A French woman, a Japanese woman and a Turkish woman—three determined writers, three autonomous individuals, who lived worlds apart but spoke the same language—could they be dining together in heaven now? I’d like to think so.
In Search of the Mother Goddess
O
n the second day of September, I descend from a bus that has PETER PAN written in gaudy, capital letters on both sides. The name suits my mood. I, too, feel like “a boy who wouldn’t grow up,” and this place with its unfamiliar landscape and fickle weather could very well be Neverland. I drag a big, blue suitcase on wheels, and carry a cat box—except there is no cat inside, but four finger-women. Though they had raised no complaints during the eleven-hour flight from Istanbul, in the one-and-a-half-hour bus ride from Boston they have been constantly whining or puking.
As soon as I step down onto the sidewalk, the silence on the campus is like a slap on the face. My ears are so used to the constant chaos and crazy rhythm of Istanbul that I fear I may go deaf here. I see people, but nobody is shouting, yelling or whistling. Even the squirrels seem to tiptoe so as not to make noise. I find the stillness unsettling.
But the campus is lovely. It is vast and green as far as the eye can see. There are tall, thick trees everywhere, speaking in gnarled mystery. There are dozens of other languages being spoken here—the college being home to more than two thousand students from almost seventy countries. One out of every three students is a foreigner like me.
This impressive, cosmopolitan college is the outcome of one woman’s vision. In 1837, an idealistic teacher named Mary Lyon began to advocate for the right of female students to be given the same level of education as male students. At a time when women did not yet have the right to vote, her views were quite radical. But Mary Lyon persevered, and after much struggle and several setbacks, she managed to collect the necessary funds to found the college. Since then, thousands have graduated from Mount Holyoke, and perhaps with each new graduate, Mary Lyon’s spirit has been rejoicing.
Mount Holyoke and neighboring Smith College were nerve centers of the 1960s and 1970s American feminist movement. When I set foot here, the tradition is still visibly alive. In addition to feminists, postfeminists and half-and-half feminists (those who appreciate feminism but do not necessarily like feminists), there are also plenty of Wiccans in search of spiritual union with Mother Goddess, and quite a number of bisexual and lesbian activists.
All this—squirrels and lesbians—I write about in a column for a widely circulated Turkish newspaper known for its conservative readership. Understandably, the feedback to my columns is mixed. Overall, my readers in Turkey seem to be more surprised by the fact that nobody catches the squirrels and cooks them (not that we have a national squirrel dish; I don’t know where they get this idea from) than by the sight of lesbian couples walking hand in hand. I take this as a progressive sign.
There is one poster that grabs my attention from day one—that of a female worker wearing blue overalls, a red and white bandana on her head and a shirt with one sleeve rolled up to reveal a tensed and muscled bicep like that of Popeye the Sailor Man. She adorns the walls around campus. “You can succeed, you can stand tall and be strong in this male-driven world” is the slogan everywhere.
On my second day, I discover the building that will become my favorite place during my entire stay: the gigantic, gaudy, gothic library. It’s love at first sight. From handwritten books to modern literature, political philosophy to botanical science, I roam the aisles touching the books, smelling them.
But no one appreciates the library more than Miss Highbrowed Cynic. The second she spots the building, which resembles Rapunzel’s castle from a distance, she jumps with joy and yells so loudly, she damages her vocal cords.
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 fiction is a tidal river with strong currents. While flowing with it, one doesn’t think, “Let me now add a splash of symbolic order and a dash of the mother’s semiotic.” You don’t chew on such things when developing a novel. You are too busy falling in love with your characters.
That is what Miss Highbrowed Cynic doesn’t understand. Novelists write without thinking. It is afterward, when literary critics and scholars weigh writers’ every sentence that theories are applied. And then when people read those theories, they get the impression that novelists were purposefully creating their stories in such a way—which is not true.
“There’s something I don’t get,” Little Miss Practical says.
“Why am I not surprised?” scoffs Miss Highbrowed Cynic.
“You’re so into the theory of motherhood. All this
semiotic, symbolic
,
bucolic
. . . But when it comes to the practicalities, I am sure you’d fall flat on your face.”
“My knowledge would guide me,” says Miss Highbrowed Cynic.
“Whoa, come on, Sister, you couldn’t even change a diaper. I may not know anything about your theories, but I can get the hang of motherhood faster than Speedy Gonzalez runs.”
The shape of her eyebrows indicates that Miss Highbrowed Cynic doesn’t appreciate the remark. I leave them quarreling, and walk out of the library.
I wander around the campus. Being rid of the finger-women—if only for a short while—lightens my heart and my mood. Like a walking sponge, I soak up every detail I see, every sound I hear, every smell I sniff, and store it all away inside me. That is what happens when you are a foreigner; you collect details as if they were seashells on a shore.
In the cafeteria, I get in line and end up standing in front of a lesbian couple. One of the women is short and has spiky, carroty hair. The other is quite tall and heavily pregnant. We move forward, pushing our trays along inch by inch. Just when we reach the dessert display, the short woman chirps up.
“Ah, would you mind if we take that, since there is only one left?” There on top of a glass shelf, where the woman is pointing, is one lone piece of raspberry cake. I move back.
“Of course, go ahead.”
“Thank you, thank you! Shirley has been craving raspberries since this morning,” says the woman, giving me a wink.
“Oh,” I say. “You’re expecting a baby, how wonderful.”
“Yes,” says Shirley as she pats her belly. “Six feet one, chess and amateur tennis champion, professional artist, IQ over 160, interested in Buddhism and Far Eastern philosophy—”
“Excuse me?”
“The father,” she says. “We picked him out of thousands at the sperm bank. . . . He’s going to be a very special baby.”
There is something in all this meticulous advance planning that freaks me out. Perhaps it is not surprising that women would look for athletic, charismatic, wealthy and influential sperm donors. But as someone who has grown up without a father, I am thinking, what does that ultimately mean to a child who will never know his or her biological father? Besides, the things we lack in life—such as blue eyes, a muscular body or conversational eloquence—might help us to develop other qualities that are dormant inside. Many talents are born in the shadows, out of necessity. The search for perfect babies misses the surprising role of oddities, coincidences and absences in our personal development.
In the evening I return to my room. The place I am staying in is about 130 square feet. It has the tiniest kitchen counter and a shower so small you can wash only half of yourself at a time.
Before me, there was an Indian painter residing here—the walls still smell of her paints. And before her, a Zimbabwean sociologist. The room has seen dozens of women from all over the world. The Indian artist left behind paint stains and an intricately designed rolling pin. The Zimbabwean scholar left a scary mask on the wall, which casts a long and thin ebony shadow.
What will I leave to next year’s fellow? “Before me, there was a Turkish author staying here,” she will say. I can’t find anything but words to hand down to her. Perhaps I can leave one of my favorite Turkish words, which also exists in English:
kismet
.
I lie down on my bed. The solitude that I so enjoyed only this afternoon now darkens my mood. What am I doing here so far away from Istanbul, from my loved ones, from the place where my novels are set, from my friends, my mother and my mother tongue? Am I throwing myself into unknown waters just to see if I can swim?
What if I can’t?
I recall my mother telling me I was too good at being alone. “It is as if you don’t need anyone,” she had said. “But you should. Too much independence is not good. You should be dependent, even if a tiny little bit.”
This, coming from someone who had refused to remarry at the expense of being “a woman without a male protector” in the eyes of the society, had surprised me. But now I find myself thinking of her advice in another light.
Women of my age have husbands, children and picnic baskets. They don’t hop on Peter Pan buses and go roaming Neverland. You should do that in your early twenties, when you are fresh out of school and your “life” hasn’t started yet. But you don’t do it in your midthirties. There should have been some order and stability in my life by now. Women my age have scrambled eggs in the mornings with their families and social rituals they like repeating. I’m still being dragged around by the winds, like a kite whose string has snapped.
The members of the Choir of Discordant Voices seem pleased to be here, doing their own thing. Miss Highbrowed Cynic doesn’t look like she’s ever going to leave the library. When she has a spare moment she attends either a workshop or a conference. Little Miss Practical keeps taking computer classes—PowerPoint, Excel, Linux. The last time I saw Dame Dervish she was meditating in this place where nature is so beautiful. As for Milady Ambitious Chekhovian, she is always on the Internet writing, applying for this and that, finding things to do.
Everyone is in their own world. But where is Mama Rice Pudding?