Cover image: Painting by Ksenia Datsiuk, Dream, 2021-2022
This is a very special poetic essay that Gonca Özmen had written some time before and then sent it to the Rotterdam Poetry Festival last year when she learned that the theme of the festival was going to be centred round the body. After reading it the organiser of the festival, Jan Baeke, wanted to base a section of the festival around it, so we can say that this essay was used as the inspiration for that section of the festival in which other poets read poems/prose and singers sang texts set to music around the central idea of “My Lover, My Body”. It has never been published anywhere before and we are both excited to offer it to The Dreaming Machine and its readers.
Neil P. Doherty
My Lover, My Body
“the body is the most imaginary of all imaginary objects.”
Roland Barthes
My lover, my body…when did I first notice you? First listen to you? When, where and how did I first grasp that you were a map full to the brim with meaning? When did I first read you? And when and how did I first come to love you?
My lover, my body…. even the poets I admire so much depict you as an object destined to give sexual pleasure. You are seen as passive, silent and dangerous. You are stripped of desire, something that must never be heard, but must instead, be hidden away. You are controlled and suppressed; you are loved and killed.
My lover, my body… if only you knew how hard it is for a woman to love her own body…for a woman to understand her own body before anyone and anything else …to feel its uniqueness…to add wings to it…and soar freely with it…
Because the female body is under siege… in truth, we can say that it is a war zone, a site of contention. The belief that the body, but most especially the female body, is a source of sin is something that has been prevalent in many cultures. Through the ages the forbidding mind has drawn back in fear from the female body, leaving it trapped between the circles of dread and desire, and so its history is entwined with the history of repression itself.
My lover, my body… morals and religions, customs and laws agree that you are a proscribed book. You are obliged to mask itself, to reign in its desires. Erotic gratification has always been something granted solely to the male, not to you. In fact, your duty has been to act as the supplier of that gratification. You are, after all, merely a vessel that enables reproduction. Devoid as you are of a mind you are checked on all four sides just in case you might slip and make a “mistake”. Your father, brother and husband; your society, religion and state, each, at some stage will do your thinking for you. If not, you might, perhaps, be killed in affection, beaten to pulp in the deepest love, strangled or stabbed with the greatest care; perhaps, because some devil has managed to get inside you, they will burn you alive. The erect penis will obliterate you. For what would be the point of sustaining that erection, of keeping it hard before all and sundry?
My lover, my body… how you stifled a scream when first you became a shelter for two. Every part of you, both the seen and unseen, cried out to be heard. At times I grew very frightened of you, at other times you amazed me. It was then that I first really noticed you as you became the giver of both life and death. How deeply woven into each other these two forces are. However, there is nothing of the “sacred” about any of this. Instead, you were prey to wild hormonal fluctuations and extremes of sensitivity; there were difficulties, deprivations and an ever-rising sense of fear and worry. And all the while you continued to expand and grow…during those long and arduous hours of labour, in spite of your blood, pus, water and pain soaked efforts to give birth naturally the baby was stuck in breech position. And so…as there was no other choice left to you. Right down the middle you’re split and not like some melon some pomegranate. Then something strange is placed into your still bewildered arms… something you can’t even hold properly…as for you, my body, you are left like a shrivelled up balloon that was blown up and blown up before having all the air sucked from it…how long will it take for it to recover, who knows…but at this moment the centre of everything is this little girl. With her, you take the first tentative steps towards healing, towards living.
My lover, my body… another path then opened up. A path to be walked in tandem. Once again you came to know life, to feel desire and to revel in sound. Before another love came calling, a love, however, that society did not deem dependable. For there was no ring, no home, no wedding bells, it was an “unlawful” love. And ah…what then is this: you scream out again…my body…once again.
My lover, my body… this time you have no strength, no will, you are comforted by no sense of security. Instead you are riddled with fear, with anxiety, with a feeling of disquiet.
My lover , my body… there was then six hours of fasting, veins found for injecting, boredom even fainting, a local anaesthetic, a repeated burrowing down into the skin, then ceaseless, ceaseless bleeding, drugs, credit cards, checks, legs spread wide open, fear, strange looks, a whole range of guilt.
My lover, my body…Pain, abandonment, shame and trauma: all are entwined here. Up on those tables, legs splayed out, you are nothing but a nameless and dumb “thing”. Your body is solely what remains behind after all is done. You are left staggered and bewildered. Wrapped up in guilt. Everything has been programmed to make you feel the deepest remorse. Yet, you do not have the words to express what your body has been through. For you continue to carry something bunched up in your womb.
My lover, my body… before your eyes then are the bodies of all those other women who could not chose, whose choice was take away from them, who were left pregnant after rape, abused by a relative, who were gagged and forced, whose right to an abortion was taken away from them by the state, who died in lonely places trying to force themselves to miscarry- and those who bled and bled and bled. Fascism, in the guise of the hand of the state, reaches into your vagina, into your womb. It has no sense of shame. It does not ask for permission. It takes every decision on your behalf. In these lands of ours the state has been responsible for the death of countless children. Simone de Beauvoir summed this up when she suggested many years ago that societies that obsessed over the foetus in a mother’s womb tended to care nothing for children once they were born. This is why, without delay, all those powers that have come to represent the erect penis must be emasculated. Because my dear daughter…
… your body is your lover too. There will be those who will try to turn it into a source of shame. Into a realm of captivity. Everybody will have an opinion on what is apt for your body. Many will demand you hide it away, be ashamed of it and even scorn it. This is how male authority consolidates its power. Your identity will be bruised; it will be battered. You will be easily led, manipulated and suppressed. They will not tell you that your body is the key to your freedom. Or let you know that it is, in fact, a book of desire…
My daughter, your body is your lover too. Do not forget this. Revel in the smell of its sweat. Come to know the feel of its skin. Be aware of its every shape and contour, for you are your body. It is your very self, your freedom. Let no one call it a book of sin as it is…instead, the book of all that you are. Read it well…
Gonca Özmen was born in Burdur, Tefenni in 1982. She graduated from the Department of English Language and Literature at Istanbul University in 2004. She received her MA degree in 2008, and PhD degree in 2016 from the same department. In 1997, her first poem was published in literary journal Varlık, and she was named ‘a poet to watch in the future’ at The Yaşar Nabi Nayır Youth Prizes. Her first poetry book Kuytumda [In My Nook]was published in 2000, then came Belki Sessiz [Silent Perhaps] in 2008, and Bile İsteye [Knowingly, Willingly] in 2019. Her poems have been translated into English, German, French, Spanish, Slovenian, Italian, Romanian, Persian, Greek, Hebrew and Macedonian. The Sea Within (Selected Poems) was published by Shearsman Books in 2011, and her second book Vielleicht Lautlos was published by Elif Verlag in 2017. Having participated in international poetry readings in various countries abroad, Özmen was granted numerous poetry awards. She edited Çağdaş İrlanda Şiiri Seçkisi [Selection of Contemporary Irish Poetry] (Edisam, 2010) and İlhan Berk’s Çiğnenmiş Gül [Trampled Rose] (Yapı Kredi, 2011), a collection of unpublished poems of the poet after his death. She sat on the editorial board of a literary translation magazine Ç.N. [Translator’s Note], and the literary magazines Pulbiber [Chilli Flakes] and Çevrimdışı Istanbul [Offline Istanbul]. She translated five children’s books, Small in the City by Sydney Smith (Kırmızı Kedi, February 2020), The It-Doesn’t-Matter-Suit and Other Stories by Sylvia Plath (Kırmızı Kedi, September 2020), I Talk Like a River by Jordan Scott (Kırmızı Kedi, March 2021), Flibbertigibbety Words: Young Shakespeare Chases Inspiration by Donna Guthrie (Kırmızı Kedi, May 2021), and Town Is by the Sea by Joanne Schwartz (Kırmızı Kedi, 2022). She was one of the members of the advisory board of Bursa Nilüfer International Poetry Festival, Three Seas Writers’ and Translators’ Council (TSWTC) based in Rhodes, Greece, and the magazine, Turkish Poetry Today, which was published annually by Red Hand Books, in England. She is currently editing the Turkish poet küçük İskender’s poetry books at Can Publishing, translating the Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, and has been living in Istanbul since 2000.
Neil P. Doherty is a translator, born in Dublin, Ireland in 1972 who has resided in Istanbul since 1995. He currently teaches in Bilgi University. He is a freelance translator of both Turkish and Irish poetry. In 2017 he was one of the editors of Turkish Poetry Today, which was published in the U.K by Red Hand Books. His translations have appeared in Poetry Wales, The Dreaming Machine, The Honest Ulsterman, Turkish Poetry Today, Arter (İstanbul), Advaitam Speaks, The Seattle Star, The Antonym, The Enchanting Verses and The Berlin Quarterly. He is currently working on volumes of poetry by Gonca Özmen and Behçet Necatigil.
