[Transit Books; 2024]
Documenting the first forty days post-partum—a period of transformation in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—Ayşegül Savaş’s The Wilderness is a moving, lyrical documentation of the everyday caretaking of motherhood transformed in the aftermath of birth. Using this period of time as her anchor, Savaş charts, through forty sections, the shifting opacity of motherhood, and how it transforms her mother, her, and her baby. This triangulation is the means through which Savaş is eventually able to articulate her dual self now as both a daughter and a mother, witnessing anew her mother, envisioning time in new and expansive ways.
The Wilderness opens with a tracking of the geographic distance between Savaş and her own mother; she writes: “My mother arrived to Paris from Istanbul the day before I gave birth, but wasn’t allowed to visit us in the hospital.” In this spatial framing, Savaş also articulates a central tension to the essay as a whole—the systems of care that collectively shape her relationship to motherhood, and the limited networks of support she and her husband have in Paris. The familiarity of Savaş’s mother flying this distance to take care of and support her daughter and new grandchild is contrasted with her not being allowed in the hospital. This move centralizes the pressures exerted by diasporic motherhood and daughterhood as a relationship framed by a geographic fracture that extends beyond the self. Turkey is central to the emotional landscapes of this essay, even as it exists amidst the immediacy of Paris. The relationship between these two geographies is ever present in the awareness that Savaş has of the fact that this is suspended time, of her mother’s presence in her life in Paris—her mother will soon leave, and this is the fixed point Savaş writes towards.
Savaş contextualizes her artistic project here, at the opening, highlighting the cultural significance of this period of time in Turkish mythology. “The new mother was susceptible to air currents that often brought with them invisible beings,” she says. This sense of mythological haunting mirrors Savaş’s prose too, which in its sharpness and clarity, never loses sight of the new mother as shaped by the world, by culture, by history, and most of all, by familial networks of care. Later, Savaş says: “In the book of recipes Katia sent us, the postpartum mother is warned, above all, to avoid the wind. Her own constitution, recently hollowed by birth, is air. Any more and she will lose grounding, begin to float.” In situating motherhood in relation to cultural practices of motherhood, Savaş’ project locates motherhood as not just a new framing of self in relation to child, in relation to one’s own mother, but also as a cultural, spatial structure, something tangible, something present; grounding is necessary. There is a geographic sense of loss too that is highlighted here, the idea of something that is not natural. Floating, through these metaphors that Katia articulates to Savaş, becomes a space to also echo the tenuousness of self as it is reconfigured here, the cultural a way for Savaş to contextualize the individual against history, myth, and society, anchored always by networks of care.
Of her return home from the hospital after giving birth, she writes: “We walk back home from the hospital, the same way we walked four days ago for the induction.” The geographical repetitions here—to walk a path from home, and then back home—haunt Savaş, repetition turning simultaneously into difference, with the presence of her mother and her daughter on the walk back, both relationships that are beginning anew for Savaş. She writes of this early period of the baby’s presence in their lives: “All day long I have waited for a beginning: for the baby to reveal itself to me. To know who she is, or what, exactly, she wants.” This potential for a narrativization of self is particularly central to Savaş’s project in how it writes a new reframing of her role as daughter, which then in turn is also a reframing of her baby and the baby’s role in this matrilineal framework.
The mirrors of daughterhood—being mothered, motherhood, and mothering—make up the central tension of this diaristic documentation of new motherhood. Savaş writes in one section: “Am I crying for myself or my mother? Am I crying for the baby haunted by my childhood self?” Here, she draws direct parallels between the affective and historical experiences of herself as a new mother now haunted by an awareness of the fraught dynamics of being a mother, as well as the parallels between the baby who as yet only knows the self in relation to the mother, not yet distinct and individual. Savaş also articulates the tensions she feels for her mother now, that she considers her mother as “in need of [Savaş’s] care.” This reframing of care onto her mother—care as her responsibility as a daughter just as much as her mother’s responsibility towards her as mother—marks a productive progression in the emotional throughline of this essay as it tracks Savaş’s own emotional transformations of self that come in the wake of becoming and being a mother.
In a later section of the book, as this new coming-of-self transforms and shifts, Savaş articulates an everyday moment between herself and her mother: “Side by side on the couch, my mother and I are also easing into our new triangulated bond, hacked apart and reforged by the baby.” This is a progression of Savas’s awareness of the baby’s role, in some ways, as a mediating force that reshapes the stable sense of mother and daughter selves in this framework, but occurring alongside is a spatial mirroring, of the two of them, mother and daughter, being next to each other on the couch, a shared quotidian moment. In the latter portion of the book, Savaş articulates this tension of the mother-daughter/mother-daughter triangulation at the center of this essay, writing: “Mothering, at every turn, is about being mothered.” With an incisive clarity, we see here the relationality slowly coming into focus for Savaş, highlighting the diaristic way she works through, over the course of the book, the varied ways in which motherhood shifts how she moves through the world.
Documentation takes on a different dimension in photography too, which is present, if not central throughout the essay—becoming a way for Savaş to map her meandering self and to understand concretely the continuously moving landscape of her early days as a mother. In the opening sections, she writes that “[her] face, in the photographs [her] husband took that day, is swollen and translucent.” The photographs are not described by Savaş, lending them an air of abstraction, becoming something fleeting, hard to grasp—even as we are aware of them as an object through which Savaş is able to articulate herself as a mother, they remain elusive. Translucence as Savaş understands it here in the photo, takes on a multifaceted function, allowing Savaş to think about herself concretely, even in the multifaceted selves she newly embodies. It becomes a way for Savaş to negotiate her understanding of the simultaneous opacity and transparency of those early days. Translucence also becomes another dimension here of understanding what Savaş has read earlier in the recipe book given to her by her friend Katia: The mother’s constitution “recently hollowed by birth, is air”—translucence, as the middle ground between transparency and opacity, becomes a push against this hollowing of self, this erasure via replacement by air. Her mother becomes clearer, her daughter less so; and translucence, as a metaphor, becomes the middle ground she walks as both mother and daughter in this triangulation.
Later, on a different day when her mother sets out bowls of food around the house for them all, Savaş writes: “I remember this, because there are photographs from that day, our house beautiful and orderly. A picture of perfect calm though I have no bodily recollection of it.” In this section, we see the chafing of documentation against memory—the tangibility of the photograph, what it provides to Savaş in terms of her narrativization of her own sense of these forty days amidst her shifting senses of groundedness and floating. It is a memory not present in her body, but in the photograph becomes real, taking on a shared narrativization that transcends the boundaries of the days her mother is present. The photograph allows the suspension of time that motherhood has created for Savaş to once again become real, to be read through linearity rather than the convergence of past and future onto the present. Savaş later writes: “The fluid state, the prolonged moment of metamorphoses, is impossible to retain. But for now, the experience resists narrative. Nothing rings true.” This experience of new motherhood, and all motherhood in some ways, as a suspension of time, a suspension of narrativization, is articulated here by Savaş as a relationship of motherhood to truth, and the photograph, then, becomes a way to negotiate motherhood against the linearity of time in culture and history at large, a way to document even in this state of flux, transition, and “wilderness” as Savaş characterizes it.
Towards the end of this essay, Savaş writes of these forty days, what she has been calling the “wilderness”: “Still, I am resistant to the urge to explain, to bring clarity to the wilderness.” Savaş’s project in this book, documenting, with precision and care the liminality of early motherhood, the shifting nature of memory and experience, the reframing of self brought on by a new baby, is also one of light and truth—to wonder at the binary of transparency and opacity of language. In The Wilderness, translucence takes on a necessary role in documenting the larger histories of motherhood Savaş writes into, allowing for a liminal sense of mother, self, and baby that allows Savaş to negotiate her own new mother self against and with.
Vika Mujumdar was born in New Jersey and raised in Pune, India. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from UMass Amherst, where she is currently an MFA student in Fiction. Her work has appeared in Public Books, the Cleveland Review of Books, the Brooklyn Rail, the Chicago Review of Books, and elsewhere. She edits Liminal Transit Review.
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