Submitted by Gaelle Stewart

Elif Shafak dips her pen in ‘Black Milk’ to write a novel that is not a novel. She takes as a starting point her own personal history, her inner world filled with discordant voices...the difficulty of her own choice of motherhood, to write a text full of truth and humour. And what we recognise in her inner confabulations are our own contradictions. She leads us through the streets of Istanbul, bringing us close to the dilemmas of Turkish women today, then to a Boston university campus and then again into the lives of women writers who have left their mark on her, those who have been successful or who have given up. We discover the dark shadow cast by Tolstoy on his wife, Sofia. We come close to Simone De Beauvoir and so many others.

Many women writers have become well known, sometimes tragically so, having carried out in great suffering, that splitting of the self between the life of a mother and wife and a life of writing. Countless other names deprived even of the possibility of looking to writing have been lost forever. The all-usurping rôle of wife and mother blocked all their right to creativity.
And here we are today so selfishly grateful to so many talented women for having chosen to write cost what it may - without bearing in mind the sacrifices they endured to be able to do so. What would have become of American poetry without Emily Dickinson? She never married nor had a child.

Can we imagine the literature of the woman and mother without Sylvia Plath? She took her own life, after bringing up her two children alone whilst endlessly filling notebooks.

How would literature have turned out if only more women had managed to find a room of their own, that impossible, vital space according the writings of Virginia Woolf.

Whatever side of the ocean they are situated on, women have always had to conquer the very possibility of withdrawing from housework time, from family and mothering time in order to write. It’s easy to imagine that things are still the same for so many women in so many other countries, and may well be the case closer to home.

‘Black Milk’ is a book to dip into, to lend around, a book that you feel deserves to be read by all women attempting to draw together so many differing aspirations. Let us choose. But not repress ourselves. It’s a book to be readily passed on to anyone inclined to step out of their way in the direction of Istanbul, to all those with a taste for humour and imagination - to anyone who happens to be wondering what women on either side of European frontier might possibly have in common.

Elif Shafak lives in Istanbul. She was born in France in 1971, grew up in Spain and studied in the United States. She is an essayist and novelist and is considered one of the best contemporary Turkish writers. Several of her books have been translated in French of which the most well-known is « the Bastard of Istanbul ».

http://www.magazineazur.com/gaelle-stewart/black-milk-elif-shafak