Table of contents for August 2017 in Womankind

In a society, that seeks efficiency above all else, technology towers over the frail human form. Technology can deliver more quickly and with less effort, or wastage. And we humans have become accustomed to being on the receiving end of this fast-paced provider of just about everything from beautiful images on a screen, to instant music, instant movies, instant food, instant love, instant answers to life’s questions… We expect to be instantly gratified with sights, sounds, and tastes. Nothing need wait any longer. But at the same time, many complain about the reckless speed of life: weeks drifting by too quickly; days disappearing; it’s Friday again; another month gone; the years piling up. To be instantly gratified means to shun activities that take time, discipline, and commitment; we dine out…

When I was nine my mother gave birth prematurely to my little sister, who perished within moments of being born. I was just a little girl and my mother fell into a deep depression. My father was then burdened with trying to keep things together, pretending that the situation was all under control and no one was grieving. But we all were. I saw my father falling apart. We were all enveloped in a dark, suffocating cloud. Five years after my sister’s death, my mother lost her job. She remained unemployed for one and a half years, staying at home, me being the only reason to keep on. I am the apple of my parents’ eyes, this being both a source of empowerment and stress. I was born in Adana…

In a compound in the Pennsylvanian countryside - decked sparsely with a prayer mat, treadmill, and bookshelves - lives a recluse, Fethullah Gülen. He is also, paradoxically, one of the most powerful men in the world. Many in the west will never have heard of him. But Gülen - a Turk who fled to the United States in 1999 - heads one of the most influential movements in the world.  With millions of followers (there is no official count, making numbers difficult to confirm), the Islamic imam leads from exile what is known in Turkey as Hizmet, or ‘The Service’, a community The Guardian has compared to an “Islamic Opus Dei”. To some it is a dangerous cult that has infiltrated the top levels of Turkish military and government. To others, Hizmet is a moderate alternative to…

“When women’s lives are in stasis, or filled with ennui, it is always time for the wildish woman to emerge.” Over an hour late to lunch, crouched inside a beaten-up old Volvo, she emerges wearing multicoloured clothes bearing oversized gifts. Months later, I happen to cross her path while suit shopping for my very first office job. She looks me squarely in the eyes and suggests a suitable colour, “Hot pink, or what about burning red?” You see, my aunt was a wild woman. Even today, so many years since this wild woman’s footprints ceased leaving a mark, her spirit lingers. But not everyone is as acquainted with their inner wild as was my aunt. Some of us repress her least she cause embarrassment or humiliation; for others she is…

For over four years I have been battling a mystery iron deficiency. Lack of iron makes every little thing, which everyone else takes for granted, a huge chore: getting out of bed, not being puffed, staying awake, keeping house, and playing mum. Even with iron infusions, I have a temporary high before it all leaves my body again. I can’t get up for my children at night and rue the day I go without my nana nap. It’s a total downer when some days I can’t even summon the energy to smile. And no, it’s not depression, I’ve had that before. My life is perfection, except for one small detail: I need to be asleep. And now that I’m pregnant again, injecting a little liveliness into our days is harder…

Some Hindus have an elephant to show. No one here has ever seen an elephant. They bring it at night to a dark room. One by one, we go in the dark room and come out saying how we experience the animal. One of us happens to touch the trunk. A water-pipe kind of creature. Another, the ear. A very strong, always moving back and forth, fan-animal. Another, the leg. I find it still, like a column on a temple. Another touches the curved back. A leathery throne. Another, the cleverest, feels the tusk. A rounded sword made of porcelain. He is proud of his description. Each of us touches one place and understands the whole in that way. The palm and the fingers feeling in the dark are how…

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Owning a smartphone seems like a logical choice in today’s connected world. The little tool that rests in the palm of your hand can do just about anything, whether that’s banking or paying bills, checking the news, or connecting with a friend on the other side of the world. Its myriad functions mean that the average user checks her phone some 85 times a day, and 91 per cent of users would never leave home without their ‘friend’ in hand. But the smartphone, as constant companion, never shuts up. And research indicates that ignoring your phone is as impossible as ignoring someone calling out your own name. When it rings, beeps, or vibrates, we snap to attention. Even when the phone is silent and not in use, it still commands…

There’s the expression that something is ‘part of the furniture’, meaning that something or someone is so familiar that we no longer notice it. In this case, performance artist Cecilia Paredes is part of the wallpaper. Her painted body camouflages into the patterned backdrop. In areas, she almost disappears. Paredes, originally from Lima, Peru, is now based in Philadelphia, USA. Her artwork Part of the landscape is about blending in to a new life in foreign lands. When assimilating, one hopes to ‘fit in’, achieved by learning the language, and dressing and behaving according to cultural norms. But for many immigrants, or travellers, or newcomers to foreign parts, there’s always a point of difference that originates from elsewhere. In Part of the landscape…

I did weird things when I was a kid. I was always misbehaving. In fact, many of my extended family have cut ties with me because of it. My poor mother. She was always running behind me, steering me clear of trouble. Every time she flew off the handle, I’d hide inside our tiny straw warehouse and wait for her anger to subside. In a matter of minutes, she’d forgotten about it. My mother was too beautiful to bear grudges. I was born in 1957 in Çelemli village, near the city of Adana. We were a big, farming family of ten children, two parents, and two grandparents. Compared to the poverty around us, we were not dirt poor. Neither my mother nor my father went to elementary school. My mother…

You are Swedish, yet you live in the US? Why did you move and how has the move influenced your work as an artist? I moved to San Francisco a few years ago to pursue my degree in photography. Once there I began to create my work, which became very influenced by the years I faced depression as well as the serene and dreamy Scandinavian landscape I spent most of my life around. I recently made a move to New York, where I currently live and work. When did you first decide to become a photographer and why? I began exploring photography when I first faced depression many years ago, and picked it up again in the middle of 2014. From there on, it has slowly evolved into a…

Discovering that a person you know and respect, like, or love has lied repeatedly should be a warning sign. Recently, a friend told me a story that wouldn’t leave her mind. An administrator at the school she worked at had embezzled thousands of dollars of school funds. No one had suspected her; she had been a pillar of the school, liked by all, including the students, to whom she had seemed warm, even maternal. “I knew her,” my friend said. “Well, I thought I knew her. Everyone did.” She shook her head, still bewildered by this betrayal. Many people will have their own story of someone who, without compunction or guilt, has created turmoil around them. Quickly, I recalled several other troubling incidents I knew of. The upstanding boss who…

Antonia Case: Antonia Case is the Editor-in-Chief of Womankind and the Editorial Director of New Philosopher. In 2016 she was awarded the AAP Media Professionals’ Award for excellence in the presentation of philosophy in the media, and was shortlisted for Editor of the Year in the Stack Awards. Lucy Treloar: Lucy Treloar’s novel Salt Creek won Debut Indie Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the 2016 Miles Franklin, Australia’s most prestigious literary award. Lucy also won the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Pacific). Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore: Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore writes for The Guardian, The Economist, Financial Times, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Statesman, New Internationalist, The Huffington Post, and Time magazine. Tara Isabella Burton: Tara Isabella Burton is the author of the novel Social Creature, forthcoming from…

My mother would announce - abruptly and joyfully - some Friday afternoon that we were moving to Paris; we’d be on a plane by Monday. My mother named me after her favourite vagabond. She was travelling when she was pregnant with me - my mother lived more or less out of a suitcase for two decades before she chose to have me, as a single mother, at thirty-nine. She was reading a book called The Wilder Shores of Love - by the travel writer and itinerant bohemian Lesley Blanch - a biography of four women whose passion for the Middle East outstripped their ability to conform to societal expectation. Isabel Burton - wife of the adventurer Sir Richard Francis Burton - was my mother’s favourite. As passionate about the desert…

At age 16, I had an epiphany. I realised that I am Kurdish. Up until then, I’d only known two sentences in my mother tongue: “How are you doing?” and “Are you okay?”, which I’d learnt from my Kurdish grandparents. So I began attending Kurdish lessons. And I began fighting for my language, customs, and culture. I grew up in Baglar, Diyarbakir, a Kurdish district. My father was a contractor and my mother was a housewife. My parents, four siblings, and grandparents lived under one roof. I loved my childhood. As a child, I couldn’t comprehend what was going on around me. Everything seemed like a movie. But at one point, I understood people were dying. In senior high school, everyone had a story to tell: one Kurdish student had…

Increasingly people are realising that their brain is their most important asset. After all, our brain not only directs our organs and helps us walk, talk, and solve problems, it also enables us to joke, play, grow, and love. With the average lifespan now over 80 for women in many countries, there’s greater interest in maintaining our brain for life. The likelihood of suffering from dementia increases with age and by age 80 the odds of developing clinical dementia are estimated to be between one to two people out of every three. Alzheimer’s Disease International reports that by 2050 the number of people living with dementia worldwide will triple current numbers to a staggering 131 million adults. While we can’t stop ourselves from getting older, we can do quite a…

By the time the wise woman has found a bridge, the crazy woman has crossed the water. Turkish Proverb Kalkan’s elegant houses descend a hillside in a half moon curve toward a turquoise sea, their whitewashed façades tinged sienna in the late afternoon sun. A breeze rustles through the cobbled streets in anticipation of cocktail hour, but my only thought is to find the Ay–Moon Pension, owned by my friend Wendy and her Turkish boyfriend Orhan. It’s early June and for the next six weeks, until Wendy finishes business in the US, I will help run her newly leased six-room guest house, which I’ve never seen. However, Wendy and I have dreamed of running a guest house since we met years before in Washington D.C., introduced by her now long-gone…

Between a Wolf and a Dog By Georgia Blain Ester is a family therapist with an appointment book that catalogues the anxieties of the middle class: loneliness, relationships, death. She spends her days helping others find happiness, but her own family relationships are tense and frayed. The novel demonstrates our capacity to live in the face of ordinary sorrows, and to draw strength from the transformative power of art. A Strangeness in My Mind By Orhan Pamuk It took Nobel prizewinning author Orhan Pamuk six years to write A Strangeness in My Mind. It is the story of boza seller Mevlut and the woman to whom he wrote three years’ worth of love letters, and their life in Istanbul. Mevlut wonders what it is that separates him from everyone else…

“One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.” Offline is the New Luxury What have we lost as a result of our increasingly interconnected digital technologies? In a world where we can send messages to nearly anyone on the planet we’ve become more disconnected from one another than ever before. There’s practically no part of the globe that isn’t pulsating with digital signals. Being offline has become the new luxury. Do We Really Need the Moon? There are many moons in the solar system but none like ours. It exerts an extraordinary influence on planet Earth, keeping our world in balance. Space scientist Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock investigates what would happen if the Moon was no longer in the night sky, or was in a different position…