Defne Suman: “Your body dictates fiction; fiction dictates your body”
At the Kerala Literature Festival 2025, Turkish author Defne Suman reflected on exploring Istanbul’s unwalked places and how Hatha yoga informs her fiction.
In The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City, Matthew Beaumont writes that not all steps are “unlost”, but only those that follow a “prescribed trajectory”. Given that the characters in your books also have a nuanced relationship with their city, what is your relationship with exhuming history — the “unlost” steps — and memory?
Amazing — what a beginning! I can relate to this thought very much because, even as a young child in high school, I was really interested in walking the streets of Istanbul. Though I grew up in a modern part of Istanbul, I really liked going to the old town. But I wasn’t allowed to go. So, instead of going to school, I would often go on walks around the old town, the old buildings… bunk school to see some old people, to try and figure out what kind of a city the one I was in was before my time. Indeed, it felt like there were several un-walked steps that I was following, like the way it’s noted in The Walker, and going places I always wanted to visit. Walking the streets in Istanbul, I realised that it wasn’t only me, but my generation and my parents’ generation, too, who had not walked these un-walked places. I think it made people forget certain parts of the city, forget about the spaces and the people who used to live there, and, in a way, this resulted in several histories getting lost.
From the Ottoman times to the early 20th century and all the way down to the 1960s, Istanbul was a cosmopolitan place with foreigners, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and Assyrian Christians, all living together. Not together in a sense, but living in the same space. There’s a difference. I don’t want to create a mythical past where everything was fine; nothing was fine. But there were more voices; you could hear different languages, you could hear the church bells, and you could also hear the synagogues, too.
I started walking the neighbourhoods in the 1990s. By then, this cosmopolitanism was gone. There were people who, you know, got tired of Turkish politics. Bad things happened to them. Either their homes were rummaged or they were kicked out. In a way, they were really pushed out of Istanbul, pushed out of Turkey for different political reasons. With their exodus, the city lost its colour. So, by the time I was growing up, the city was already one-dimensional. It was reduced to a Turkish-speaking, Sunni-Muslim nation. So, by walking about the city, I was trying to find the colours — the lost steps. Then, when I started writing, they came back to me like my dreams, these lost steps that I had traced as a young girl.
Desire is one of the major themes in your work. And I must note that something is striking and different when women write about desire. Do you feel the nurturing side of an individual’s being expands their sensibilities to experience and embrace the spectrum of desire uniquely? Also, most characters in your books aren’t corrupted by the faithful-unfaithful binary, for desire manifests in several other ways for them. In Summer Heat, we have Melike finding her father in her husband, Sinan. But then this filmmaker, Petro, enters her life, asking her to show him the city through her eyes. As you note in the book, too, there’s some sense of nourishment that Melike gets in keeping secrets. There’s a novelty of experiences she doesn’t want to deny herself by being with Petro yet she’s very much aware of how comforting she finds Sinan. How do you balance writing such conflicts arising out of desire, whether it is the Electra complex or the simple transactional nature of everyday life, in a novel that’s very much about a city?
It’s a very good question. I’ve been thinking about it because recently I read this book called Scaffolding (2024) by Lauren Elkin. In the book, the author talks a lot about female desire. But let’s speak about male desire — male desire is much simpler, more urgent. You see, like any other desire, sexual desire is nothing but a desire for power. It’s not complicated at all. For example, if a man loses power against another man, then the former feels a big void, a sadness so overwhelming that he considers this to be a huge loss for himself. Compared to men, women, by nature, are more layered.
As it’s noted, women are associated with the moon, whereas men are with the sun. So, the sun is out there, showing everything to us, blinding us with its light. But the moon, it is more hidden, more complex, more layered. Articulating female pleasure, as a result, is also harder. But once it’s accomplished, the writing becomes intense. Now, you may ask what’s common between a male and a female desire. It’s a hole in you: a missing piece in you, and you go looking for things that would fill that space.
In Melike’s case, obviously, it’s the loss of the father at a very young age. Not only that, but also that of losing her grandmother. Without giving any spoilers, it’s something else for her to learn that her grandmother faced a big loss, too, alongside several minor losses, like losing her country, having to leave her home, her village, having to live like the mistress of her pasha, her friendships… all that. All these losses accumulated first in Melike’s father, then in Melike.
[Drawing a circle in the air, pointing at her belly] So, I think, women especially feel a void in the stomach and the womb. Many women become mothers, hoping that that void, that space will be filled. And does get filled for a while, but then a child is a temporary thing. You’ve got to fill your emptiness with your work. However, it doesn’t work out well all the time, so you end up looking for things and objects, men and women to fill the emptiness inside you. And because Melike decides not to become a mother, she must find ways to fill her void, so she goes to these men — Petro and Sinan. In a way, I feel, Petro was the closest to filling Melike’s void. Which is why she goes crazy for him. She becomes crazily disappointed when she realises that things are not going to work out with him. Because she has a feeling that this emptiness in her is about to be closed — it’s about to be fulfilled with this man, but now he is not who he is. It’s a big disappointment for her. And you know, the higher your hopes, the more intense your fall. That’s what Melike goes through. It’s only towards the end that she finally connects with her father, the unspoken past that she’s able to make sense of the void she experiences.
In what ways does Hatha yoga inform your fiction?
Hatha yoga works at an elemental level, the air and the space, that is. And writing is very similar. Everybody thinks writing happens in your head only, and that’s true but it’s also a bit like what one experiences in a dream. For example, while dreaming, if you’re somewhere cold, you feel cold. You’re peeing in a dream sometimes, and it makes you feel you need to pee too. In the same manner, your body dictates fiction, and fiction dictates your body. When you read, because you’re feeling the words, you feel sadness, you cry, you experience pleasure… It’s the same with Hatha yoga: the immersive experience of it does impact my writing.
All your books have been translated by Betsy Göksel. What has this partnership been like between you two? Particularly, during the translation phase of Summer Heat, what were the challenges you faced given it consists of a mix of implicitly and explicitly translated sections?
So, Ms Betsy got married to a Turkish man, learned excellent Turkish, and after retirement, moved to a small island outside of the Aegean coast of Turkey. I found her through a friend. I asked if she’d want to translate my work. She said, let’s try. When she sent me the first chapter of At the Breakfast Table, it looked good, so we started working together. We developed this amazing symbiotic relationship.
Summer Heat was difficult to translate not only because of the mélange of languages it has — Greek, Turkish, and English but also because I was writing another novel, Last Apartment in Istanbul, which is coming out in English this year. So, I didn’t have much time to read and she had a bunch of questions like: how shall we translate this? What should we do with this Greek part? For example, there is a character in the book, Niki. She is Greek and speaks Cypriot Greek, which is like a Greek from the Cyprus island. She also speaks Turkish but with a Greek Cypriot accent. Now, that makes, like, four layers of translation, right? So, how do we simplify that? What can we do about these complexities? It’s hard to uncomplicate it. But she [Betsy] is good. Very good, in fact, because not only does she translate well, but she also works in tandem with me. She doesn’t have a big ego and never says things like: this is the way I’ve translated it and it’s going to be like this. She’s okay with whatever I say. She’s okay with whatever the editor says afterwards. I think this is a very important asset for a translator. I love her so much.
Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.