Black Milk - Elif Shafak [84]
Week 41
Panic! The time has come and I am terrified. Her Majesty the Queen is doing everything she can to calm me down, but it is no use. There’s only one finger-woman who can help me right now. I need to speak to her.
My belly at my chin, careful not to slip, I descend the stairway to the basement of my soul. There, in a city as spiritual as Mount Athos, beyond a wooden door, I find Dame Dervish, sitting cross-legged on a grape leaf. On her feet are cerulean sandals, around her neck a silver Hu.
“Dame Dervish, may we talk?”
“Of course,” she says. “Words are gifts from one human to another.”
“Okay, do you remember the time I felt grateful for not being an elephant? Now I wish I were one.”
Seeing the expression on her face, I decide to follow a different tack. “I’m not ready for this birth; I don’t know what to do. Nine months is too short.”
“First, calm down,” she says tenderly.
“But what am I going to do?”
“Nothing,” she says.
“Nothing?”
“You are so used to doing something all the time, not to have to do anything terrifies you. But it is, in fact, calming to do nothing. Don’t worry, your body knows what to do, as do the baby and the universe. All you have to do is just surrender.”
Surrender is not a great word with me, so I bite my lip and sigh.
“Do you know that the Sufis believe the world is a mother’s womb?” she asks. “We are all babies in a womb. When the time comes we have to leave the world. We know this but we don’t want to leave. We fear that when we die we will cease to exist. But death is actually a birth. If we could only understand this we wouldn’t be scared of anything.”
Imagining the world as one big womb and the billions of us human beings, of all races and religions, waiting to be born into another life has a calming effect on my nerves.
“Dame Dervish,” I say. “How I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you as well,” she says. “Now go and surrender. The rest will come of its own accord.”
Two days later, early in the morning, I wake Eyup up and we calmly head to the hospital. All of the breathing practices, prenatal yoga, black caviar, broccoli salads and even Little Women lose their significance as I surrender.
Books and Babies
Likening children to books is not a common metaphor in the world of literature, but likening books to children surely is. Jane Austen considered her novels as her children and spoke of her heroines as “my Emma,” “my Fanny” or “my Elinor.” When George Eliot talked about her books, she referred to them as her children. Likewise, Virginia Woolf ’s diaries teem with references to writing as a maternal experience. While examples abound, I find it intriguing that it is always female writers who employ this metaphor. I have never heard of a male writer regarding his novels as his children.
As widely held as the metaphor might appear, there is one crucial difference between babies and books that should not go unnoticed. Human babies are quite exceptional in the amount and intensity of care that they require immediately after being born. Helpless and toothless, the infant is fully dependent on his or her mother for a long time.
Books, however, aren’t like that. They can stand on their own feet starting from birth—that is, from their publication date—and they can instantly swim, just like newborn sea turtles: excitedly, doggedly, unsteadily—from the warm sands of publishing houses toward the vast, blue waters of readers.
Or perhaps novels resemble baby ducklings. As soon as they open their eyes to the world, they take whomever they see first to be their mothers. Instead of the authors, “the mothers” may be their editors, their translators or, yes, their loving readers. If indeed that is the case, once the books are born, their authors do not really need to keep an eye on them or discuss them; just like books do not need to give interviews, pose for photographers or tour around. It is we writers and poets who crave the recognition