An Interview During a Revisit to Women’s International Study Center in Santa Fe

 What a treat it was to in Santa Fe where I spent six weeks back in Fall 2014. The simplicity of the women writers’ house, the rural, peaceful setting of the neighborhood reminded me that most life changing experiences and decisions require a radical move from one’s habitual environment (e.g., from Cyprus to Santa Fe!) After six weeks, I remember flying back to San Francisco, how it suddenly felt chaotic and young after New Mexico!  I felt blessed to be back to WISC in March 2018, even with better hopes and plans for the future.  Thank you Jordan Young, the Program Manager, for the interview and the warm welcome. Thank you Jude Deason for hosting me in your lovely studio! The full interview link was online [but no longer there] so I decided to post it here.

J. Young: What are you working on in Taos?

I’m actually at the final stages of my book on Syrian women refugee lives. Doing my best to capture the voices of nine women from different parts of Syria who are now displaced in four countries, that is, Germany, Canada, Turkey, and Greece. I began the interviews almost two years ago. I have a book contract with a deadline of May 15, 2018. 

JY: What brought you to this project?

I have been engaged in women’s life writing since 2003 through my PhD expertise area. I have been recording and writing creative non-fiction based on women’s lives for years. With the conflict in Syria, Turkey received 3 million refugees. This was impossible to ignore for me as Turkish woman writer, researcher, and activist. I thought I could contribute with my prior experience of writing life-stories, compose a biographical work.  I reached out to Syrian women from very different backgrounds and recorded their life stories.

JY: Why?

In order to challenge the stereotype of refugee women. The stereotype would be someone poor, uneducated, needy, conservative, and religious. Covered and conservative women who are considered repressed or secondary citizens. All stereotypes are detrimental and mislead us, yet we all have them.

The media representations of refugee women are fragmented. I write full biographies of people whereas the media focuses on their refugee status, and not that they had lives before and after. I ask questions about their childhood, favorite recipes, families, and other personal stories.  At the end, you get a full human and being a refugee is just one chapter in their lives.

JY: How do you approach telling someone else’s story?

All of my project participants are in transition and have changed countries and cities. After the recordings of  approximately 12-15 hours, what happens is that I send follow-up questions through email or WhatsApp. We are constantly in touch. I keep getting updates on their lives—last week I got some exciting news from one participant and thus added paragraphs into her story.

In Istanbul where I started interviewing, women didn’t live in refugee camps whenever they had the means to rent flats even if located in shanty town areas. Plus, the Turkish government made it almost impossible to go inside the camps and conduct interviews. Whenever I talk about the process of the book in the West, people assume that the Syrian women stay in camps. That is not always true.

My approach and methodology can be called narrative inquiry, which is a ubiquitous practice with some postmodern strands. Life story is a portal through which I enter women’s worlds but the process of narrating forms a relational aspect and demands ethical responsibilities. I highly recommend the works of Clandinin and Huber for people who are interested in digging more on narrative inquiry.

JY: How did you create comfortable rapport with the nine women? Are you a biographer or a witness?

One NGO in Istanbul and friends helped me connect initially, and I wrote all the potential participants emails. I must have sent 15 letters maximum, introducing myself and the project. In return, they wrote me back whether or when they could be available. The two Syrian women made it all the way to Toronto, and I got connected to them by a Turkish sociologist Secil Erdogan Ertorer who is teaching at the Sociology Department at York. My former PhD committee member and a wonderful Canadian feminist professor Meg Luxton mentioned her name due to Ertorer’s work areas. See, it’s all about people trusting your work and good intentions, they want to help you throughout the process.

As for creating rapport, I’m a good listener. I’m originally from Turkey, I grew up there. It was never out on the table, but many times the women I interviewed said “you know” or “you understand this” so in some way, they assumed that we shared commonalities such as religion, food, culture, etc. which we did. Unlike most people who approached them regardless of how well they meant, talking to me did not require opening a lot of parentheses or explanations. Especially when I posed questions on gender and sexuality, men-women interactions in the society, they said: “Well, it’s similar to Turkey…” meaning the patriarchy, the double-standards etc…

Even though we didn’t speak the same language, we shared many cultural experiences and I think that helped build trust.

JY: How does your Women’s Studies background inform your creative writing?

I have the feminist lenses all the time. It means that the women’s authentic voice comes first. Secondly, even though I am being or playing the writer, I need to have their confirmation. Whatever I write, before it goes out anywhere, it goes to the subjects themselves first. They have full control until the manuscript goes to the publishing house. I’m not taking advantage of their voices, which is a common concern in feminism so much so that it paralyses several life story projects or ethnographic work in general.  It is good to be oversensitive but not to the extent that it will block the writer or the researcher due to fear of staining the voice, or not capturing authenticity. I don’t let this happen, I prefer to be criticized instead.

Each storytelling journey has been an empowering journey too. That’s based on the women’s feedback. At the end of the two years, I end the interviews with the question “How did you feel about this?” With no exception, the women expressed feeling much better. They feel relieved and more complete, which is very rewarding for me.

JY: How does your creative writing inform your women’s studies?

I don’t know if it has a powerful effect, but I’d like to make academic language or jargon more accessible, more approachable, more mainstream both on campus and at conferences. I try not to use exclusive language to insert my power as a writer or as a teacher. I have decided to separate creative non-fiction writing as a genre and my career as a professor a while ago.

JY: How does theory inform your writing?

There are a lot of fancy feminists, who are missing the connections that they are part of, or consciously deny them. They focus on differences rather than shared values as women or some get way too abstract in their approach to women’s issues. I’m more interested in fluidity - being open to change and being in transition - and I have really liked that since I was introduced to postmodernist theories or experiments in the 1990s at college and in literature. There should be room for many different ways of thinking about being a woman. I owe the title “womanhoods” to a Syrian feminist activist when I visited her in Stockholm in December 2016. I hope my publisher McFarland will keep the concept even if the title may have other changes. It indeed captures the diversity and evades generalization on women.

JY: What can you say about the #METOO movement?

I’m a big fan! But I’m also aware of the criticism but I don’t care, there are people who will always criticize every move because it’s in their nature or they are very pessimistic in general. I’m very happy that so many stories came out. I don’t think it is pretentious at all, and by the way, it is becoming really an international movement due to social media. One of my Syrian participants who lives in Istanbul is 25, and she joined the #MeToo Movement on Facebook and wrote a bunch of things in English. Her mother saw it on Facebook, woke her up in the middle of the night, and asked her to delete it because it would shame her family.  She refused to take it down. Her father got involved in the conversation the next day and the movement talk is on their table for the family to deal with. It’s amazing!

I’m following Turkish media, and the Turkish feminists wondered why #MeToo Movement didn’t catch on as fast or widely as it did in North America. We put the blame on culture and society: geographical difference.

JY: Can you name three inspiring women?

I recently read Gloria Steinem’s memoirs, and I felt privileged to get the book at Hedgebrook where she wrote it. It was a signed copy! I connected her surprisingly well since my life has been on the road too, and I don’t drive either. I even read a passage from the book to a taxi driver who took me from the farm (Hedgebrook) to the ferry terminal on my way to Seattle. The passage was about taxi drivers, which needs a whole other interview when combined with uber drivers whom I had to interact with in the Bay Area. Talk about #MeToo Movement!

Virginia Woolf was inspiring during my college years, the whole Bloomsbury group was attractive to me. Vita Sackville-West, the inspiration for Woolf’s protagonist of Orlando: A Biography, was another figure I pursued in text: her letters, memoirs, and travels, some 12 years ago. I have been very inspired by women travelers since I was 19 because solo traveling has been an act of rebellion and freedom for me. It still is, and depending on how it is practiced, it can be a very feminist act. I always encourage my female students to travel solo  at every opportunity. Unlike in Europe or North America, we don’t raise many women travelers in the Middle East, less so when it comes to keeping or publishing travel journals.

I find women writers like Ursula LeGuin and Margaret Atwood who steadily and consciously bolstered their fiction with feminism over decades.

JY: What are you reading right now?

I usually read like 2 or 3 things simultaneously. I’m reading a German novelist named Jenny Erpenbeck Go, Went, Gone thanks to the family who is hosting me in Taos. Because of my current work, they knew I’d be interested in it and gave it as a present. I am also reading books about inter-cultural and comparative theology. This is one area that I’m trying hard to direct my academic studies. I’m really surprised with the different reflections and practices of Islam. I realize that with the amount of material I collected for the current book on Syrian refugees, I can write another book selectively focusing on spiritual transformations (either rejections or deeper devotions) that the women have been going through as a result of displacement and war. Can you imagine that in only two years or less, among the small sample of women I interviewed,  some stopped practicing Islam, one covered her hair, two of them became more religious than ever, and increased practicing etc.? It was amazing to witness so I am planning to get another graduate degree in near future where I can dedicate more time into this phenomenon. Also with increasing  number of Muslim refugees from Syria and other countries, Europe and North America will need to be engaged seriously in Islam in the coming years. As women who grew up in Muslim societies, we need to be more vocal about the alternative ways of spiritual living, and present our daily lives realistically. Decontextualized Rumi poetry with its diluted New Age versions for example is not helpful in talking about Islam. I am reading a lot about these matters.

JY: Do you consider yourself an activist?

I think so, yeah. In different ways: for me, writing is an activism, connecting women to other women is also activism. Not jumping on the bandwagon of contemporary society such as not using social media is activism! Buying used clothes or goods, recycling, riding a bicycle or using public transportation etc… I am a huge proponent of the simple sounding “personal is political” motto of feminism.  It captures a lot! People can constantly make ‘mini-revolutions’ in their daily lives and thus are activists.

JY: How does teaching fit into your life?

I gave a break to full-time teaching because it was very demanding and taking me away from writing in the way I wanted to. I came to a point after several years  of teaching where I felt burned out. I arrived in WISC in 2014 and that was an immediate fresh breath: it feels very different to be a full time writer. However, I’m also a people-person, and I like meeting new people, exchanging ideas with them. I wouldn’t mind teaching part-time or offering workshops as I did in Athens.  

JY: Can you say something about your international identity? 

I feel comfortable in most places. I’ve travelled a lot. I don’t feel unsafe or freaked out when I am in a completely new environment where I can’t speak a word of the local language, for example. I’m calm in that fluid global identity that was formed over the years so I don’t need a fixed address or house 24/7.  However, I feel more at home if there is ocean or sea nearby due to … probably my background or happiest memories. Even when I am surrounded by the most stunning landscapes such as in New Mexico or Switzerland, I begin to miss the sight and the scent of the ocean after a few weeks.  I don’t do well in cold climates either. These are my only weaknesses when I’d like to believe that I have a fluid global identity! On a more serious level, I’d like to mention Şirin Tekeli, a prominent feminist figure in Turkey whom we lost last summer (June 13, 2017), who told me once that I shouldn’t feel upset or guilty about leaving my country of origin. She advised the same to other young feminists such as Pinar Selek who has been in exile in France for years. Tekeli said that the nations are actually crumbling, people can contribute to causes in which they believe in and get connected through very different means in today’s world. Last summer when I realized that the feeling of homesickness left me a while ago, it was very liberating. I can’t even point how or when it happened. I remember her words often and how significant it is to cross that threshold for a woman or anyone for that matter.

JY: Thank you so much.

OE: You’re welcome. Very good questions. 

 

 

Eating and Fasting for God in Sufi Tradition

Valerie J. Hoffman

Journal of the American Academy of Religion LXIII/3 (1995) 

 Below passages are selected and paraphrased from Hoffman’s article based on my focus of interest.

The Qur'an says all the food of the Jews and Christians is lawful to the Muslims, as is the food of the Muslims lawful to them (5:5). Gratitude (shukr) to God for His provision is one of the main characteristics of the faithful, while unbelievers are characterized, in the typical Qur'anic literary style of assonance and antithetic parallelism, by ingratitude (kufr).

Feeding a poor person is so meritorious that it can be an expiation for failure to observe the fast of Ramadan or for breaking the taboo on hunting during the pilgrimage (2:184, 5:95).

The Qur'anic preoccupation with food and feeding goes beyond discussions of human sustenance and charity. Images of food and drink appear prominently in descriptions of the Garden of Paradise and of Hellfire. The believers who are rewarded in the Garden eat abundant fruit and are served non-intoxicating drinks (43:73). They drink from rivers of water, rivers of milk that does not go sour, non-intoxicating delicious wine, and clarified honey (47:15). On the other hand, those who conceal God's revealed truth or treat it lightly, trying to derive some financial gain from it, "eat nothing but fire into their bellies" (2:174). The wrongdoers in Hellfire have only filth (69:36) and thorns (88:6) and food that chokes (73:13). They fill their bellies from the tree of Zaqqum, which grows in the bottom of hell and produces fruit like the heads of demons (37:6266). They drink boiling water, which tears apart their bowels.

The overall attitude of Hadïth is that the Muslims should be neither too worldly nor too other-worldly: they should take from both this world and the next. For instance, Ibn al-'Arabi cautions disciples against both satiation and excessive hunger. "Keep your constitution in balance, for if dryness is excessive, it leads to corrupt imaginings and long, delirious ravings" (31). Balance and moderation are key words in this attitude.

Attitudes Toward Food in Sufi Tradition

Sufism began as a pious reaction against the growing worldliness of Muslims in the second half of the seventh century C.E., accompanied by an avoidance of government officials and rich people. It developed into a full-fledged mysticism in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, but the asceticism of the early Sufis remained an integral part of Sufi life.

Fasting: The spiritual benefits of fasting are abundant. One is the humbling effect of hunger. Another benefit is that it produces patience. The other aspect among early Sufis was the cultivation of an attitude of absolute dependence on God to provide for all one's needs, avoiding asking for provision from others or working for a living or worrying about where one's food would come from. Fasting is "a fortress and a paradise" for the "friends of God," who has granted them the method to repel the guile and trickery of Satan as in the lost Paradise (1:303-4).

There are some extreme examples of fasting as demonstrated in al-Maghribï’s words among Sufis: The one devoted to the Lord eats only every forty days, and the one devoted to the Eternal eats only every eighty days." Another Sufi commented, "If the Sufi says after five days (of fasting), Ί am hungry,' then send him to the marketplace to earn something" (Qushayrï 1990: 81-2)— implying that he is unworthy to live the Sufi life.

It is not just the quantity of food, but the type of food that affects spiritual well-being. One of the expected charismata of the saint, or friend of God, was the ability to tame wild animals and be on friendly terms with them. Valerie J. Hoffman cites two anecdotes/advice on avoiding animal-fat which were attributed to Rabia and Ibni Arabi.

Sufism and Food in Modern Egypt

Sufis who dress in colorful rags and live off the charity of others without regular employment may still be seen at the celebrations of saints' days (mevlids), but their lifestyle is not highly regarded even in most Sufi circles. They epitomize the "dervishism" that many Sufis feel has given Sufism a bad name with today's educated middle class. Many Sufi shaykhs, however, neither live off the charity of others nor work for a living.

Hospitality’s Link to Food: Sufis today in Egypt appear to delight in the assurance of their relationship with God, and enjoy this relationship while functioning normally in the world. Hoffman argues that rather than embracing hunger, Egyptian Sufis make the serving of food central to their devotional life. Hospitality has long been a prominent aspect of Sufism since the founding of Sufi retreat centers—as early as the eleventh century—that regularly welcomed traveling Sufis. Today, this custom continues in Egypt where Sufi shaykhs or other individuals establish centers for Sufi devotion, spiritual retreats, and hospitality, called sähas.

In contemporary Egypt, Sufi hospitality and devotion often revolve around the attendance of moulids—saint's day celebrations. Moulids/mevlits celebrate the anniversary of the death of a saint (can be any man, woman or child) who is believed to be close to God. Their tombs become shrines where pilgrims implore the intercession of the saint or, more Islamically proper, implore God by virtue of the baraka of the saint, for a variety of reasons such as healing, help with exams, the redress of wrongs, or simply for favor with God.

Some of the moulids/mevlids, like that of Ahmad al-Badawi in the town of Tanta in the Delta, have become such economic affairs that their religious significance becomes obscured by the secular pursuits.

Although food may be offered by a spiritual superior or by a person of lower spiritual rank to a spiritual superior, the meaning of the offering of food is interpreted according to the larger context. Any food offered at a moulid carries the baraka of the saint in whose name it is offered. When a shaykh offers food, he is offering his own baraka, and blessing is conveyed to the person who eats. When a shaykh/shaykha accepts an invitation to eat at somebody's home, he brings baraka to the house, and honors the host by tasting their food. Hierarchy and submission are expressed not by the mere act of offering food, but by the dispensation and receiving of blessing.

Among the drinks, milk seems to enjoy a special significance Sufism, signifying spiritual adoption if visions or dreams are related to it. 

Hoffman concludes with a balanced statement that in Sufism, eating to satisfy one's appetites leaves one open to Satanic insinuation, but eating for the sake of God can strengthen one for worship.

Wild Women Representations Part III _Agnes Varda

Sans Toit Ni Loi or Vagabond (1985)

 

The name of the main character of Agnes Varda’s Sans Toit Ni Loi  is Mona or Justine (because she changed her name from Justine to Mona, she says). Although the French title's translation is "No Shelter No Law" in non-Francophone countries it was released as Vagabond. I think I have first seen it at a film festival in Istanbul or Ankara but this revisit was glorious. I entirely enjoyed the mastery in it. Mona is 'the vagabond' whose seeming freedom is mostly but briefly envied by others who speak or report to the camera about Mona since the movie is the chronicle of a death foretold. It is a woman’s story via testimonies of others whom she came into contact one way or another. Mona’s indifference and unapologetic attitude can be compared to Joe (the protagonist of Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac) for the audience who are familiar with both.

 

As a young woman wanderer, Mona spreads unease. Through the small talk that most drivers or men who give her daily or hourly cash-in-hand jobs had with her, we learn that Mona quit her job as a secretary and took off on the road to nowhere with her tent on her back, sleeping in fields, on roadsides, deserted houses. We witness some hard times when she most likely sells sex and gets raped too. She remains always defiant, faintly mutinous, uncaring, enigmatic. As she says, “I don’t care – I move on”.

 

The amazing Agnès Varda renders the audience as her observers, and we are (I as for one) led to feel uneasy with our helplessness and detachment from a character whose life has been detailed by the others; yet, whose thoughts remains buried. Mona is a “rahat” woman but doesn’t give the impression that she is comfortable or at ease with herself or with the world except a few occasions.

 

Among the dozens of characters whom she meets on the road, I will remember particularly the two. A stylish academic (Macha Méril) encounters Mona and agrees to drive her around, lets her sleep in the car, buys her good food etc. Her job is to diagnose the sick trees in Southern France and report to her team so that the diseased trees can be logged and cleared (anything symbolic there?). She is disgusted by Mona’s smell but is too polite to ask her to get out of the car, yet, also fascinated by her. Not once we hear Mona thanking her or showing appreciation, not even after she hands Mona groceries and some money before the drop off.

 

The second one is a hippy with an MA in Philosophy and his girlfriend. They raise goats and make cheese, and they happen to like Mona who asks for a place to crash for one night. They offer her some land to work and a caravan to live in because earlier, Mona tells the guy that she wants to grow potatoes for future, an almost shockingly simple dream. But they are deeply irritated and disappointed when Mona shows no inclination to get out of bed in the mornings. This man tells Mona that, for all the romantic notions, life on the road, combined with its ruthless poverty, is a kind of living death. I agree and consider the family’s offer as a truly missed opportunity. In fact, that setting seems to be only place where she could combine her readings and daydreaming with gardening. I even thought of Voltaire’s Candide ou l'Optimisme when Mona too was surprised that the guy was once a traveller like herself and studied philosophy. He managed to find a mid-way (as is clearly expressed) and was empathetic with Mona’s ways.

 

Whether Mona is a determined free spirit or just a lost soul is up to the viewer to decide but it is not an easy conclusion to make. Her story's end (or the movie’s beginning, that is, a frozen corpse) is nothing like the attractive hitchhikers in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (Gus Van Sant, 1993) or In July (Fatih Akın, 2000). Mona is an unusual and memorable one who defies most women representations in movies or in real life for that matter. 

"Wild Women" Representations_ Part II_Roseann Quinn and Maryse Holder

Sisterhood is Complicated

Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1975) by Judith Rossner

The novel was inspired by the murder of Roseann Quinn and examines the underside of the seventies sexual liberation movement.  The protagonist, Theresa Dunn, is a young woman who spends her days teaching first grade to a classroom of deaf-mutes and her nights hanging out in singles bars of New York in the 1970s. She is a beloved and dedicated school teacher who loves her job but very anti-marriage and want no children of her own makes, which renders her a complicated woman.

For centuries, women weren't allowed to be complicated: They were ladies or tramps. Of course, that binary doesn’t work for all women on the planet. So what happens when they don’t mind being both and even enjoy it? The sequence of “the good boy at family dinner scene” which raises her parents’ hope for a possible marriage is  followed by the scene at the bar with another and clearly bad boy (Tony) who jokes about the Bible that Theresa finds her in purse (stuck by her mother). The answer is -as long as the movies are made by and for the patriarchal system- their end is not the happiest. Even worse, these products can send signals or messages to the audience that women better not complicate life and roles for their own well being and safety!

Janis Joplin’s poster on the wall is significant at T’s flat where Tony inflicts physical abuse on her and becomes a stalker after a one-night-stand. The bloody end that Theresa faces can be interpreted as a punishment for many conservative viewers but also refreshingly criticized by several other readers from the opposite end of the spectrum.  And hey, what’s with Janis Joplin?

Give Sorrow Words – Maryse Holder’s Letters from Mexico (1979) 

I came across Maryse Holder’s Give Sorrow Words - Letters from Mexico at a giant secondhand book fair in San Francisco in 2014, and picked it out of the hundreds books that I scanned on that wonderful day at Fort Mason. Despite the book’s cheesy Harlequin style cover, its foreword was written by Kate Millett so it was more than enough for me.

Holder’s experiences and adventures with men are expressed in letters in a language that an average reader would call unsettling. Some sections can be said to border pornography and f-words are generously used, which LA Times referred to as intellectual erotica. Without being judgmental, based on the letters, one can call Maryse self-destructive and enigmatic. Her style is compared to Jean Genet and Henry Miller at the time. Like Roseann Quinn/Theresa, Maryse too paid the price of being ‘rahat’. She was murdered in Mexico at the age of 36 in 1977.

For a woman with a degree in literature from Cornell, the seventies sexual liberation movement must have triggered several ideas, probably along with expectations of some sort. However, at some point, Maryse’s anger turned to herself, as hinted by Kate Millett. I do share Millett’s regret that Maryse’s inferiority complex regarding her physical being could have been curable in women’s collectives or consciousness raising groups at the time. To Edith Jones, recipient of Maryse’s letters, Maryse describes her time in Mexico as her "vacation from feminism." Why would anyone need a vacation from feminism, and furthermore why bother with the patriarchy’s radical representatives, the machos of Mexican bars during this so called “vacation”? Millett’s reference of Mary’s self-destruction in regard to Janis Joplin is telling (ix).

According to Millett, most women have hard time to shake off the “guilt” of freedom and turn them into a self-destructive form, killing themselves factually or metaphorically. As a reader, I keep thinking “wow, the notion of sisterhood is indeed complicated.” In “Feminist Sexual Politics and the Heterosexual Predicament”, Lynne Segal describes the book as “gloomily absorbing” and finds it hard to decide whether it was Holder’s notion of feminism or her own predatory view of sex which was the more depressing. Even more dispiriting for Segal is “the fact that many feminists would confidently endorse Maryse Holder’s dual depiction of feminism as anti-heterosexual pleasure and heterosexual pleasure as anti-woman” (77).[i]

Janis Joplin, Theresa (Roseann in real life), and Maryse Holder’s choices to make themselves available to men probably was a way to cover their "unfitness" according to the beauty standards of the times (thus feeling insecure and unwanted). However, because they were smart women, ability to discern between the reasons why daily partners were around at any time took away the spiritual satisfaction. If only they could have tasted the empowerment and the comfort of being supported by other women friends or strangers who are sympathetic and compassionate under any circumstances! Millett laments that the nonjudgmental girlfriend Edith was not considered a potential partner, for instance. Being backed up by women’s solidarity is the cure for patriarchy's damage, and women who are aware of this solidarity and choose to extend it over never would feel weak or lonely. It saves one from sinking into many demoralizing and destructive relationships or moods.

---

[i] Lynne Segal (1997). “Feminist Sexual Politics and the Heterosexual Predicament.” In: Segal L. (eds) New Sexual Agendas. Palgrave Macmillan, London.

“Wild Women” Representations_Part I

“Wild Women” Representations and The Costs of Being Untameable by Choice

This essay deals with the concept of “loose women” or in Turkish “serbest/rahat kadınlar” through an analysis of selected female characters’ representations created after the 1970s. Maryse Holder’s book Give Sorrow Words, Judith Rossner’s novel Looking for Mr.Goodbar and Lars von Trier’s film Nymphomaniac provide the context in which the main characters are compared. Normativity of single and free woman’s sexuality is reconstructed on a variety of levels including proposals on changes in daily language. Janis Joplin’s name and image recur as a nymphomaniac and a wild woman both in media and in the selected works for the essay. Despite its complexity, the notion of sisterhood remains an option in its inclusion of “loose women” and of women who are determined to survive in a patriarchal and heterosexual world, dealing with body-image and self-esteem issues.

==

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak /

whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it to break / Macbeth, Act IV, Scene III.

“I always demanded more from the sunset. That is perhaps my only sin.” Joe, the protagonist of Nymphomaniac

Let me begin with an explanation on language: “Serbest” in Turkish means “free” so in most cases it has a positive or neutral connotation except that when it is used in describing a woman or a young girl. If you cannot ever bring yourself to use swear words (bitch or whore,) or the attitudes that are associated with these two words, you may use “serbest”. Examples: “She is raised ‘serbest’, she comes from a ‘serbest’ family”. Although the word’s connotations may vary from one perceiver to the other, it means the following: She hangs out with guys without being monitored, she dresses tank tops, mini-skirts, shorts, maybe uses lots of makeup etc. It is likely that she doesn’t avoid drinking, flirting, or smoking and dancing in public. I suspect that for a conservative family whose women are all covered, the same word is used for another series of actions (which may not at all included in your bag of “serbest”).

            I celebrate essay as a hybrid form with no strict tradition of its own, thus allowing transparency and emotions along with cultivation of ideas and fact-based observations. To use Adorno’s words: “It evokes intellectual freedom” which I immensely value (3).^[i]

Janis Joplin once sang: Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose…

           The other word which is used interchangeably is “rahat” which means comfortable. When it is used to describe a woman, this one is even more mind-blowing. Could you guess that a “rahat” woman in Turkish means “too liberated”? As a child, not knowing this second, negative meaning of “rahat,” I focused on the literal meaning. When I overheard conversations of women in the family or among the neighbors, I carefully recorded the word and decided to put it into use in a naively proud manner as most children do. We didn’t have the imported phrase “free-lance” at the time. I was probably dreaming of an outdoors job where I can hang out in fresh air in a ‘rahat’ manner, and not spend my life inside office walls.

            One day, our primary school teacher asked ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’, I answered “I want to be a ‘rahat’ woman”. She did not laugh. In fact, she called my parents, once this career plan was made public. Then my mother told me that I should consider other future plans, and being a “rahat” woman is not a profession. Furthermore, it is not something that a good girl should aspire. Her tone implied that no further questions were to be asked at the time.

Now, as an adult woman, I ask myself how I should be responding if a 6-year-old girl tells me that she wants to be a “rahat” woman in the future because the word sounds so sympathetic. The opposite of rahat is rahatsız (1. uncomfortable, 2. ill) in Turkish. If someone is “rahatsız” you feel sorry for him/her regardless of gender.  

            Constructing an anti-mainstream language in any culture is challenging. Even when one dares the attempt, her audience is used to and is using the old language and thus cannot help contrasting, and measuring the acceptibility of the new language accordingly. As a consequence, what one may promote as novel or revolutionary is likely to get ‘lost in translation’ (yes, in the very same language) or understood by only a few. I realized however that whenever ‘serbest’ women’s stories are materialized for mainstream consumption, a happy end for them is rare. I don’t think it is a coincidence that ‘serbest’ woman is singled out, marginalized, and punished in a heterosexual system so that women in general and women’s sexuality in particular can be monitored. Can it be due to a concern of not creating bad role models by any chance, and thus better not to empathize with ‘wild women’ of any kind? Or is it because art is imitating life?

            I like to politicize and appropriate the term ‘wild women’ and change it into “untamed women” in a positive sense. It is my hope -utopic as it may sound- that both words gradually turn into compliments when used for women because these words are the opposite of imprisoned and uncomfortable as mentioned earlier.

            Most women in the modern world are not even aware of the matriarchal societies such as the one in  Bijagos Islands of West Africa.^[ii] Thus, their gender roles range from feeling like a loser to feeling guilty about assertiveness or leaving a relationship. We need to remember  how limited our vision of the world can be due to our socialization and the five senses that we are bound to in experiencing the world. There are always alternatives: One needs to be bold and have a Plan B.

---

[i] Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form.” Notes to Literature. Trans. Sherry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. 3-4. 

[ii] See Leyla Assaf Tengroth's documentaries: “Our God is a Woman” and “Women’s Island”.

Field Work_Gaziantep Notes

After a smooth flight from Istanbul to Gaziantep, I took the shuttle to the city center, then a taxi whose driver was very grumpy to say the least, and boldly criticized the president and the sinking economy. After checking in to a room on the 4th floor, I looked out of the window to the piles of gray concrete buildings without any patch of green in sight. I felt cold, and realized that the A/C in the room was not working so I called to report the problem and went down to wait for Zizi. She moved to Gaziantep for work after a short episode in Istanbul and her detailed story can be found in Syrian Women Refugees. In January, she turned 40. 

Zizi was a bit late to the hotel but cheerful to see me after two years. In the back seat, her 11 year-old daughter Selin scanned me with her large and curious light blue eyes. I already knew a lot about her due to writing her mother’s life story for my book, but she probably didn’t know that. She could easily pass as a Scandinavian girl with her platinum blond hair and pale skin yet her Syrian ID and Turkish residency permit belie this impression quickly. She is only allowed to live in Gaziantep and needs permission to travel across cities even within Turkey. 

Selin has almost no recollection of Syria and speaks fluent Turkish. Her mother enjoys our quick bonding, and I know she is very proud of her two daughters. First, we go to a cafe that is run by Turks and Syrians. We can skip small talk since Zizi shared a lot with me already even after the book was out. There was a time she cut our communication off and today, she tells me why: “You reminded me of things that I was trying hard to forget. We Syrians want to begin a new life but it is almost impossible. I’ve been attending a therapy group in Istanbul, organized and funded by the Swedish Consulate, and it’s doing me good.” She shows me a picture of a Nordic-looking woman whose face radiates “like an angel,” in her words. I took her name since I may need her advice on vicarious trauma, a common issue experienced by hearing accounts of traumatic experiences.

The Eskici Cafe was huge,  lively with young men and women, and next to a kindergarten. Smoking bothered me a lot but since Zizi herself was a smoker, I didn’t say anything. It was also a shisha (water-pipe) place and restaurant. Over our coffee chat during which Selin intervened from time to time, Zizi mentioned her new job, how she could no longer suppress the urge to go back to NGO work, and this time, it involved more direct interaction with real people. Then she asked me whether I’ve heard of the movie “for Sama” and I said yes. I even shared that the trailer triggered something in me, and caught me off guard only a few days ago so I decided to postpone watching the documentary. “well…” she says, “the director is a very good friend of mine,” and shows me the pictures taken when she drove them to the airport for their flight to London last month, where Waad and her family now live, and that is where they flew to Hollywood for the Oscar Ceremony as “for Sama” was among the Best Documentary nominees. Zizi was proud with her friend, and told me how modest Waad remains, and sees the whole thing as an ‘opportunity’ to create more awareness with what has been going on in Syria.

Then, Zizi showed me the dress that Waad wore for the Oscars, a sharp and elegant political statement. As Zizi translated the Arabic script on the dress into English for me, her large green-blue eyes got teary but she was able to hold them. We simultaneously glanced at Selin who seemed oblivious to our conversation, fully immersed in her smartphone. Syrian children are used to their parents talking about ‘the situation’, and switching from a massacre story to the kind of crepe or waffle to choose on the menu (as we did!) in multiple languages. Syria is a vague motherland (‘vatan’ is a shared word in Turkish and Arabic) and Turkey is the concrete one that they go to school and socialize. Selin gives a big hug to the Turkish manager of the cafe who greets her by name, and they joke back and forth in Turkish. I order coffee with cardamom (kahwat al-hail) and because of my bad pronunciation it sounds like ‘coffee with hell’! Selin looks very confused, we all begin to laugh, and I can already tell that it will become an insider joke in coming years.

Another Revisit: Pelle The Conqueror (Highly Recommended)

Some films age beautifully like some women do. Pelle The Conqueror is one of them. I vaguely remember seeing it in a movie theater as a teenager and still carry a good feeling about it, but nothing else.  Now with this revisit after 30+ years, I wouldn’t hesitate to call it a masterwork (of Swedish director, Billie August) and I wish I could see it on a larger screen as I did in the past. It received the Best Foreign Language Film in 1989, and that probably explains why and how it made it all way to the Istanbul theaters.

The film is an adaptation of Martin Andersen Nexø’s novel. The main character Oscar nominee Max von Sydow who played the all-talk-little-action old father named Lasse died this spring. The little boy is played by Pelle Hvenegaard who continued with acting career if you google. In the movie, he is dreaming of living in America one day from the small Danish island where he lives under horrible poor conditions like most refugees today. The son and the father uproot themselves from their native Sweden at the turn of the 20th century in hopes of finding better work and save some money on the Danish island of Bornholm (so they are not refugees). I know it is hard to imagine this today that there had been quite some  waves of immigration and hardcore exploitation as a result within the Nordic countries before they became the most developed and built the best welfare system in the world. Even to challenge one’s stereotypes and make some sad temporal and special comparisons of poor Swedish immigrants, the movie is worth seeing.

The workers are paid near-slave wages to work on a farm by a very brutal boss with an owner that is driving his wife insane with his adulterous actions. As is the case with most child protagonists, Pelle acts as voyeur to many heated acts of lechery and genuine love; and witnesses the worst the human beings can do to each other. Despite the high number of characters to explore after the movie is over, Pelle the Conqueror always brings us back to the father-son dynamic, a constant source of compassion and deep disappointment.  In fact, I cannot think of any other movie which captures a series of disappointments with fathers that most boys experience and cannot express as a child so movingly and successfully. I feel there is something so universal that will touch many male viewers’ hearts and they won’t even be able to tell why. Pelle slowly turns to more forceful personalities on the farm whom he can look up to including one worker who speaks out against harsh treatment and low wages (but he pays the price for it).  I couldn’t help but constantly think of refugees today except that the faces in the movie are all pale and get very red, and hair color is blond or red.

It is a two-and-a-half-hour work, just so know and plan ahead. I post this recommendation particularly to the younger generation so that they can practice some attention-focusing and also appreciate the beauty of epic movies.

PS: If you like this movie, I also recommend Antonia’s Line and Babette. 

Fun fact: Berkeley’s BAMPFA's beautiful second floor café is named after the movie Babette.