- You are the most widely read woman writer in Turkey. Where do you see yourself in the literary scene in your country ?

Most fiction readers in Turkey are women. As it happens, most fiction writers are men. So the classical formula is « men write, women read ». This is a pattern that I would like to see changing. I have always believed there is a vivid, dynamic literary scene in Turkey. And my readers are very mixed. They come from all sorts of backgrounds, culturally and socially. I do not favor the tradition of “Father Novelists” in which a novelist is always expected to know more than his readers and to teach them something. I write with intuition. When I am writing a novel I do not know where I am going with the story. I flow with the story with a strong urge and deep love.

- What is quite puzzling at first is that the subtitle of Black Milk is « a novel » and at the same time the text is very realistic. In your foreword you say that you want to write in order to show your experience (of postnatal breakdown/depression) so why a novel ?

- Black Milk is a combination of fiction and non-fiction, therefore it is difficult to put it in a single category. It’s new because it’s about issues we do not easily deal with in the « highbrow genre » of the novel. As a matter of fact, we think motherhood and postnatal depression should be put on different shelves.  I wanted to say, «look, this too can be the subject of an autobiographical novel. Writing, and art, are about creating or finding connections ; 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, and reveal the contrasts between them. I guess I like exploring connections, it is also something I have learnt from Sufism, in which everything and everyone is interconnected. Nobody lives in a vacuum. If we think we are apart from everyone, we make a big mistake. Every day, our energy dances with the energies of other people.

-At the same time you say you want your book not to be burnt but forgotten…

-Usually we novelists like to think of our books as long-lasting, almost eternal, but my feeling while writing Black Milk was I’m going to write it and then leave it behind and I wanted the readers to read it, and then leave it behind…  This books deals with depression. And depressions should be left behind once they are completed. It is only a passing season, it’s like writing on water.

-Is it a therapy for the reader as well ?

-Writing heals me, I have always believed in that. I have many readers, -not only readers who have gone through similar experiences- who tell me the book had a healing effect on them. I don’ t think this book only speaks about postnatal breakdown, it’s much deeper than that, it’s is also about how it feels like to be a human being, to have several voices inside, little women and little men.

-Speaking of that, I was very interested by the work on the voices, in Black Milk. I guess they are really important in your books. In The bastard of Istanbul, there are also djinnis. They compose a kind of « inner chorus». 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, and that is because I like to combine the western techniques of writing a novel with eastern culture. I was raised partly by my grand-mother and I know the world of djinnis, superstitions, evil eye first hand from her. I’m connected with women’s culture, oral culture in Turkey. I think women are more 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 incorporating them into my fiction.

-What about the political models you use in Black Milk while speaking of the small women ?

-Once there was monarchy inside me, then there was coup d’etat and finally democracy.  As human beings inside all of us there are multiple voices, little men and little women. Sometimes they say different things to us, sometimes we silence some in favor of others. I personally realized there was a monarchy inside me all these years. Throughout my depression I had to learn to treat all the voices inside me equally. At the end there is democracy, when you need all the voices inside you and make peace with them, and learn to accept and love them.

-In Black Milk you refer to many different writers, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir, Zelda Fitzgerald etc. Are there some contemporary writers you could add ?

-You know, I’m in a constant dialogue –through imagination- with many writers, dead or alive. But I don’t have role models. Every human being is unique and in the great book of the universe there is no repetition. So I do not look for role models. I look for connections.

-In your books in general, and in Black Milk in particular, we have a high sense of humor and at the same time it is always linked with bitter irony. In the Bastard of Istanbul, the first scene is really relevant speaking of that : a witty and fierce woman walking in rain, arguing with a taxi driver, going to a gynaecologist for an abortion. In Black Milk, you describe this period of depression when you cannot, in a way, escape your body, and at the same time humor 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).

-I am glad you ask me about humor as it happens to be a central element in my writing. In real life I’m not a very funny person, but when I start writing, it’s like using different parts of my brain. As you have said, humor is connected in my books with melancholy, sometimes sorrow: that dialectic intrigues me. I don’t use humor in order to make fun of people, and I don’t like arrogant humor, when writers think they know better than the readers. “Empathy” is a very important word to describe this relation. I’m not trying to teach anything to anyone. The kind of humor that I like has compassion and intelligence and softness. I write with love, and my characters have so many layers and conflicts. I do not judge them. It’s really important to have a « horizontal » relation with them: I do not situate myself above them or above the text. 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.

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

-When you’re a woman writer, the press always talks of you as a woman, not as a “writer” first. Gender is an important window for me and I like to question gender patterns in patriarchal cultures, but I do not consider myself a “feminist” necessarily, or any kind of –ist. I am a novelist. 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. My work can be « feminist » or « postfeminist » but as a writer, I only see myself as a novelist.

-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 » ?

-That is a coincidence because actually the title of the book has nothing to do with the poem. My title came via my grand-mother. When I was going through this depression, she said « you know if you cry too much, your milk will go sour and turn black and you cannot feed your baby ». And that vivid metaphor stuck in my mind. I realized I couldn’t change my depression in a day but out of that black milk of depression I could gradually generate ink. As a woman writer I could find the energy and will to write and writing would pull me out of depression.

-You show in your book the difficulty of making the choices you want in a patriarchal society, of combining individual choices and traditional culture – isn’t a the core of literature itself, this idea of mixing the particular and the universal ?

-For me frankly, the major difficulty in motherhood was abandoning the nomadic life I was living – I was so used to being a « free spirit » That was the biggest change for me. To know that you cannot leave and go now. … I think motherhood is not something that is given to us the moment we have a child. I see it as a continuing experience, an ongoing process of learning. You are a student, and you learn from your kids.

-In Black Milk you imagine several times a famous writer’s sister, who would be very talented, and no, because of the marriage and of all that stuff. And you are a writer. How did all that begin for you, I mean the desire of writing etc. ?

-It makes me sad to know how many women, could have become writers, poets, designers, directors, and they couldn’t because they were not given a chance. All around the world, in the past and today, they marry at an early age, they learn to abandon their talents, let go of their dreams. In that sense I feel lucky that I could continue my passion, and I want to show my respect for the women who did not have a similar luck. I started writing stories at a very early age, but not because I wanted to become a novelist at that time, but because I was a very lonely child and teenager. Books were the best thing in my life, and I liked them much better than the real world.

-You have degrees in gender studies and political science and international relations. How to combine fiction and « crude » reality, be it social or political ?

Fiction for me does not mean telling my own story to other people. Just the opposite. It means putting myself in the shoes of others, making endless journeys to other people’s realities and dreams. In fiction it is essential to transcend the limits of Self. In Sufism too that is the ultimate aim. To go beyond the boundaries of the Self. Sometimes I think I am full of multiple voices. And literature is the glue that keeps my pieces together.

-This idea of connection really makes sense in The bastard of Istanbul, with the inner world of the Turkish family and the exterior world (this of the armenian and american cousin), which finally interweave.

-Yes, in that book, I wanted to write a microstory about two families who seem very different but are connected. In general my fiction is like a compass ; one foot is rooted in Istanbul, the other foot travels the whole world. My fiction is both local and universal. I see myself as a commuter between cultures and languages. I am a nomad in spirit. I keep traveling from one story to another. And stories belong to all of us. They have no visas. They need no passports. They are the products of humanity and yet they have no owners.
Thank you so much…..