By Elise J. Choi

Review of Lojman by Ebru Ojen (USA: City Lights, 2023)

“Everything was meaningless, exceedingly so.” An understandable worldview, perhaps, when your husband’s left you again, your daughter fantasizes about killing you (and you her), and an interminable blizzard has trapped the family in your village home—all of which escalate tensions that hurtle toward a violent, deadly finale. Lojman, published in Turkey in 2020, is Kurdish writer Ebru Ojen’s first novel to appear in English, and it’s a hell of an introduction to her work. In this visceral family drama, Ojen is unafraid to articulate the most unspeakable, brutal emotions of unwanted motherhood.

Ebru Ojen is an actor and writer who has appeared in Turkish films, documentaries, and TV shows. Lojman, her third novel, follows Aşı (Vaccine, 2014) and Et yiyenler birbirini öldürsün (Let the Carnivores Kill Each Other, 2017). Lojman’s lyricism is admirably co-translated by Aron Aji, Director of Translation Programs at the University of Iowa, and writer and translator Selin Gökcesu. The chapters comprise short snapshots of domestic life, two or three pages each, mostly from the alternating third-person perspectives of the main character, Selma, and her daughter, Görkem. Their thoughts—drifting between stream of consciousness, memories, minute observations—augment the repetitive nature of daily life in the village lojman, or teacher’s house.

Lojman takes place in an eastern Turkish village during a terrible winter. The novel, with its small cast of characters and minimal locations, could easily have been set in a fictional town and treated as an allegory, but Ojen sets it in the town of Erciş, naming multiple landmarks—Lake Van, Mount Süphan, the Erciş Plateau—that situate the surreal story in a real-life setting. The cold bites and threatens in every chapter; because of it, the family is isolated from most social contact, trapped with each other, and surrounded by death: “We cannot trust winter. Nature…insists on disasters. If we are not attentive, it can easily bury our supposedly meaningful lives into history.” Even as the harsh terrain entraps the family in precarious circumstances, Selma marvels at its beautiful and nightmarish force. It’s precisely the season’s deadliness that so attracts Selma, who wants to “disappear into the contented, hermetic beauty of death.”

The year is unclear; the family has a cell phone and computer, but they’re seldom used due to frequent electricity outages, and so the narrative takes on an anachronistic, distant-past color. Selma, forty-two, is first a poet and last, unwillingly, a mother. The novel opens with her giving excruciating birth to her third child in their lojman in the midst of a blizzard with no medical assistance except a heated razor she uses to slash her umbilical cord. Her husband and village teacher, Metin, has recently abandoned the family in a rage. During the birth, their oldest child and only daughter, Görkem, who suffers from lack of parental love, derives pleasure from seeing her mother suffer (“It was fun to watch Selma wrestle with unbearable pain.”). The newborn remains unnamed throughout the novel, and Selma frequently forgets about the baby’s existence; his neglect stains the story, the latest reminder of their despair. The middle child, Murat, is also frequently forgotten in the conflict between mother and daughter, and he has, without coaxing, become the baby’s de facto caretaker. Their only neighbors try to help Selma out of concern for the malnourished children, but she scorns them as plebeians. As the unending blizzard goes on and Metin remains missing, the remaining family members struggle against each other in an unwinnable war.

The novel may begin with a birth, but for Selma and the two older kids, it’s a bleak affair, no cause for love or celebration. When Görkem asks what the baby’s name will be, Selma snaps, “What does it matter?” This brutal and loveless depiction of birth sets the story’s tone and prepares the reader for a grim road ahead. Ojen voices what’s socially taboo for parents, especially mothers, to say. More than once, Selma imagines killing her children violently, such as when Görkem leaves her locked in a coal shed: “She despised her daughter enough to slash her pubescent curves. Crush her joints … brand her eyes with hot skewers, injure her soul irreparably.” It’s possible to attribute this thinking solely to psychological instability, and certainly the story implies the entire family suffers from mental health issues, but Ojen normalizes the violent intrusive thoughts that a mother might have:

Selma was seized with a desire to slam her baby against the wall and kill it. But she knew she wouldn’t. She couldn’t kill it. This nameless, small creature had stripped her of exactly this: her glorious self-confidence, her power to destroy. Her children had hacked at her courage …

Her body was trapped somewhere alien to herself, by something she could not give meaning to. Suffocating in its arbitrary chokeholds, she could not figure out what to do against its powerful force … Watching her life force wither, she pressed the baby to her bosom so she wouldn’t have to hear its voice, and fell into a crying spell.

The violence isn’t ever sugarcoated, but it’s accompanied by a specific maternal despair that can be read as a sympathetic view on the impossible task of motherhood. The narration attempts to understand the internal struggle happening in Selma’s mind without passing easy judgment.

Still, though Selma’s thoughts never actualize into physical violence, they certainly materialize as child neglect. The most important person in Selma’s life is her husband, Metin, and it was for him that she had children in the first place. Her experience isn’t written as an example of unwanted motherhood (though the patriarchal expectation that women must bear children is always in the ether); there’s no hint that she was forced to have children: “This earthworm that had managed to conceal its gluttony until now, she had given birth to it out of love for Metin. When he had whispered his desire for another child in her ear, she could not refuse him.” The question isn’t why did Selma have children (or at least, it’s no longer of importance); rather, it’s now that they’re here for good, how does she deal with this new and permanent reality? (If this was ever a question for Metin, his ultimate answer was to run away.) Now that Metin’s gone, Selma spirals into an obsession with death and forgoes her parental role, barely bothering to cook or clean or breastfeed her newborn. The neglect is so extensive that it feels like a relief when some unconscious instinct compels Selma to display affection toward her children, like when “she moved slightly and noticed that her arm had wrapped itself around Görkem.”

But overwhelmingly, Selma resents maternal affection and feels the compulsion to cleanse herself with art: “She needed to rid herself of the vulgar womanhood that clung to her body, she needed to find a book, read a poem.” Selma perceives an unbridgeable divide between poetry and family, art and motherhood that fills her with despair and makes it impossible for her own children to love her. Poetry reminds Selma of an earlier, pre-children life that was filled with a future—a life no longer viable, only gestured toward in daydreams. Her chapters are interspersed with poetry, spoken off the cuff or recited from published works, often as an escape from her parental duties: “Reciting poetry meant scorching the flower of motherhood with a flamethrower.” But Ojen also suggests that the art–motherhood binary isn’t clean-cut; poetry is a crucial haven, but it will not alter a woman’s material reality: “Neither her children who resembled little worms nested inside a fresh fruit, nor her husband who made her body tremble with love, nor the poetry that added meaning to her life…was strong enough to make her abandon her death wish.” Ojen doesn’t mandate any beliefs of motherhood onto the reader or make sweeping generalizations of the pros and cons. She rather highlights the singularity of each case: “Even when Selma had children of her own, she failed to empathize with her mother. Was this her nature?”

Görkem’s age is never given; she’s referred to as a child, but her thoughts are overly mature, full of violent fantasies. She carries something of an Electra complex, wanting to kill her mother and jealous of the attention her father gives to Selma. Her primary emotion toward her mother may be hatred, but it comes from a yearning for maternal love: “Stupid Selma! If you weren’t going to love us, why did you make us?” If Selma’s chapters primarily deal with the suffocation of having unwanted children, then Görkem’s chapters explore the pain and trauma of being an unwanted daughter. Görkem commits two acts of violence against a mallard duck, which are graphically described; the first is accidental, the second intentional. Horrified that she’s maimed a duck, Görkem brings it into the lojman but then becomes angered when Selma unexpectedly shows affection towards the duck and nurses it as she’s never done for her own children. Selma finds solidarity with the mallard that survives precariously in this cruel season. Jealous and enraged at her mother’s reaction, Görkem brutally kills the animal as an act of warfare against Selma. The scenes are difficult to stomach and effective in highlighting the parallel mindsets of mother and daughter.

In the climactic final third of the book, in which the narrative shifts into a dream-like fantasy, the titular lojman is foregrounded as a character, literally becoming a jelly-filled prison that suspends the characters in goo, entrapping them with only their thoughts. One exception remains for the baby, still unnamed, who somehow escapes the spell and gains autonomy in monstrous proportions by cannibalizing his family. We delve further into the characters’ interiorities, learning how Selma first met Metin and fell in love, how they married and moved from village to village following Metin’s government-mandated teaching assignments, how Selma had children for Metin’s sake. The events are grotesque and terrifying, but they’re a welcome reprieve for Selma, who has already felt trapped throughout the book and yearns for death. On the one hand, the story’s pivot to magical realism allows for a drama in which the central conflict can be faced only by turning a psychological lens inward onto the characters’ interiorities. On the other hand, it can feel like a deux ex machina that induces a distraction to bring the story to a close. The genre shift allows for a thrilling ending, but I wonder what an alternative that didn’t rely on a magical monster baby might have looked like.

Lojman is an impressive and provoking first entry into English for Ojen and a finely rendered translation from Aji and Gökcesu. It’s a marvel to see such taboo thoughts, particularly regarding motherhood, written defiantly on the page. The topic of motherhood has always been a complex battleground that invokes strong emotions, and I imagine one’s reception of Selma will be a kind of Rorschach test that reveals the reader’s own politics. Ojen depicts a mother who has made the choice, gradually, to stop being a mother. However, nature—both the vastness outside and the voice of conscience within—makes that a difficult task: “A product of nature, Selma had to live by unnatural laws.” Shocking pronouncements about desiring to kill mother or daughter are grounded by melancholic ruminations on the threat of nature outside and the endless seasonal cycles that tug helpless humans toward the end: “The gray, bleak lojman where nothing changed, didn’t even allow for the illusion of change anymore; seasons changed, children grew, flocks of birds blended with the landscape, and yet, all that was left was the bitter, familiar taste of repetition.”

Elise J. Choi (she/her) is an editor, translator, and cat mother based in Portland, Oregon. She’s also been a writer, instructor, graduate student, and admin. Her literary interests include Asian/America, the diaspora, translation, comics, and genre fiction. You can send her a line at elise.j.choi@gmail.com.