Black Milk

Description

Black Milk: On Writing, Motherhood, and the Harem is a Turkish-British novelist Elif Shafak. Here, Shafak reflects upon complicated emotions and experiences surrounding motherhood, creativity, and the crisis of identity blended in personal narration with cultural analysis. The book assumes the form of her postpartum depression and the inner struggle between her wanting to write and playing the role of a mother.

The title “Black Milk” is a metaphor for these dark, hard emotions, juxtaposed with the nurturing image of milk often associated with motherhood. In anthropomorphizing different aspects of herself, the author takes on various voices that represent her struggles as conflicting personalities, including her creative self, her maternal self, her feminist self, and the list goes on and on.

In addition to her personal experiences, Shafak invokes literary and historical figures, particularly women authors, who have similar struggles in writing and living socially, such as Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, and Alice Walker. She defines the tension of their own lives, creativity, and societal expectations from women.

Infiltrated by the anecdotal forays, philosophical reflections, and feminist critique, Black Milk looks at the larger issues of identity, womanhood, and the social constructs imposed on mothers and therefore turns out to be a profoundly introspective and richly resounding work.