. But this acknowledgment had not held her back: “I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: Turn back.”
Blue Belle Bovary pauses in case I have anything to add, and when she sees that I don’t, she goes on, just as fervently.
“As for you, I am sorry to say you don’t fulfill any of these conditions. Seriously, darling, you are in some kind of a fix. You never write openly about the body. Of course, I am the one who bears the brunt. My entire existence is censored!”
She could have a point. But there is something she doesn’t recognize. It’s not only me or us female writers who as a matter of self-protection shy away from the depiction of graphic sexuality in our books. The same goes for female academics, female reporters, female politicians and those women who tread into the business world. We all are a little desexualized, a little defeminized. We can’t carry our bodies comfortably in a society that is so bent against women. In order to be a “brain” in the public realm, we control our “bodies.”
I remember Halide Edip Adivar—Ottoman Turkish feminist, political activist and novelist, the diva of Turkish literature. Though she passionately believed in gender equality and worked to improve women’s lives, Adivar often reiterated the good-woman/bad-woman dichotomy in her novels and desexualized the former. Her female characters were intelligent, strong-willed and so modest they did not undress even in front of their husbands. Rabia—the leading protagonist in her novel The Clown and His Daughter—changed into her nightgown inside the closet, and then came to bed where her husband awaited her.
In traditional Muslim society, where Rabia serves as an ideal woman, women can meet our bodies only inside closets or behind closed doors. The same impulse is reflected in our storytelling. More often than we care to admit, we women writers, especially those of us from non-Western backgrounds, are uncomfortable about writing on sexuality.
Could I ever be like Blue Belle Bovary? Could I wear ostentatious lipstick, teeny-tiny skirts and low-cut necklines like she does? Could I flip my hair as if I were in a shampoo commercial? Probably not. Two steps forward, and one of my heels would surely get stuck in a crack and break. I would never make it.
“Have you ever tried being sexy, darling?” she asks, as if she has read my thoughts.
It is a provocative question, when you come to think of it.
That same evening I ask Eyup to meet me for dinner at an elegant fish restaurant by the Bosphorus. I have never been there before, but it was highly recommended by a friend who called the place “as chic as Kate Moss.”
Eyup goes there at seven P.M. and starts to wait for me. Actually, I, too, am at the restaurant, except I am hiding in the bathroom, trying to muster the courage to walk out.
How did I end up here, in hiding? I went to a hairdresser this afternoon and had my hair dyed, my nails manicured and my eyebrows plucked. It was fun for the first ten minutes, but then I got so bored I could have run out with a towel on my head and my hands dripping soapy water. There are very few things to read at a salon, only hairstyle magazines that contain hundreds of photos but roughly only twenty words.
Yet I made it. And here I am, my hair nicely shaped, my face shining under layers of makeup, and though I did not dare to wear the crimson dress Blue Belle Bovary was wearing, I managed to get into a tight, long gown—black, of