Three Daughters of Eve

by Elif Shafak

To hurt and to be hurt – that was a human trait.

There was something inscrutable about the collective loss of reason: if enough eyes experienced the same hallucination, it turned into a truth; if enough people laughed at the same misery, it became a funny little joke.

She would rather stay home and, in the witching hours, be immersed in a novel – reading being her way to connect with the universe.

Compassion never came as an afterthought: it was either spontaneous or absent entirely.

God was a maze without a map, a circle without a centre; the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that never seemed to fit together.

So many prayers are carbon copies of one another. Protect me, love me, support me, it’s all about me … They call it piousness; I call it selfishness in disguise.’

Is there really no other way, no other space for things that fall under neither belief nor disbelief – neither pure religion nor pure reason? A third path for people such as me? For those of us who find dualities too rigid and don’t wish to conform to them? Because there must be others who feel as I do. It is as if I’m searching for a new language. An elusive language spoken by no one but me …

In the end, wasn’t that the only real aspiration to be fulfilled in life: to do a better job than our parents, so our children might be better parents than we were? But what we often discover instead is how we unwittingly repeat the same mistakes as the previous generation.

The new arrivals would tell the other fish what it felt like to live in that big mansion above the sea, relinquishing the vastness of the blue in exchange for not having to worry about their next meal. Soon the fugitive fish would be swallowed up by large predators, for how could those used to the pampered habitat of a rich man’s aquarium survive in dangerous waters? All the same, they would not trade a single minute of freedom for all the years in captivity.

Peri would come to understand that nothing swells the ego quite like a cause motivated by the delusion of pure selflessness.

There was something about a family row that resembled an impending avalanche: one wrong word and it threatened to turn into something so huge it brought down everyone.

Mensur, mortified at his wife’s appearance, wished not to be seen with her any more. He shopped alone; so did she. Her outfit epitomized everything that he had always despised, loathed and confronted in the Middle East. The benightedness of the religious. The presumption that their ways were the best – only because they had been born into this culture and swallowed unquestioningly whatever they had been taught. How could they be so certain of the superiority of their truths when they knew so little, if anything at all, about other cultures, other philosophies, other ways of thinking? For Selma, Mensur’s manners embodied all that set her on edge: the condescension in his eyes, the finality in his voice, the righteousness in the tilt of his chin. The arrogance of the secular modernists. The pompous and pretentious ease with which they placed themselves outside and above society, looking down on centuries-old traditions. How could they call themselves enlightened when they knew so little, if anything at all, about their own culture, their own faith?

Meanwhile, Peri found solace in literature. Short stories, novels, poems, plays … she devoured whatever she could lay her hands on at the limited library at school.

Books were liberating, full of life. She preferred being in Storyland to being in her motherland. Refusing to leave her room on weekends, munching on apples and sunflower seeds, she finished one borrowed novel after another. She discovered that intelligence, like a muscle, needed to be exercised with increasing levels of stress, if it were to grow to its full potential.

That life was about enlightenment or ideals or love – that made sense to her.

But her true companions were always books. Imagination was her home, her homeland, her refuge, her exile.

It was the first time he had realized that what was ordinary to him was not necessarily so to outsiders. It was the first time he had realized there was an ‘outside world’.

He was advised to give up drinking and to stay away from stress – as if stress were an obnoxious relative one could simply stop inviting to dinner.

Daily habits were altered, personalities reformed, allegiances renounced, friendships broken, even addictions spurned, but the hardest thing to change in this life was one’s attachment to a place.

Wordlessly, Deniz gave her mother a sidelong glance, her incredulity apparent. For the first time it crossed her mind that the woman who had given birth to her, the woman she had seen every day of her life and expected to cater to her every need and whim, might have been a different person before she and her brothers were born. It was an uncomfortable thought. To this day her mother had been a terra cognita where Deniz knew each blissful valley, each placid lake and each wintry mountain. She didn’t like the possibility that there might be parts of that continent still unmapped.

The problem with praying, however, was that it had to be pure, monophonic. One consistent voice from beginning to end. But when she talked to God, her mind fragmented into a plethora of speakers, some listening, some making witty remarks, others expressing objections.

Readying for prayer was like shoving into a cupboard all the junk and clutter, before God came to visit the house of her mind. While she wanted to look her best, she remained acutely conscious of what she’d concealed from His gaze.

She refrained from talking about these issues with the pious, because once they noticed her vacillating between doubt and faith, they insisted on trying to win her over. The few atheists she had met were not so different. Whether in the name of God or science, there was no satisfaction for the ego quite like the satisfaction of converting someone to your side. But being proselytized was the last thing Peri wanted. Did these people not understand that she did not want to reach a decision about their code of belief? All she wanted was to be on the move. If she came down on one side or the other, she feared she would turn into someone else and it would be the end of her. She wrote in her God-diary: I’m perpetually in limbo. Maybe I want too many things at once and nothing passionately enough.

In Istanbul, ancient though the city was, the past was treated like a visitor who had overstayed his welcome. Here in Oxford, it was clearly the guest of honour.

‘In my experience, authority is like garlic: the more you use it, the heavier the smell.’

‘Surely not all authority bad,’ Mensur insisted. ‘What about women’s rights, what do you say when a strong leader defends women?’ ‘Well, I’d say, thank you very much, I can defend my own rights just fine. We don’t need a higher authority to do that for us!’

Why roots were rated so highly compared with branches or leaves, Peri had never understood. Trees had multiple shoots and filaments extending in every direction, under and above the ancient soils of the earth. If even roots refused to stay put, why expect the impossible from human beings?

She felt like an impostor. She feared she might never succeed here, among students who were surely far better educated and more articulate than she.

if you are homesick, it means you have a home somewhere.’

You were expected to believe in the State for the same reason you were expected to believe in God: fear.

The bourgeoisie, despite its glamour and glitz, resembled a child afraid of its father – the eternal patriarch, the Baba.

She was aware that she thought about death far too much for a person so young.

‘It’s hard to break our chains when some of us love being shackled.’

Believers favour answers over questions, clarity over uncertainty. Atheists, more or less the same. Funny, when it comes to God, Whom we know next to nothing about, very few of us actually say, ‘I don’t know.’

There’s no wisdom without love. No love without freedom. And no freedom unless we dare to walk away from what we have become.

There were different ways of growing of old, perhaps. Some withered first in body, others in mind, yet others in soul.

There was a box inside the part of the brain that stored memory – a music box, its enamel paint chipped, its notes that of a haunting melody. Stashed away in it were all the things that the mind neither wanted to forget nor dared to remember. At moments of stress or trauma, or perhaps for no apparent reason, the box snapped open and all its contents scattered about. This was what she felt was happening to her tonight.

If I ever fall in love, she promised herself, it’ll be with someone’s brain. I won’t care about his looks or status or age, only his intellect.

Was religion an empowering force for women who otherwise had limited power in a society designed for and by men, or was it yet another tool for facilitating their submission?

Architecture in Oxford fell into two categories: the kind that remembered and the kind that dreamed.

‘If you are irritated

‘The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.’§

These were God-fearing, husband-fearing, divorce-fearing, poverty-fearing, terrorism-fearing, crowd-fearing, disgrace-fearing, madness-fearing women, whose houses were immaculately clean, whose minds were clear about what they expected from the future. Early on in their lives they had exchanged ‘the art of coaxing the father’ for ‘the art of coaxing the husband’. Those who had been married long enough had become bolder and louder in their opinions, yet they knew when not to cross the line.

How easy it was to hate a loved one.

‘When I was a child, I was stung by a bee on my lip,’ she muttered slowly, as if she were dusting off the memory. ‘My mouth became so swollen it looked like a water balloon. My father said the bee was madly in love … with me. It wanted to kiss me. I always wondered, did it know it would die as soon as it used its stinger? Weird, isn’t it, if it knows it and does it anyway. Self-destruction.’

degree of one’s emotions varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts.” ’

‘For instance, if God is omnipotent and omnipresent, all-powerful and all-benevolent, does that mean that He – or She – embodies evil too, or does it mean that evil is external to Him – or Her – an outside force that He/She needs to fight? What exactly is the relation between what-God-is and what-God-is-not?’

Maybe God was a game only those with happy childhoods could play.

If any of you ever feel like you are not special enough, remember, even Descartes felt that way sometimes.’

‘The Malady of Certainty.’ Certainty was to curiosity what the sun was to the wings of Icarus. Where one shone forcefully, the other couldn’t survive. With certainty came arrogance; with arrogance, blindness; with blindness, darkness; and with darkness, more certainty. This he called, the converse nature of convictions.