{"id":28298,"date":"2023-09-18T08:06:32","date_gmt":"2023-09-18T06:06:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/?p=28298"},"modified":"2023-09-25T12:30:26","modified_gmt":"2023-09-25T10:30:26","slug":"kurdish-novel-explores-nightmarish-isolation-in-eastern-anatolia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/kurdish-novel-explores-nightmarish-isolation-in-eastern-anatolia\/","title":{"rendered":"Kurdish Novel Explores Nightmarish Isolation in Eastern Anatolia"},"content":{"rendered":"
Lojman,<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span>an unnerving and dark domestic drama, centers around a Kurdish mother and her three children who live on a desolate plateau at the foot of Turkey’s Van province. Ojen’s protagonist struggles to come to terms with all that motherhood has taken away from her, as she questions social roles and institutions. Ebru Ojen is among the ten most important emerging voices in Turkish literature.<\/span><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lojman<\/em>, by Ebru Ojen<\/span>
\nCity Lights Books<\/a>\u00a02023
\nISBN 9780872868984<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Kaya Gen\u00e7<\/span><\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

In Turkish, a<\/span> lojman<\/span><\/i> is an enclave defended by force of arms against enemies. It\u2019s no wonder the Turkish state has long used the word to describe resident complexes intended to house the state\u2019s educational personnel. In the Kurdish towns of eastern Anatolia<\/a>, <\/span>lojman<\/span><\/i>s are symbols of Turkish officialdom. Schoolteachers, who are civil servants, live there in isolation from their surroundings. They are meant to embody the ideals of the Turkish Republic while the Turkish security establishment protects them behind the curtains. In Ebru Ojen\u2019s novel <\/span>Lojman <\/span><\/i>(City Lights Books, 2023), elegantly translated into English by Aron Aji and Selin G\u00f6k\u00e7esu,<\/span> a woman and her three children are locked up in one of these complexes. We watch them rot there, first emotionally, then physically.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a nightmarish tale.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Ebru<\/a>
Ebru Ojen’s Lojman<\/em> is published by City Lights<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Isolated in their <\/span>lojman<\/span><\/i> overlooking the landscape of the Erci\u015f Plateau in Van, the family is a neurotic bunch. Selma, the mother, despises her children, even fantasizing about their imminent death. Starving them is one option, strangling another. G\u00f6rkem, her daughter, hates Selma equally, dreaming of finishing her off in various violent scenarios. As for Murat, her son, and the newborn baby, their thoughts and feelings remain a mystery \u2014 until they, too, raise their voices in the book\u2019s finale.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lojman <\/span><\/i>features two well-drawn character studies. G\u00f6rkem, the daughter, is a woman of contradictions. She wants to explore the world yet is full of fear. She\u2019s happy to take advantage of the luxury of being a child, yet resents Selma<\/span>\u2019<\/span>s independence. Her distress is physical, one that engulfs her body. She can\u2019t stand carrying \u201ctraces of Selma<\/span>\u2019<\/span>s blood in her veins.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In a striking birth scene, her hatred comes to the fore. After feeling the \u201cfoul-smelling fluid that trickled from Selma<\/span>\u2019<\/span>s loins\u201d on her toes, G\u00f6rkem hears Selma\u2019s \u201cgruesome groan of pleasure\u201d and notices how closely pain and pleasure resemble one another. \u201cIf G\u00f6rkem hadn<\/span>\u2019<\/span>t known that Selma was giving birth,\u201d Ojen writes, she would have imagined that Selma was making love to Metin \u2014 the absent husband and the children\u2019s father, whose vanishing, two weeks before the events of the novel begins, increases the tensions in the household.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This is not a page turner, and the intensity of <\/span>Lojman<\/span><\/i>\u2019s initial chapters will likely rattle some readers. The scene where G\u00f6rkem heats a razor blade on the stove, helping her mother with labor, is a case in point. The outcome, the actual baby, unnerves her powerfully with his materiality, and Ojen captures G\u00f6rkem\u2019s alienation in a visceral confession: \u201cI wish it would never be born, wish its lungs were filled with poison instead of breath so I wouldn<\/span>\u2019<\/span>t have to struggle with such pointless questions.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

With four of them now sharing the <\/span>lojman<\/span><\/i>, their sense of suffocation greatly increases.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Ojen draws vivid vignettes of the isolated <\/span>lojman<\/span><\/i> in winter. She characterizes the Erci\u015f Plateau \u201cas harsh and desolate as an arctic desert.\u201d As the doors and windows of their room whistle, the only sounds missing, she notes, were the cries of owls and wolves. Outside, they see green headed and mottled mallards who take wing from dry reedbeds and fly toward the valley near their village.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

A Kurdish writer born in 1981 \u2014 the same year I turned up \u2014 Ojen is aware of the implications of placing her characters in an outpost of the Turkish state. \u201cIn the East, the state builds its schools and the lodging for its teachers away from the residential areas of the villages,\u201d she writes. \u201cThis lojman was no different, a forgotten dot on the village<\/span>\u2019<\/span>s suffocating landscape, distant and alone under the dark clouds.\u201d She adds a gothic layer to her political tale: her <\/span>lojman<\/span><\/i> looks out \u201conto the plains through a thick fog that conjured the atmosphere of ghoulish tales,\u201d with her characters constantly fearing the existence of \u201cfearsome winter monsters, jinn, dead donkeys, and poison trees\u201d outside, laying siege to their<\/span> lojman<\/span><\/i>, \u201chaving sworn an oath to terrify anyone who dared to step outside.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Ojen\u2019s tale rests on two axes. G\u00f6rkem, the daughter, desires Teacher Mahir, who was assigned to the village school the fall before. All she wants is his hands on her body. What makes him more attractive is his criminal past: she hears that he has butchered his mother, which adds a gothic allure to his person. There is a gruesome description of her infatuation: \u201cShe pictured his perfect teeth sinking into his mother<\/span>\u2019<\/span>s flesh, the deepening grooves of his dimples, his mouth savagely taking possession of his mother<\/span>\u2019<\/span>s body as the snow invaded the plains from end to end.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Selma desires a return to her life before becoming a mother, when she was the center of Metin\u2019s sexual attention. Hearing the baby wail, she lifts him and looks at \u201cthis creature that had ripped all her strength from her, disturbed her chemistry, plundered her mineral deposits, and come into existence by practically destroying her. What a powerful gaze!\u201d In her view, the baby is responsible for destroying the passion between her and her husband, Metin. \u201cBecause of the children, no trace of passion was left between them. It was only when she turned her back to the things they had created together that she felt closer to Metin, more in love with him. She was seized with a desire to slam her baby against the wall and kill it.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The narrative zigzags between G\u00f6rkem\u2019s fury and Selma\u2019s solitude, sometimes annoyingly so. As G\u00f6rkem takes refuge in the only thought that makes her happy, the image of Teacher Mahir, she smiles \u201cas she imagined him in his unbuttoned, stained, faded shirt, his greasy hair, his hands bright red with his mother<\/span>\u2019<\/span>s blood.\u201d Her lust then turns violent as G\u00f6rkem fantasizes about sucking on the blood from her lover<\/span>\u2019<\/span>s lips. \u201cAs his blood flowed, her thirst became insatiable. Her tiny mouth expanded like a hose sucking up sludge.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

As mother and daughter fight it out in consecutive monologues, the newborn remains unattended. His \u201cappealing but also repulsive\u201d existence unnerves Selma. She feels like a \u201ccomplete alien in the realm of motherhood\u201d and desires to be free from all obligations. Looking at her children who sit around the stove \u201clike pups,\u201d Selma is certain they\u2019re there to enslave her.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

It’s a testament to Ojen\u2019s skill as a writer that this polyphony of hateful and murderous feelings doesn\u2019t grate on the reader\u2019s nerves, even as we reach the book\u2019s middle sections. Instead, they grow on one. To her children, Selma is like an Emma Bovary<\/a> figure \u2014 stuck in the world of books, living out her fantasies, and deserving retribution. And yet, while initially shocked by Selma\u2019s thoughts, I found myself sympathizing and even agreeing with them after a point. What Selma desires in place of her married life is clear: \u201cBooks, hours and hours of reading, outlandish thoughts distanced Selma from her responsibilities; in her own mind, she was rejecting motherhood.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For her, the struggle to fit into the typical mold of womanhood is pointless. \u201cShe hadn<\/span>\u2019<\/span>t warmed up to either married life or motherhood,\u201d we learn. \u201cShe saw love and affection as fabrications, words and emotions that bound humans into a dark ignorance with dreadful chains.\u201d I nodded approvingly while reading her wish to live alone in the \u201cmountain village, amidst the snow, with that melancholy gloom.\u201d Living in the middle of nowhere, \u201cjust a mountain and us,\u201d her biggest fear is to lose her link to poetry. \u201cWhat wouldn<\/span>\u2019<\/span>t she give to touch the noisy hawthorn leaves once again, to lounge on her armchair after a brief walk and read a few verses.\u201d Because of family life and its responsibilities, \u201cthe tree she had been nurturing inside her was left without water; she had been stripped of the strength to feed it the few lines it craved.\u201d Reading those lines, I wanted Selma to be safe and free.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Illegitimate Literature\u2014Interview with Novelist Ebru Ojen<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Haunting the novel is also a mystery: Where is Metin, the husband and the father, who disappeared? Yasin, who also lives in the <\/span>lojman<\/span><\/i> with his wife Song\u00fcl, is trying to figure this out. In Metin\u2019s absence, Yasin takes over the task of raising the <\/span>lojman<\/span><\/i>\u2019s flag. The lack of Metin\u2019s patriarchal authority, an extension of the power of the Turkish state, both frustrates and liberates his family members. While the dutiful Yasin obsesses about raising the flag every morning, Selma questions <\/span>lojman<\/span><\/i> life. \u201cWhy did the flag have to be raised? Who cared about this in the middle of a doomsday snowstorm?\u201d She sees Yasin as an \u201cotherworldly creature\u201d whose voice is \u201crobotic, metallic, sexless\u201d and who resembles \u201ca computer with a human body.\u201d When she notices a nearby shovel with a black handle, \u201can irrepressible vision appeared before her eyes, in which she hit Yasin on the head with the shovel over and over, smashing his skull until his brains spilled.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Each turn in the book\u2019s dark plot leads Selma to a further reckoning with her life choices. Everything that happened to her \u201cwas because of Metin<\/span>\u2019<\/span>s infinite love of children,\u201d she decides near the end. She had been in love with Metin but never wanted to have a child with him. \u201cWith all her heart, she had rejected the gift of fertility that nature had offered her as if it were some sort of blessing.\u201d Yet somehow, she\u2019s been cajoled into giving birth.<\/span><\/p>\n

As Selma\u2019s frustration grows, the living room and the walls of their apartment embody her feelings. She accuses her children of taking her love from her. \u201cDisgusting worms, they had desiccated her sexuality, they had robbed her of her appetite for a bit of skin, casting handfuls of earth over everything she enjoyed.\u201d Yet she tries to keep her sanity, but grows increasingly afraid, \u201cafraid of her children, of her baby who didn<\/span>\u2019<\/span>t even have a name, of the way it was always hungry.\u201d As the voices of the symbolic order grows louder, \u201cthey leaked from the <\/span>lojman<\/span><\/i>\u2019<\/span>s walls and wrapped around her throat, they seeped under her skin, into her blood.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Selma\u2019s stream of consciousness recalls the writings of the great Turkish feminist writer Tezer \u00d6zl\u00fc, who recorded her despair in the face of Turkish patriarchy in <\/span>Cold Nights of Childhood <\/span><\/i>(Transit Books, 2023)<\/span>, <\/span><\/i>recently translated into English by Maureen Freely. And the depictions in Ojen\u2019s <\/span>Lojman<\/span><\/i> of the barren heartlands of Anatolia resemble Ferit Edg\u00fc\u2019s <\/span>The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales <\/span><\/i><\/a>(NYRB Books, 2023)<\/span>, <\/span><\/i>rendered into English by Aji, one of <\/span>Lojman<\/span><\/i>\u2019s translators.<\/span><\/p>\n

As the tale darkens, we get a clearer picture of the book\u2019s protagonists. Ojen\u2019s joy in creating a set of situations that help her dramatize her characters\u2019 sensitivities is palpable. When G\u00f6rkem finds a wounded mallard and almost kills it in her attempted rescue, Selma informs her daughter: <\/span>\u201c<\/span>It<\/span>\u2019<\/span>s going to die. It won<\/span>\u2019<\/span>t make it. Let<\/span>\u2019<\/span>s bandage the wounds anyway.\u201d Even this desire for care and comfort discomfits G\u00f6rkem, who questions why she isn\u2019t receiving such mercy. As Selma tenderly takes care of the mallard, G\u00f6rkem fumes, \u201cHow come this monstrous woman could show the mallard a care she never showed her children?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My favorite scene describes a visit the family pays to the apartment of Yasin and his wife Song\u00fcl, who inquire about the baby\u2019s name and health. Selma\u2019s children admit he doesn<\/span>\u2019<\/span>t have a name, which shocks the couple. Song\u00fcl also notices how frail the baby is and asks whether Selma\u2019s milk is not enough for him. \u201cSelma didn<\/span>\u2019<\/span>t respond.\u201d The inquisitive gaze of Song\u00fcl and Yasin soon exhausts Selma. Back home, she broods on \u201cSong\u00fcl<\/span>\u2019<\/span>s tedious meddling with others<\/span>\u2019<\/span>\u2019 lives in the guise of honesty, benevolence, responsibility, and other drivel.\u201d For Yasin, she harbors more violent feelings, wishing \u201cshe could deliver him a blow and smash his brain and his benevolence.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Lojman<\/span><\/i>\u2019s second part is weirder, and I loved it all the more for that. It begins with G\u00f6rkem waking up to find herself suspended, hanging in the air. Selma, too, is in the same position. A strange jelly surrounds them, and Ojen lovingly details her uncanny creation: \u201cThey both hung motionless in the jelly like two figurines glossed with sadness. Although G\u00f6rkem was convinced she was having a bad dream, she couldn<\/span>\u2019<\/span>t stop her body from trembling in fear.\u201d Even in this position, G\u00f6rkem is ashamed of her mother and compares Selma to \u201ca fly on a pile of horse dung.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the book\u2019s disturbing finale, the baby boy, practically reduced to only his mouth, takes over the narrative. As the mouth is activated, with his \u201clips quivering, curving, setting in motion the rest of its moist features,\u201d Selma grows worried that the baby might swallow them all.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This parting of the lips becomes a sublime act. As the baby grows \u201cbig and ruddy,\u201d I was reminded of Lars von Trier\u2019s miniseries <\/span>Riget<\/span><\/i><\/a>, aka <\/span>The Kingdom<\/span><\/i>, which similarly interweaves architectures, bodies and the subconscious. Selma\u2019s baby boy grows horrifyingly: \u201cCheeks puffed up, arms and legs ballooning in rolls of fat, chin multiplied in pudgy waves.\u201d Who is this creature? Did Selma birth it?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In transforming this tale of suffocating cabin fever into a gothic horror story and concluding it with great panache, Ojen has showcased her remarkable storytelling skills, which readers in Turkey had discovered and now English readers will be able to sumptuously enjoy.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kaya Gen\u00e7 reviews Ebru Ojen’s newly translated novel, an exploration of a Kurdish mother grappling with the sacrifices of motherhood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":426,"featured_media":28328,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,51],"tags":[2952,3034,1002,3033,1397,1734],"coauthors":[2892],"class_list":["post-28298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","category-tmr-weekly","tag-anatolia","tag-domestic-fiction","tag-kurdish-literature","tag-motherhood","tag-prison","tag-turkey","entry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nKurdish Novel Explores Nightmarish Isolation in Eastern Anatolia - The Markaz Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Kaya Gen\u00e7 reviews Ebru Ojen's newly translated novel, an exploration of a Kurdish mother grappling with the 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