Elif Shafak is becoming one of those authors I just keep coming back to. I have read four of Shafak’s fiction books and one of her nonfiction books, How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division. Black Milk is the second nonfiction book of hers that I have picked up, and if the first one left me impressed, this one left me moved. There is something about the way she writes: honest without being dramatic, deep without being difficult. It makes you feel like she has already thought about everything you are afraid to think about, and she is just waiting to walk you through it.
Black Milk is a memoir about the Shafak’s experience with postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter. But the more you read it, you realise it is so much bigger than that. Black Milk is really about the impossible juggling act of being a woman who creates — a writer, in Shafak’s case — while also being expected to be a mother, a partner, a daughter, a functioning human being in a world that has very loud opinions about how all of that should look.
The book takes you on two journeys at once. One is inward where a deeply personal exploration of womanhood, motherhood, and identity. The other is outward: a rich, fascinating tour through the lives of female writers across history, from different cultures and different eras, all of them wrestling with the same central tension between creativity and caregiving. Flipping between those two threads never gets old. Just when one starts to feel heavy, the other pulls you somewhere new.
And running through all of it is this beautiful idea borrowed from Sufi philosophy, as Shafak writes here, that every person is essentially a mirror of the whole universe, carrying every contradiction and complexity inside them all at once. The trouble is, most of us spend our lives silencing the inconvenient parts of ourselves just to keep things tidy. Black Milk makes a highlight about that. For choosing wholeness over performance, even when it is messier and harder and a little terrifying.
At some point you will find yourself putting it down mid-chapter, staring into space, because something on the page just reached into your chest and pulled on a thread you did not know was there. The questions it plants are the kind that do not leave when you close the cover. For example where Shafak writes:
How much of my womanhood is biological, how much of it is socially learned? Of the will to become a mother, which part is innate, which part is imposed? Is it sheer coincidence that I have started contemplating motherhood in my midthirties? Is it because my biological clock is ticking? Or is it because the social chronometer, which continuously compels us women to measure ourselves against one another, is speeding ahead? When everything is so culturally loaded, how am I going to know what is really natural and what is environmental?
That subject remains a timeless debate in society. Deep down, I wrestle with the same questions, but Shafak helped me articulate what I had been struggling to put into words.
How much of who I am is genuinely mine? Is the life I am building something I actually chose, or something I slowly absorbed from a world that had very specific plans for me? When society has an opinion about everything and how do I find the voice underneath all of that noise that is just, purely, me?
If any of those questions feel even a little familiar, this is the book for you. Read it slowly, sit with it, and let it do its work because by the last page, you will feel a little more seen, a little more understood, and maybe, just maybe, a little braver about being all of yourself at once.
My Favorite Bits
- In order to understand the thoughts churning in my mind, I have to first see them in the form of letters. I know I have an idea now, but I need to put pen to paper to learn what it is.
- Those who use the expression “the female bird builds the nest” don’t understand the bird. It is true that birds build nests, but with every new season they abandon the home they have made to erect a new one in a different place. There is no bird that stays in the same nest for the entirety of its life.
- How much of my womanhood is biological, how much of it is socially learned? Of the will to become a mother, which part is innate, which part is imposed? Is it sheer coincidence that I have started contemplating motherhood in my midthirties? Is it because my biological clock is ticking? Or is it because the social chronometer, which continuously compels us women to measure ourselves against one another, is speeding ahead? When everything is so culturally loaded, how am I going to know what is really natural and what is environmental?
- They did not take gender roles and barriers for granted. They questioned the established norms and, most important, changed the world by changing themselves first.
Author: Elif Shafak
Publication date: 1 December 2007
Number of pages: 267 pages
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