Identities in Motion: Reading Two Ottoman Travel Narratives As Life Writing

Identities in Motion: Reading Two Ottoman Travel Narratives as Life Writing Roberta Micallef Journal of Women's History, Volume 25, Number 2, Summer 2013, pp. 85-110 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jowh.2013.0023 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/510532 Access provided by Boston University Libraries (18 Mar 2018 19:11 GMT) 2013 Identities in Motion Reading Two Ottoman Travel Narratives as Life Writing Roberta Micallef This article examines two travel narratives by two Ottoman women: Haremlik (1909) by Demetra Vaka Brown and A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions (1913) by Zeyneb Hanoum in order to understand how they represented themselves in a well-established field of harem literature. I ask how they constructed their autobiographical subjectivity. In their representation of life at home we see how memory interacts with the processes of identification and differentiation to illuminate the authors’ textual autobiographical subjectivity. I focus on three topics that both texts emphasize: education, life in the harem, and political participation. The narrators’ commentaries on these topics at times coincide, but more often are in conflict and reveal much about the relationship between their location, the historical moment, and their evolving autobiographical personas. he lives of Ottoman women provoked much interest in the imaginations of Europeans and North Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentiethT centuries. Travel writing was a very popular literary genre of the time among western readers, and harem literature operated as a related field of travel writing that gave particular priority to western women writ- ers’ perspectives.1 Educated in western languages, elite Ottoman women had access to books and magazines written about them by western men and women. This article examines two travel narratives by two Ottoman women: Haremlik (1909) by Demetra Vaka Brown and A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions (1913) by Zeyneb Hanoum in order to understand how they represented themselves in a well-established field of harem literature, mostly produced by western women.2 I ask how they constructed their autobiographical subjectivity when intervening in a dominant life narrative discourse. Life writing, a phrase used widely in eighteenth-century Europe before autobiography became a well-established, even dominant genre, encompassed autobiography, biography, letters, and diaries.3 The humani- ties and women’s studies scholar Marlene Kadar’s contemporary working definition of life writing includes all texts “that are written by an author who does not continuously write about someone else, and who also does not pretend to be absent from the . text himself/herself.”4 The literary scholars Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson also understand life writing as a general term for writing that takes a life, one’s own or another’s, as its © 2013 Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 25 No. 2, 85–110. 86 Journal of Women’s History Summer subject. They describe life writing and life narratives as inclusive of the heterogeneity of self-referential practices: biographical, novelistic, historical, or explicitly self-referential and therefore autobiographical.5 Written in English, Haremlik and A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions are first-person narratives where the authors are overtly present from the first page of the text to the last. By examining these works as instances of life writing and by placing emphasis on the narrators’ self-presentations during their travels we learn much about the narrators’ formations of their subject positions, including their shifting senses of identity and belonging. By reading these two texts as examples of life writing we can trace how each author constructs “herself defined.”6 These two narratives, which reflect a gendered subjectivity formation in motion, begin to fill a lacuna identified by the Turkish scholar Deniz Kandiyoti in reference to the discourses about the modern family and the construction of gender, from the Ottoman reform era to contemporary Turkey. Kandiyoti writes, “Comparatively little attention has been paid to the less tangible effects of processes of social transforma- tion on the emergence of new identities and forms of subjectivity, and there has been little critical awareness of the specificities of the ‘modern’ in the Turkish context.”7 After providing the historical context for the narrators and their texts, I discuss the importance of travel in infusing their voices with authority. However, it is in their representation of life at home that we see how memory interacts with the processes of identification and differentiation to illuminate the authors’ textual autobiographical subjectivity. In this section I focus on three topics that both texts emphasize: education, life in the harem, and political participation. The narrators’ commentaries on these topics at times coincide, but more often are in conflict and reveal much about the relationship between their location, the historical moment, and their evolving autobiographical personas. Autobiographical Data in Historical Context In 1909, Demetra Vaka Brown published a book titled Haremlik: Some Pages from the Life of Turkish Women chronicling her trip back to Constanti- nople after six years in the United States.8 Vaka Brown was an ethnic Greek from the Ottoman Empire. Having grown up among the Turks but not be- ing a Turk herself, she claimed to be a unique expert who could explicate the Turks, and in particular Turkish women, to an American audience.9 Vaka Brown writes: “And to be able to judge the Orientals one has, like me, to be born among them, to live their life for a time, and to breathe the air of contentment that fills their homes.”10 In 1913, with the publication of A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, also a travel book but arranged as a series of letters, Zeyneb Hanoum, a Muslim Ottoman woman, joined 2013 Roberta Micallef 87 a small and exclusive group of Ottoman women who appropriated the pen.11 A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions is a collection of letters Zey- neb Hanoum exchanged with Grace Ellison, a British journalist who spent many years in the Ottoman Empire and advocated for the Turkish cause in the British press.12 The collection chronicles the time between 1906 and 1912 when Zeyneb Hanoum and her sister Melek Hanoum lived in Eu- rope. Ellison provides an introduction and intervenes throughout the text and occasionally provides the readers with her own letters, which elicit responses by Zeyneb Hanoum and thereby provide a context for some of Zeyneb Hanoum’s comments. Ellison also peppers the collection with footnotes, some of which are purely informational and some explanatory. For example, Zeyneb Hanoum mentions “babouche” in a letter that Ellison footnotes and explains them as “Turkish slippers without heels.”13 A more extensive footnote serves to explain why Zeyneb Hanoum would refer to a cemetery as “comfortable.”14 Ellison’s presence and the inclusion of two letters by Melek Hanoum prompt the cultural studies scholar Reina Lewis to classify this collection of letters as “a composite text.”15 Multiple voices are not uncommon in life writing, and the interplay of voices in this text is intriguing. In this article, however, I focus on Zeyneb Hanoum’s presenta- tion of herself as a speaking subject. Zeyneb Hanoum refers to herself as a Turk throughout her text, but she was the granddaughter of a French marquis who had converted to Islam.16 Although she received a Europeanized education, her family still expected her to lead the life of a traditional secluded Ottoman lady. Her given name was Hadidje Zennour but she adopted Zeyneb Hanoum after gaining notoriety as a character in Pierre Loti’s novel Les Désenchantées.17 As the real-life person hidden in Loti’s 1906 novel, Zeyneb Hanoum became a figure of interest in Europe. This information, provided on the title page of her book, alongside a note that the book included a Rodin drawing, seemed to give Zeyneb Hanoum the European artistic community’s seal of approval. The prominent presence of Ellison, a professional woman and journalist, only added to Zeyneb Hanoum’s credibility and pedigree for her readers.18 However, Zeyneb Hanoum was not always received or accepted as such by all of her European audience, some of whom critiqued the book by questioning whether she was Turkish at all.19 Vaka Brown refers to herself as “a child of the Orient.”20 Born in 1877 on Prinkipo (Büyükada, in Turkish), an island off the coast of Asia Minor in the Marmara Sea, Vaka Brown immigrated to the U.S. in 1894 at the age of seventeen.21 The early death of her father forced her to earn a living and she therefore came to the U.S. as a nanny of the Ottoman consul to New York, who was also an ethnic Greek.22 When he was called back to Constan- tinople with his family, she remained in the U.S. and began working as a 88 Journal of Women’s History Summer journalist. Eventually she married Kenneth Brown, an American journalist and novelist. Between 1907 and 1946 Vaka Brown went on to write and publish well over a dozen romances and personal narratives; some of these she co-authored with her husband and some appeared posthumously. She became the most prolific Greek-American writer to date.23 Although I focus primarily on Haremlik, I will also refer to A Child of the Orient, where Vaka Brown describes her childhood and early womanhood in Constantinople, her immigration to the U.S., and her brief return to her motherland as an Americanized “child of the Orient.” She writes that her family had been in the Ottoman capital since before the Turks arrived in Anatolia—a prece- dence which seemed important to her sense of self.24 By nature of her family background and her education, she was exposed to European languages and ideas.

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