Interview for Magazine Litteraire/France

From july 2009 to march 2010, takes place the season of Turkey in France. The Elif Safak’s autobiographical ninth novel will be published next august (Phébus ed.) in french. We met her.

1. Your last novel, Sufi, Mon Amour, has been published in Turkey and it is number one best-seller there. And now in France your previous book, Black Milk, is coming out. In your « foreword » you say that you wanted to write in order to show your experience of postnatal nervous breakdown, so why a « novel » ?

Black Milk is a combination of fiction and non-fiction, it’s about issues –motherhood, postnatal depression- we do not connect easily with the « highbrow genre » of the novel. I wanted to say « this, too, can be the subject of an autobigraphical novel ».  It’s also uncommon and surprising in Turkey. I wanted to connect my personal experience with the experience of other women writers, both turkish and worldwide, showing the connection between reality and imagination, intellect and intuition.

2. Was the transition to motherhood difficult for you ?

The major difficulty in motherhood for me was abandoning the nomadic life I was living – I was so used to being a « free spirit »…  Also, being a novelist is a very self-centered art. I write very intensely, almost exhausting myself. I didnt know how to balance my lifestyle with the necessities of motherhood. During depression, all of a sudden, words were gone, blankness of computer, blankness of words, that was when nervous breakdown started for me. I learnt that not writing a book is also a part of the writing process. That’s the reason why I think depressions are golden opportunities to rebuild ourselves. A book is a chance to bring again together the pieces, literature working like an existential « glue ».

3. In the same foreword, you say you want your book not to be burnt but forgotten…

Usually, when a novel is written, we like thinking our work will last eternally. However, my feeling while writing this book was I was going to write it and then let it behind. And I wanted the reader to read it, and then let it behind… writing heals me and there are two really bad things about breakdown : first, you think you’re alone (it only happens to you), and secondly, you think it will last forever. To remember it is only a « season », it had to be like writing and reading something on water : you read it, and then it vanishes.

4. You write that the reader is the real mother of the book… why do you mean by that ?

Novel is a very lonely kind of art, in the sense that you are on your own while writing it, and the reader of novels is also very lonely : when you go to an exhibition, a concert or a movie, you often go with some friends, these are public spaces. When you read, you retreat into a private space. There is a connection, through that loneliness, between writer and reader. I have many readers from diffewrent background, -not only readers having gone through similar experiences- who tell me the book had an healing effect on them. I don’ t think Black Milk only speaks of postnatal breakdown, it’s much deeper than that, it’s is also about how it is to be a human being, man or woman, with multiple voices inside.

5. Speaking of that, I was very interested by the work on the voices, « djinnis » in Black Milk. I guess they are really important in your books. They compose a kind of « inner gynoecium », Miss Cynical, Miss Voluptous, Miss « Maman gâteau »... It seems to be a very theatrical and rhetorical device : what does it mean for you, apart from the process of writing itself and of having choices to do in the course of the  narrative ?

There are djinnis in several of my novels : I like to combine the western technique of the novel (this is a very european and modern genre, unlike poetry or short stories) with eastern culture. I was raised partly by my grand-mother, and I know from her the world of djinnis, superstition, evil. This women’s oral culture is very important in Turkey. I think women are particularly connected with this world of magic, especially in more traditional societies. This culture is not reflected in the written culture, which is more dominated by men. I like mixing them in writing. In a way, the voices, the small women are also voices of the numerous women, all around the world, who did’nt have the chance or won’t be given the chance of becoming poets, writers, designers, because of a patriarchal system. From another standpoint, I use a political model as a metaphor to speak of these inner voices and characters. All of us, we have inside us multiple voices, little men, little women, sometimes they say different things, sometimes we try to supress some. I realized that there was a monarchy in me and the nervous breakdown helped me to see that. Only at the end    -of the book and of the depression-, there is democracy, when you need all the voices inside you and make peace with them, when you learn how to accept and love them.

6. What about the title you chose for your book, Black Milk, and the poem which was written by Celan, with the « black milk of dawn » ?

Actually this title has nothing to do with the poem. My title came via my grand-mother, when I was going through this depression, she kept saying « you know if you cry too much, your milk will turn black ». That vivid metaphor stuck to my mind. I wanted to « make ink » from that, to turn it into a source of writing.

7. In your books in general, and in Black Milk in particular, you use a high sense of humour, though always linked with bitter irony. In The Bastard of Istanbul, the first scene is really striking : a witty and fierce woman walking in the rain, arguing with a taxi driver, going to a gynaecologist for an aborption (as result of a rape, as we learn at the end of the book) ; in Black Milk, you describe this period of depression, linked to motherwood, and your inability to escape your body, and at the same time humour pervades throughout the little women’s or djinnis’ dialogues inside your head (each one giving you a different piece of advice, and being quite hard –tyrannic- with you, as well as you with them)…

I am glad you ask me about humour, because it’s a central element in my writing. In real life I’m not a very funny person, and in my books, the dialectic between humour and melancholy, sadness or sorrow really intrigues me. I don’t use humour in order to make fun of people, (I don’t like arrogant humour, when writers think they know better than the readers or than the world), but for touching softly. I write with love, and my characters have a moving fragility. I do not judge them. I’m not trying to control them, as if they were just puppets. I’m on an equal level with them, as well as with my readers. Empathy is a very important word to describe this relation. I’m not trying to teach anything to anyone.

8. Isn’t it difficult, as a writer as well as a reader, to reappropriate this written litterature, and not to be reduced to a feminist ?

When you’re a woman writer, the press always talks of you as a « woman », and only secondarily as a « writer ». the world of literature is still a mostly manly world. This is something we need to challenge. At the same time gender is an important thing for me and I like to question gender patterns or issues and patriarchal culture, but I do not consider myself as a feminist, or any kind of –ist. I am just a novel-ist ! I believe Virginia Woolf was right by saying that our pen needs to be bisexual. When I am writing, I am both the women and the men and I like that, traveling from person to person. I like questioning and transcending categories.

9. « Connections » seems to be a major concept for you. Can you tell us more about it ?

I think building connections lies at the heart of art. It is also essential in sufism, in which everything and everyone is interconnected : our stories constantly get mixed. Nobody lives in a vacuum, no country either. If we think we are apart from everyone, we make a big mistake. For example, in The Bastard of Istanbul, I wanted to write « microstory », it means a story about two families who seem very different (ndlr : on the one hand, the inner world of the turkish family, and on the other  hand the exterior world of the armenian-american cousin)  but who are in fact strongly connected. My approach is a modest one, it’s micro imagination, without « lessons » of history, without heroes. I emjoy showing the connections between things that might look different at first glance.

10. You lived in several countries and commuted between Turkey and the USA… But at the same time you write with love about Istanbul. Can you explain that.

I sometimes think that my writing is like a compass. It has two feet. One foot is stable, the other foot draws a wide circle and travels the whoe wide world. My fiction is both local and universal. Istanbul is dear to me. I still travel a lot and I enjoy feeling connected to different cities, different cultures, but I’m based in Istanbul - I think it’s a great city : for artists and in particular writers, it’s a treasure for stories.

11. You  wrote Bonbon palace, in turkish, the bastard of Istanbul in english (ndlr : in french, « La bâtarde d’Istanbul », whereas in turkish, there are no genres), and Black Milk in turkish …


I enjoy writing in both languages, not depending on the places where I find myself but on the novel I write, on my mood. My latest novel which has just been published in Turkey, based on sufi love, was written in english. That is rather uncommon in Turkey and some people criticize me. But I think writers can be bilingual, why not ? It adds another « zone » to imagination. I travel between languages. It’s like leaving your neighbourhood for some time and then, coming back, starting noticing much more details. And this is the age we live in, the age of mobility. It’s at the same time a challenge and a passion for me. Let’s say : when I’m in Istanbul I can go to this imaginary country of english language ; when I’m in Boston, I can go to the country of turkish language. For me, english is very « cerebral » whereas turkish is « emotional ».

12. You seem to have a special interest in language….

I have a greta passion for language. It is a mystical passionç I am in love with the magic behind letters. You know, I don’t see the language as an instrument. Usually for a novelist, the plot and structure is more important than language. In mainstream Turkish novels the language was kept more simple, because many writers wrote as if they were fathers to their sons : they wanted to teach something. But I see the reader as my equal. And instead of making big plots in my mind, I let te story fly me high and above. I write with intuition.

13. A week ago, the turkish writer Nedim Gürsel was acquitted by justice, and I’d like to know your opinion above the part and the place of literature in Turkey, the part it has to play and deal with politics, with history, though remaining before all literature : in your books, you don’t let anything apart, women’s condition, patriarchal patterns of society, historical issues…

Of course I was sad about Gürsel’s case, and I want writers and artists to have complete freedom. But such examples do not reflect the entire literary world in Turkey. In my country there is an amazingly dynamic and loving readership. Most fiction readers are women of very different ages, and social backgrounds ; when they like a book they give it to their mothers, their cousins, their aunts. Readers here buld deep personal connections with novels, an dit is deeply inspiring and motivating to see this which is another side of the picture…

14. Lastly, what is your connection with French literature ?

You know there are two nations whose literature has left a deep impact on me when I was younger, in addition to Turkish literature, of course. One is Russian literature. The other is French literature. Since I was a teenager I read French writers extensively and I still do. Balzac, Maupassant, Flaubert, then Jean Genet, Albert Camus, Michel Tournier, Marguerite Yourcenar… I enjoy reading French writers. I also enjoy philosophers just as much. Foucault, Baudrillard, Irigaray, Lyotard, Deleuze… especially.

Thank you so much….