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‘Black Milk’ Book Review: On the Fragility and Darkness of Womanhood

May 13, 2022
Elif Shafak. Photograph: Muammer Yanmaz

Freedom needs space to move, French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir once observed. In the case of women attaining their freedom, there is usually little space for them to “see their bodies through their own gaze,” since the gaze of society, of their families, and of men permeates most cultures. How can women, then, become who they desire to be, beyond what the outside world – the outside gaze – thinks of them? Renowned Turkish author Elif Shafak provides an honest introspection of her womanhood in Black Milk (2007), which details her experiences with anxiety, identity, and depression as she struggles to balance a writer’s life with a mother’s life, while endeavoring  to become her own kind of ‘woman’. The book reads like a stream of water flowing along her body’s surface, carrying the names and stories of all of the women she encountered throughout her life. It is divided into a chapter of a story of one woman writer’s experiences and struggles, followed by a chapter that goes inside the “harem of women” who live inside of her, each symbolizing a part of her personality – the intellectual, the goal-oriented…


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