Deliverance was a garden full of apricot trees
On Sevgi Soysal’s Dawn, Alva Gotby, and apocalypse porn
This article originally appeared in The Reservoir, a publication by Woodbine. I bring it back because I think Dawn deserves a wider audience and to be written about extensively. I encourage you to order it as well as The Reservoir. It was originally written and published at the end of 2023.
Men love to stir up a little institutional trouble as a treat. Between the overturning of Roe V. Wade, the surveillance of sex workers online, and the rate of trans femicide, women’s bodies continue to be politically pliable. Meanwhile, beloved feminists continue to declare their subscription to TERF Inc. Misogynoir continues to keep Black women writers from getting their due during their lifetime. Even in Leftist spaces, men continue to be outed as abusers, masquerading as liberated feminists.
Women are most often portrayed as angry when responding to misogyny in popular culture. But like any cause and effect, there’s an ambivalence that needs to be factored in. Misogyny can also induce depression. While the overt affective response to a man’s catcalls may be scornful, such as flipping a middle finger, the undercurrent of shame may come later and dig deeper. Men’s violence can stun. Sometimes misogyny can leave us crying on the couch. Oya, the narrator of Sevgi Soysal’s novel Dawn, is often forced to contend with this mixture of grief and anger. She’s no stranger to misogyny but remains haunted by the women she met in prison whose entire lives have been shaped by the state-sanctioned sport of violence against women.
First published in 1975 and recently translated into lucid prose by Maureen Freely for Archipelago Press, Soysal’s Dawn follows Oya over the course of a single day. Oya has been exiled to Adana after spending time in prison for the nebulous act of Leftist activity. She has little to look forward to other than the ritual of tea or staring at the ferris wheel. Oya’s monotonous life in a hotel is eventually disrupted when a man named Hüseyin invites her to dinner with his Uncle Ali. While she worries that any group activity could get her thrown back in prison, she accepts the invitation as if under the spell of community. Along the way, they meet Mustafa, Hüyesin’s brother who has also recently been released from prison. Over dinner, she meets Ali, his wife Gülşah, and her sister Ziynet. Much to her discomfort, the women serve Oya as if she was a man. No, she realizes, it’s worse than that. The other women don’t see her as a woman or a man, she’s just a guest of Hüyesin’s. The men briefly argue about the power of the working class until there’s a knock on the door. Oya will return to this knock again and again. Each character will remember where they were at the time of this knock.
The police rush in and begin arresting the men and Oya, believing they are having an anarchist meeting. As each character’s inner life is detailed, we eventually make our way to their violent night in jail and their subsequent release the morning after, completing one terrible day.
***
Dawn is devoted to understanding women’s position under fascism. Much of the novel is based on Soysal’s own experiences. The irony, according to Freely’s introduction, was that Turkey gave women the right to vote and run for office in 1934, before many European countries. Turkey used this as an excuse to declare feminism was no longer necessary. They’d ended the practice of polygamy, what else was there for women to complain about?
Soysal grew up with a Greek refugee father and a German mother in Ankara. She worked in radio, theater, and translation. Soysal left her first husband for a charming actor and became the primary income for her family. It was after this she began writing novels and winning prizes, few of which have been translated into English. While her second husband was performing his military service, she met the third man of her life. He was another Leftist dissident. Not long after they met, most of Turkey fell under martial law and the Left was no longer in fashion. For her own Leftist affiliations, Soysal spent two terms in prison. During her second imprisonment, Soysal wrote a prison memoir, translated Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, and a novel entitled Noontime in Yenisehir. A few years later shortly before dying of breast cancer, Soysal published her final completed novel, Dawn, in 1975.
Soysal creates a panoramic view of the remote southern shantytown Adana in Dawn, sweeping in and out of her characters’ lives with passion. From ferris wheels to coffee houses to cold hotels, Soysal’s spare prose leaps with electricity. No one’s inner thoughts are off-limits. Like Virginia Woolf’s The Waves we leap with omniscient radiance from third to first person. These are not armchair Leftists, these are men and women who know the difference between taking or refusing a cigarette from the police during an interrogation. And as always, they argue about class—“He spoke harshly because he was trying to break his class ties.”
***
Alva Gotby’s recent book They Call It Love (Verso, 2023) theorizes the labor women do to create good feelings and manage the emotional lives of others as “emotional reproduction.” Gotby’s theory draws on the idea of emotional labor as well as the socialization of women to be caretakers. This can, of course, also include literal reproduction but goes further into the process of cultivating domesticity. “Emotional reproduction seeks to make up for the hurt, boredom, and stress of life under capitalism.”
Mustafa, Hüyesin’s brother and one of the other men Oya dines, is constantly pining for his wife Güler. He remembers her strength when the police came looking to arrest him. Unlike Mustafa she does not crumble, nor can she. “It was her job to keep him going,” Soysal writes. Someone has to cook for the revolution. The reward for such labor is supposed to be love. How much is love worth?
When the police initially let Mustafa go, he briefly sleeps outside of the house. “Deliverance was a garden full of apricot trees,” he thinks to himself. But of course, the police arrest him yet again and he is forced to serve his time for dissidence. “We talked death to death, but we didn’t talk enough about torture.” He no longer knows if he will make it home or what he will find. He knows he didn’t treat Güler with the respect she deserved. She suffered in the trap of niceness.
Performing gender well is rewarded. Gotby points out we must step outside of these gendered positions and remove care from being exclusively the domain of the nuclear family. Gotby’s certainly not alone in this idea of family abolition.
Oya is grappling with the loss of a family unit that provides care. What alternatives step in for her during her exile? Under fascism groups that can provide alternatives to family, whether simple family gatherings or political readings are suspect because of the radical nature of collectivity.
If Mustafa makes it home to Güler, what will he find? A woman intent on reunion? A woman bold enough to take on a new life with or without a man?
***
One of Soysal’s strengths is that she’s able to be empathetic of all her characters without absolving them. Zekai Bey, one of the more vicious and racist policemen, knows that the law is porous. When a superior throws him out of a card game he seems to realize the fragility of his position. But Soysal doesn’t allow the inner toxic rumblings of Bey to be forgiven. Ultimately Bey’s frustration with his loss only creates more violence. He takes out his lack of control on his prisoners. “I’m in charge of time here, and who’s in charge of time, wins,” he thinks.
The apparatus of the fascist police is a fumbling bureaucracy who can’t seem to clearly comprehend how Leftist movements are structured. Any ghost of communism stirs up enough fear that they must make a move—and quickly. Thus when Oya, Mustafa, Hüyesin and others are taken in, there’s no proof they were having an anarchist meeting. Perhaps a sign that an anarchist meeting is often not much different than a dinner party.
Leftism is portrayed with a deft mixture of optimism and pessimism. Oya attempts to unravel her connection to the bourgeoisie as she feels she is merely a writer who was arrested, unlike militant dissidents or sex workers in economic precarity.
When she sees women belly dancing she muses: “Poverty’s answer to the world. We know how to celebrate. We take joy where we can.” She admires women in prison who make “joy and fury out of nothing” while berating herself for being more afraid of getting her period in jail than of the torture of the men she’s brought in with. While the severity of her guilt may not sound familiar, a popular maxim comes to mind: you can’t hate yourself into being a better person. The question remains, is Oya even a bad person? She’s certainly not a Bad Leftist in the way she thinks she is if she’s willing to go to jail for her beliefs. She is a writer who tries to do what is right, to not chase “the good life.”
The horrors she witnesses are legion. Proust’s madeleine is nowhere to be found; the object that produces a memory spiral is a truncheon. One woman is raped with a truncheon and can’t stop crying. Oya tenderly ponders the women she met in prison before her exile—sex workers, mothers with children running around in the mud, women who schemed to kill their lovers in order to not be killed by their husbands. Meanwhile, Oya’s own husband ends up seeming inconsequential. By the end of the book the only thing we know about him is she wants to divorce him.
The men deliberate their allegiance to the worker’s cause. Men are harassed for not really being working class, for trying to speak for the working class, or for the ease with which they give into torture. No one is blessed with political purity and no one is beyond suspicion. “Our new fatalism is just as false as our old romanticism.”
Here we begin to unspool the lessons for Leftists today. We’re all doompilled. Over tea with a friend recently we both discussed our mutual distress at the way so many people seem removed from death. People seem so unwilling to believe in the power of collective action in the face of government inaction. By the time this comes out, new forms of government oppression will be taking shape. As this is written the police state has descended upon the Atlanta Forest Defenders and bills are being passed across the country to ban transition-related care.
However, what is also unnerving is the Left’s often nihilistic splintering. So many have resigned to dance in the ashes, believing the world is nearly ready for collapse. Apocalypse porn is rampant. Yet so often these visions of the end of capital can only conjure the individual. The future of collective care is seen as a fragile affair, something for others to worry about.
If we can’t deliver soup to our sick friend who’s a few more stops down on the subway then how are they to trust us when their life is at risk? And, if they can’t let others in enough to administer to them while they’re sick, then how can they develop the interdependence needed for real community?
The veil of individualism is something Oya contemplates towards the end of Dawn. As the sun rises and she is finally free from jail, she walks alone weighing her responsibilities and her freedom. She considers trying to start anew, somewhere no one knows her:
“What am I trying to do, turn my life into a Godard film? Whenever a woman in a Nouvelle Vague film gets angry at home, she hops on a plane and flies off to another continent. A train annoys her. A trinket. And she’s off to Africa… Never do these women speak of how they earn their money, how they can afford all these last-minute plane tickets.”
The past few years have revealed who has the ability to afford a last-minute plane ticket. Those who grasp for comfort and those who try to choose compassion in. Sometimes though we can choose both, providing comfort for those in their time of need.
I have this on my shelves (thanks to an Archipelago membership)…you’ve made it sound much more compelling than the NYT review I’d read earlier.