"Lojman" by Ebru Ojen

Ebru Ojen, Lojman, translated from Turkish by Aron Aji and Selin Gökcesu. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2023.

The Kurdish Book Club discussed Lojman on June 4, 2024. The co-translator Selin Gökcesu was present—she livies in Brooklyn and  has a Ph.D. in psychology and an MFA in writing from Columbia University.

The novel is about a family in a town on Lake Van. The father is a teacher, so the family lives in a lojman, or government-assigned housing. But it’s a novel like no other. Their living space is very very small. The father is away from home, leaving his wife Selma with their two children to await his return. Selma gives birth in agony on a horrific night, during a snowstorm, when no one but the children are present. The central characters are Selma and Görkem the daughter. Their thoughts about each other are hateful, homicidal. It’s a nadir of human existence.

The following transcript has been edited for length.

Selin: One theme of the book is motherhood. Ojen never says the mother, Selma, is mentally ill, but I read her as bipolar. She is unhappy with motherhood in the small, claustrophobic lojman, and resents her children. Even when she’s seemingly in a good mood, her two young children are frightened of her.

This version of motherhood is very dark, but It’s not quite as alien as people make it out to be. Postpartum struggles  are real, and motherhood does have a darker side. Selma has mental health issues but no support. She probably didn’t choose this life for herself. She longs for the days when she was freer to enjoy literature.

There’s a strong contrast between her emotional brutality toward her children and her sensitive love of poetry.

Selin: She wants the space to pursue it.

The novel wasn’t an easy read—I found it a relief to come to the end. Is the author a mother?

Selin: Ojen’s vision is realistic but also different from a mainstream understanding of motherhood. She herself doesn’t have a child. We’ve noticed that readers who are not mothers find Selma unnatural.  But to me, she captures a psychological reality. A lot of the darkness that surrounds Selma is relatable. I have a child and am not in that place, but I can see how some can get there. Ebru explores  the darkest core of the mother-child relationship. The novel has lots of surreal elements, but it also manages to capture a very dark reality in familial relationships.

Ojen is most interested in the relationship between the body and the government, and how the government comes into your personal space, decides what you can do with your body.   For her, this lojman space where people are trapped is both physical and political.  Her starting point is the relation between individual and patriarchal government.

Ebru writes as a Kurdish woman, but in a very subdued way. Lojman is not a Kurdish novel per se,  and it’s not social realism, where everything has a message. It’s a novel about the individual, written from the position of an individual.

Kurdishness not mentioned directly, but it’s in the names, it’s in the term “the East.” It’s in the assistant who raises the flag—a reminder of the conditions to which our oppressor consigns us. For me, it was subtle but constantly there.

Did Ebru Ojen grow up as a daughter of teachers?

Selin: Her father is a teacher, and also a political prisoner, and they lived in lojmans. But I didn’t push her too hard on that, I don’t want to ask a novelist, is this your life? Still, I never got the impression that she fought her mother the way Görkem does.

We two co-translators struggled with the surreal streams of consciousness that alternate between Görkem and Selma. Görkem a big part of the consciousness of the book. You start reading a chapter that just refers to “she,” and you don’t know whether it’s Görkem or Selma. 

Görkem’s character is also very dark and breaks taboos regarding female sexuality. Some readers think Görkem is a teenager, but she’s a child. Görkem and Selma represent the same persona at different stages.  They’re both representations of women’s sexuality.

I grew up in a difficult house and remember at times wishing my mother dead. Reading about all these homicidal fantasies in Lojman was a relief, making me feel I’m not alone. By the way it is a wonderful translation.

Selin: We had a great team.

Life in winter in the village is so grim. All the curses and screaming during the childbirth–it reminds me of a terrible old concept that agony of childbirth is a punishment for women for having sexual enjoyment.

Selin: Selma thinks of herself as an intellectual. One reason this family is isolated is thay she has a lot of disdain for the people in the village. Her husband Metin is a lot more sociable, arranging soccer tournaments and engaging with the local community. They have different dispositions. An episode when the family goes into town is very interesting—for the first time we see them the way the villagers see them: as underdressed and odd, the children underfed.

What do you make of Görkem and the mallard? She wanted to break the princess and take her crown away.

Selin: Görkem is the primary perpetrator of physical violence in the book. The mallard, like the family, is a victim of circumstance: it got stuck in the ice. The family’s actions toward the mallard mimic the actions of the government. First Görkem wants to help the mallard, but then Selma shows care for it, in a way she never did toward her children. So Görkem comes to hate the mallard. Something Freudian is going on here. It’s very symbolic, the death of animal. Then the book shifts as the goo arrives.

It arrives slowly, a subtle transition. At first I thought it was a metaphor for depression, but then it becomes surreal and consumes them all.

Selin: It’s a dreamlike ending. An unexpected turn. You wonder who wins. Has Nature engulfed and absorbed them all?