Preface
Traveling (with) Books
How do we learn about each other? How do we do it without harming each other but with the courage to take up a weaving of the everyday that may reveal deep betrayals? How do we cross without taking over?” —Lugones, “Decolonial Feminism,” 755
Virgin Crossing Borders is a book that tells the story of a traveling book— Hanne Blank’s Virgin, a western feminist history book about virginity that crossed the Atlantic via my translation to be transplanted in Turkey and is now coming back to the United States as yet another book expanding the transnational web of relations that Virgin’s translation initiated over a decade ago. Undertaken as an epistemic project of transnational feminism, the story of Virgin’s border crossing is deeply interwoven with my own story as a transnational feminist subject who has been shuttling back and forth between Turkey and the United States, between Turkish and English, in a constant cycle of mobility—of displacement, translation, resettlement, transformation, and growth. Although I came across Virgin on this precarious path of entanglement and decided to build a bridge of translation with it while walking that path, the journey that brought us together had in fact started long before I came to the United States.
I was born and raised in Turkey with parents whose unabated encouragement and unyielding dedication made it possible for me to pursue higher education so I could become an independent, self-reliant, and self-defined person. I grew up with an inspiring older sister whose fearlessly rebellious stance of justice for all both introduced me to intersectional feminist politics and enabled me to see firsthand how one could fight for social justice on multiple fronts of resistance. My family equipped me with epistemic hunger, intellectual humility, political curiosity, ethical sensitivity, and subversive energy that have over the years been sustained by many people, most of whom
I have never met face to face but benefited immensely from through their books. In fact, I was very young when I started learning about the subversive power of books—particularly books that exposed injustices, condemned inequalities, and ingrained in me the wisdom of resistance and solidarity early on. After all, I grew up surrounded with banned books. Books, I came to understand, were consequential. Words mattered. Stories mattered even more. They carried dreams that could be mine. That could become ours. Books moved us as they moved among us. So, wherever I went, I carried a book with me. My passion of traveling with books, literally and figuratively, began with that early faithful bond.
Growing up in Turkey in a working-class, leftist, profoundly secular, and Alevi1 family, navigating, surviving, and resisting simultaneously functioning systems of oppression was a skill I had to learn early on, and reading books was a central component of that coping process. Books were where I took refuge when the oppressive and fear-ridden realities of gender, class, religion, and political affiliation were too much to bear on my own. As I traveled to the worlds of stories hidden in books, I learned that books had their own stories as well. And those stories could be just as powerful as the books themselves. For instance, the stories my parents told me numerous times about their heartbreaking book-burning incidents in the repressive aftermath of the 1980 military coup showed me that reading books could be a form of resistance to hegemonic power structures as well as a threat to fascist regimes. At the time, like many people in Turkey, my parents had to burn almost all of their “politically suspect” books so that in case their house was raided by the military police, they would not be imprisoned for working for an underground communist party. In fact, my father named me, born one year before the coup, emek (literally “labor” in English) in honor of that communist party, perhaps without foreseeing that it would bring on some not-so-amusing encounters with police years later. Over time, the story of my “burning” name and the story of the burning books melted into each other, solidifying my belief in the power of words and books. It was no wonder that when I heard my parents tell me those painful stories of destroying their books in the face of possible government retaliation, it felt as if they were mourning after fallen comrades. It was then that I found out that one could indeed mourn after lost books; books that leave long-lasting traces on one’s self and let them see the world from different places and lead them to different paths of life. And years later, when I helped my sister hide her “politically suspect” books so neither our parents nor the police would find them in case of a search, the thrill I felt was because I now knew how important that “game” of saving books was. We had to make sure those books
lived on so that their theories of liberation, stories of resistance, and dreams of justice continued inspiring. So, we hid them well. I had not yet learned that books also “lived on” in translation, as Walter Benjamin famously said (Illuminations).
There were other incidents that helped crystalize my political vision of books. I was in seventh grade, when one day our Turkish literature teacher asked us to bring poems to class. I went home and chose a poetry book I found on the bookshelf. It had many beautiful poems, and I was certain any one of them would impress my teacher. As I was trying to decide which poem, my sister asked me why I was reading “that” book. Upon hearing that it was for a class assignment, she told me to leave it and instead find one that praised Atatürk, Turkey’s “founding father.” When I asked her why, she said that my teacher, who used to be her teacher as well, was a fascist and would fail me if I took that book to class. Again, my child self asked, but why? It turned out the book was by Ahmed Arif, a Kurdish communist poet who had been imprisoned for years on political grounds in Turkey. I had picked one book that my parents could not bring themselves to burn a decade ago. I never took that book to school, but I devoured every poem in it and never forgot one—a short one called “İçerde” [Inside/Locked Up] that spoke of hope despite the ruling presence of captivity.
Through these and other similarly transformative encounters with books (and stories about books), I discovered early on that some books were so powerful that their words could spill out of the pages and pour onto the streets and spark protests of social change—also send you to prison or the principal’s office, for that matter. When I eventually encountered feminist books, my conviction about the political power of books to make dreams and actions of resistance solidified even more. I became aware of, in Sara Ahmed’s words, “how feminist community is shaped by passing books around; the sociality of their lives is part of the sociality of ours. There are so many ways that feminist books change hands; in passing between us, they change each of us” (Feminist Life, 17). And some of those books I could read, and be changed by, only because translators had labored hard to rewrite them in my mother tongue. Thanks to that cross-border act of retelling and sharing called translation, I could encounter stories rooted in different lands and landscapes and expand the boundaries of myself beyond the familiar limits of my immediate world. Thanks to translation, I could develop an early appreciation for the distant, the unknown, the foreign, the other. My passion of translating feminist books, telling the transatlantic journey of Virgin, and researching the political potential of translation is rooted in this personal history marked, both epistemically and affectively, by those indelible book
memories. Virgin Crossing Borders is a product of this passion of traveling with books and the ethico-political responsibility that comes with it, which Audre Lorde beautifully explains in Sister Outsider (43):
And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we do not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own.
How did my path cross with Virgin’s, then? After I received my bachelor’s degree in translation studies in Turkey, where I learned to conceive translation as a political and ethical question of intersubjectivity and cross-border interconnectivity, I came to the United States to get my master’s degree in women’s studies, which congealed my already primed interest in feminist politics. It was in this time and space of displacement that my fascination with feminist translation emerged, an interest that was kindled by the very act of my traveling into the United States, where, much to my dismay, I was feeling disconnected from the feminist movement in Turkey. My sister, who was the editor of the renowned monthly feminist periodical, Pazartesi, suggested that I translated news articles on global women’s issues for the periodical. While volunteering for Pazartesi, I realized that translation enabled me to stay connected to as well as serve the feminist movement in Turkey—no matter how small-scale—despite thousands of miles of distance. Moreover, it facilitated the cross-border flows of feminist stories and lessons from around the world into Turkish, increasing a sense of global affinity and solidarity among feminists. This is when I started asking questions about “feminist translation.” And soon I discovered that I was not alone. There were many scholars and translators, particularly in Quebec, Canada, who had already done it and written about it. Once again, I was reading books that deeply touched me.
It was also in this period that I met Hanne Blank and her book, Virgin: The Untouched History. At the time, I was working on my master’s thesis on the medical and legal construction of virginity in Turkey and struggling to find a comprehensive feminist source that demedicalized virginity and substantiated that with historical data. My thesis both aimed to condemn medical virginity tests and virginity violence in Turkey, which was already done by local feminists, and, more importantly, sought to reveal that virginity was a fabricated idea—that it could not be “tested” or dis/proven even by medical doctors trained to believe so. Besides, without such a comprehensive source, my thesis, written in English for an Anglo/American audience with its focus
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on Turkey, ran the risk of orientalizing virginity and presenting it as if it were an exclusively Middle Eastern problem or “tradition”—Lata Mani’s (“Multiple Mediations”) and Lila Abu-Lughod’s (“Orientalism”) questions about “multiple mediations” and “multinational reception” were fresh on my mind. Then, one day, I saw a flyer on campus that was announcing an upcoming talk on the history of virginity by a visiting scholar, Hanne Blank. I was awestruck. After I met Blank following her thought-provoking talk, which summarized the key findings of her archival research, I realized that I had finally found a feminist book on virginity that would not only help me demedicalize virginity, but also alleviate my geopolitical anxieties about writing a thesis on Turkey’s virginity politics for an Anglo/American feminist audience. Virgin appeared at that very moment when I needed a credible source that would help me conceptualize virginity as a cross-cultural problem. And it did help prevent the topic from becoming a “Turkish problem” in my thesis, even though I exclusively focused on the “Turkish face” of the issue. After our initial encounter, Hanne Blank was generous enough to share with me an unpublished version of Virgin. The manuscript dismantled longstanding heteropatriarchal virginity myths, including the most longlasting ones fabricated by western medicine, so compellingly that I decided to translate it into Turkish as soon as it was published in English. I did not want this book to continue missing from Turkey’s feminist repertoires. In the meantime, Blank became a member of my thesis committee and the vigorous archival research that produced Virgin shaped my own virginity research and thesis—the thesis that would eventually become an introduction to the Turkish translation of Virgin and travel back to Turkey. By the time Virgin was finally published in 2007, I had already started my doctoral studies researching the political potential of translation as an apparatus of transnational feminist knowledge production and solidarity making. Could the translation of Virgin become a transnational bridge between feminists in Turkey and those in the United States? Would feminists in Turkey walk across that bridge despite the well-archived oppositional gulf—the west versus the east—that the traveling book attempted to cross? Virgin Crossing Borders explores these questions. And it further asks, could Virgin Crossing Borders itself become such a transnational bridge? Given that “to bridge is to attempt community, and for that we must risk being open to personal, political, and spiritual intimacy, to risk being wounded,” will you, dear reader, walk across that bridge with me and the feminist readers of Turkish Virgin, whose stories in/of generosity, hospitality, vulnerability, and solidarity are not only uplifting, but also eye-opening and inspiring (Anzaldúa, “Preface,” 3)? I/we hope you accept this invitation because, in Anzaldúa’s (“Now Let Us Shift,” 576) words,
We are ready for change. Let us link hands and hearts together find a path through the dark woods step through the doorways between worlds leaving huellas for others to follow, build bridges, cross them with grace, and claim these puentes our “home” si se puede, que asi sea, so be it, estamos listas, vámonos. Now let us shift.
Traveling (with) Virgin Crossing Borders
Virgin Crossing Borders not only tells the story of the cross-border journey of Virgin from the United States to Turkey but is itself a traveling book bringing back stories from Turkey. Borrowing from Richa Nagar’s inspiring book on “hungry translations,” where she asks, “what possibilities for justice can be created by rethinking translation as an enterprise of ethical and ever open mediation across space, time, and struggle,” (Hungry Translations, 26–27) I invite you to consider the translational processes that make this book as “a series of ‘retellings’ being passed along from one person to the next” and position yourself as a responsible agent of “telling in turn” (Merrill, Riddles of Belonging, 5, 43). You are a crucial part of this journey, and how you read and retell the stories here will matter for what kinds of networks of meanings it establishes in and beyond its immediate reception context. You are, in Christi Merrill’s words, “part of this ocean of streams of story, contributing to it and redirecting its flow” (5).
In a world that is violently divided into two supposedly irreconcilable opposites, which I cautiously continue to call “the west versus the east,” zigzagging those borders back and forth is risky business, to say the least. My mediating presence, which has been in every part of this transatlantic journey as the reader, translator, researcher, and writer, is particularly bold in this phase of the journey because the orientalist meaning-making regime of the border economy within which Virgin Crossing Borders is to be read and interpreted increases my geopolitical anxieties immensely. As a transnational subject whose liminal positionality poses distinct challenges and opportunities for retelling stories across borders, I find myself caught between the desire to retell my feminist co-travelers’ inspiring stories and the fear of this polyphonic text being appropriated into the simplistic interpretive schemes of existing oppositional regimes. I do not want this book to re-activate the persistent colonial imagery of “the Oriental Woman,” fantasized by both patriarchal and feminist agents of knowledge-making as an abject object of
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western pity and rescue. The geopolitical conditions of possibility that govern the reception context of the book, and thus the political fate of its stories, do not yield immediate trust in the meaning-making mechanisms, conventions, and practices awaiting this traveling book.
Therefore, as I worked on the book, I frequently found myself asking the same question: will the readers of Virgin Crossing Borders be ethically and politically responsible co-travelers in this cross-border journey (do I dare, sister?)?2 Or in María Lugones’s moving words, “do I trust myself to you” (Pilgrimages, 45)? This is a crucial question because “without such accountability, Euro-American feminist critical practices will not sufficiently examine the material conditions of ‘information retrieval,’ ignoring the politics of reception in the interpretation of texts, information, and points of view from the so-called peripheries” (Kaplan, Questions of Travel, 169). However, my desire (duty?) to (re)tell is bigger than my fear of being unheard or misheard, no matter how precarious the hope (of mutual trust, vulnerability, and generosity) that sustains the stories in the rest of the book is. All these intermingled affective states—of desire, fear, doubt, as well as hope—are justified because “When we speak of violence directed to us, we know how quickly that violence can be racialized; how racism will explain that violence as an expression of culture. . . We must still tell these stories of violence because of how quickly that violence is concealed and reproduced. . . But it is risky: when they are taken out of hands, they can become another form of beating” (Ahmed, Feminist Life, 72). Taking that risk is about continuing the cross-border dialogue, no matter how difficult, tentative, and unpredictable it is, while “reminding ourselves and one another of the violent histories and geographies that we inherit and embody despite our desires to disown them” (Nagar, Hungry Translations, 43). And who articulates this simultaneous presence of hope and doubt, fear and commitment, frustration and faith in our political narratives better than Audre Lorde’s following manifesto-like words (Sister Outsider, 40–41):
I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. . . . My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.
I believe in the transformative potential of translational journeys enough to invite you into the stories retold in this book. You will have to constantly
shift geopolitical gears to read them against the colonial grain, but it will be worth the effort because the stories you read will then summon your own (perhaps untold, perhaps mistold, or perhaps overtold) stories, which may or may not stick to you with the same affection after the cross-border encounter. However, regardless of the outcome, the stories you read and the stories you re/tell will have faced each other against a colonial backdrop that threatens but does not preclude ethical encounters. It is that possibility of clogging, corroding, disrupting, and decelerating, if not demolishing yet, the age-old colonial machinery of cross-border meaning making and story re/telling that makes the translational encounter between the self and the other worthy of risk. We can, indeed, radically touch and budge one another beyond the relational dictates of domination, but we must be ready to break the mold, share our intimate stories regardless of what might become of them, and become vulnerable in each other’s presence. This is why,
I invite each one of you, the reader and the co-learner, to also retell your own locations, journeys, encounters, and struggles and to bring them into conversation with texts, moments, and movements that have inspired you. Then, we can together learn how to meet, cross, counter, and respect the borders between self and other as an essential part of grappling with politics that are simultaneously intimate and global (Nagar, Hungry Translations, 208).
The reward of being such a geo/politically grounded and ethically attentive reader is not only self-transformation, but also intervention into existing relations of domination, which in the case of translation is both local and global. The traveling stories you read in this book attest to the simultaneity of such an inward-looking and outward-turning movement in translation, so I hope you let them tempt you with their connectionist lessons. If you read these stories with responsibility, hospitality, generosity, and vulnerability, they will show you how to encounter the other ethically in translation and how to become anew and expand with them and their traveling stories. And that means getting one step closer to that dream of a just, peaceful world of coexistence in difference that fuels feminist movements across the world. This polyphonic dream-world that is yet to come is possible only if “you” and “I” let translation bring “us” to each other and together across languages, differences, and borders, because, as Judith Butler beautifully says, “I am nowhere without you” (Precarious Life, 49):
What was once thought of as a border, that which delimits and bounds, is a highly populated site, if not the very definition of the nation, confounding identity in what may well become a very auspicious direction. For if
I am confounded by you, then you are already of me, and I am nowhere without you. I cannot muster the “we” except by finding the way in which I am tied to “you,” by trying to translate but finding that my own language must break up and yield if I am to know you. You are what I gain through this disorientation and loss.
Virgin Crossing Borders is a product of that dream of/in translation that will bring “me” to “you” and “you” to “me.” So that together we can muster the transnational “we/s” necessary for justice and liberation for all—and, until we get there, for survival because “we need each other to survive; we need to be part of each other’s survival” and we can only survive together in translation (Ahmed, Feminist Life, 235).