Writing Women and the (un)Written: Servi Nine ve Üç Güzeller
In A Room of One's Own Virginia Woolf says that a woman needs some money and a room of her own to be able to write. Suna, the protagonist of Arlin Çiçekçi's 2023 Duygu Asena Award winner novel Servi Nine ve Üç Güzeller (Grandma Cypress and Three Beauties) , who stands out with her naivety and kindness, has these two things Woolf mentioned in the 1920s, which are still important today: economic freedom and personal space. Yet, she lacks a writing desk and a large bookshelf to make use of It is the cypress tree across the apartment where she lives on her own after parting ways with her husband, the fairy tales she learned in her childhood, and the characters she created as her story unfolds that inspire Suna to write with a small notebook and pen.
Throughout Arlin Çiçekçi's masterful novel, there are multiple intertwined stories that span across different periods of history. In this respect, the story also contains elements of historical metafiction, and the fact that an old saint as the narrator frequently addresses the reader in a reader-centered style brings to mind Roland Barthes' famous "Death of the Author" discourse. However, leaving all that aside, what I would like to focus on in this article is the way Çiçekçi presents us with the experience of "Being a Woman Who Writes"—which dear Aylin Vartanyan so delicately put into words through Karakaşlı and Ernaux in her last article for Parrhesiapar column—through a rather naive character like Suna, and the language she uses.
Throughout the novel,we eventually learn that Suna is a girl who lost her mother at birth and has been raised by her father ever since, she learned how to make up fairy tales while playing games with her aunt, she came to Istanbul from the village of Kuruçay in Erzincan by her marriage to her beloved Fırat, but they broke up because of Fırat’s injustice and betrayal to Suna, she tries to survive on her own in Istanbul and now she works as a ticket seller at an agency. Suna's story, which I call her authorial adventure , emerges from her desire to save a cypress tree. One day, in a short conversation with the bagel seller in the park across from her apartment she hears about the myth of a tomb. Besides, she also witnesses that the cypress tree that gives her peace from her window is in danger of being cut down due to construction. Dina, whom she meets by chance in the park and befriends, and Ararat, who later enters her life through Dina, become the turning points of Suna's adventure. Hereafter Suna starts writing stories in her little notebook, and she sets out to spread these stories from Eyüp Sultan to various parts of Istanbul.. An old myth meets Suna's creativity and pure spirit to save a cypress tree, and Suna's writing adventure begins with a small notebook. Sometimes with her omniscience and sometimes with her wisdom, the narrator surely plays a prominent role, by becoming a kind of muse for Suna, In this novel filled with various sub stories, centralizing on a female character whose life it transcends the small world of her village and takes shape in the chaotic big city, and whose creativity turns into a shield to save a cypress tree is highly valuable.Suna's representation of resistance against extinction can be regarded as a unique example of women's centuries-long struggle for existence.
Finally, the fact that Servi ve Nine ve Üç Güzeller is written by an Armenian woman may arouse curiosity in the reader about what they will see about the author's culture throughout the novel. To be honest, I had this curiosity and expectation because it is a literary work written today by a young woman who belongs to the same community, but when I started reading it, I realized that the language adopted by the author was very unfamiliar to me. In her story, Çiçekçi slightly touches upon Armenian culture. For example, Suna recognizes the word “tırçun” that she hears from Dina, because her father had learned it as a child when Armenians lived in their village and called Suna tırçun. Dina and her cousin Ararat liken the pastry Suna's offers to those of their grandmother’s. However, those references were more like observations from the outside than reflections from the inside.
My expectation was not about reading a story completely about Armenianness, but I had the expectation to capture the experience of existing and writing as an Armenian woman through her language since I believe that we need to hear the experiences of the present as much as we need the experiences of the past, and it is important to be able to tell our own stories ourselves. The more I explore, the more I feel that this novel requires a postcolonial reading. Along with my own reading experience, I can say that Çiçekçi does not explicitly reflect such a view, but through Suna’s story, it is still impossible to ignore the experiences of women trying to survive in the reality of migration the 20th century Armenian community experienced. In a lecture he gave in 2005, Krikor Beledian stated that one of the main reasons for the difficulties in the progress of the Armenian novel is that it is an expression of the ongoing problems in the Armenian communities of the diaspora and therefore, the genre loses the aesthetic and literary qualities that will be carried on to the next generations. I see that Arlin Çiçekçi reminds us of the reflections of her own culture only between the lines, without turning novel writing into the expression that Beledian mentions.
