Hello, Project Istanbul!
There comes a time in every woman’s life when she decides to browse a spiritual bookstore in Santa Fe and ends up coming home with a new journal. She will then behave accordingly and set the journal in pride of place on her overstuffed bookcase, uncertain of what to write in it. Weeks will come and go, classes will begin and end, and finally she will realize that it is time to write some nonfiction in that journal, and she will dub it Project Istanbul.
My sojourn into nonfiction commences.
A confession: I always loved writing essays in school, from third-grade book reports to my analytical final portfolio in my 20th century literature course. Despite this, I regarded – perhaps still regard – myself as a fiction writer and poet.
But these days, I hunger for essays in my reading and in my writing life. I recently picked up Michael Paterniti’s collection Love and Other Ways of Dying and Durga Chew-Bose’s Too Much and Not the Mood. I was privileged to read extensive selections of the former in a class that I took two semesters ago; I saw the latter on Booktube. My mother gave me Wallace Shawn’s Essays. Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion occupies a place on my shelf. I am aiming to acquire Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris’s humor epic, at my local library. I am positively brining in essays.
Perhaps it is impossible to separate what one reads from what one writes. With each essay in Love and Other Ways of Dying, I have selfishly employed my highlighter to pick out little moments, little tactics, that I might utilize in my own nonfiction. I aim to understand how much of oneself to sprinkle into the essay, how much is personal and how much is academic.
This is my project: Write essays about the literatures of languages that I am studying.
To take a step back, I should define the languages that occupy my time. I am fond of foreign tongues, of grammar, the machine that is language. In this pursuit, I collect textbooks and dictionaries like some people collect stamps (though I daresay storing these textbooks is a more cumbersome task than storing stamps). Even today, I split my time writing and studying Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Persian, Icelandic, Russian, Japanese, Swahili, Turkish, and German. It goes without saying that I do not speak these languages so much as study them. I love the smooth turning of gears — phonological inventory, subjunctive mood, pronouns and prepositions — that grind to a living engine, this thing called language.
And I love the context in which a language abides — that is to say, its literature. When I first studied Arabic, I was an undergraduate freshman looking to fill her class roster with whatever was open. Besides, I reasoned, I am interested in learning more about the Sudan and the Arab Spring, which was in full flow and might at that time. I didn’t know that Arabic and the Middle East would become so essential to me. I didn’t realize that I would be planning to write an essay about this experience.
One essay for every language that I study and their respective literary contributions, that is the endeavor. Maybe I will write about how Fernando Pessoa made me want to learn Portuguese and the two dreams I have subsequently had in that language after I had been studying it, circulating it, for awhile. I might write about French WWII narratives or Faust and Ikiru. This is all quite nascent; the project doesn’t even have a name yet, only a code. Project Istanbul is in reference to the combined worlds of literature and language sitting at the crossroads of human existence, much as Istanbul has one foot in the East and one in the West.
Another confession: This is not the first large-scale nonfiction project I have ever planned. In fact, it is my second, after what I am calling Project Thistle, which concerns women’s literature and pivots around an essay that I penned many years ago.
What separates Project Istanbul from Project Thistle is that the former is under construction in a new Savannah Brain, one who has had the immense fortune of being a graduate student in Writing. In my time at Johns Hopkins, I have come through a sort of tunnel to get from a woman who loved to write to a woman who wonders and hopes to make it her career, from a woman who shyly kept calling her novel a “story.” I am not someone with a tremendous amount of confidence, but Savannah Brain now has unbridled hope, perhaps a key ingredient that was missing in the pre-Hopkins Savannah Brain.
Anyway, what I love to do and what I seek to devote myself to have aligned, and that is a great gift, the greatest anyone could ask for. Even as I write this, the binder that I purchased on the internet to hold my resources for Project Istanbul has just arrived, and yesterday I went on a frenzy and bought a guide to reading and writing Hebrew and Hindi. Life is good. Life is spicy with the scent of promise.
