Across her novels and short stories, Turkish writer Ayşegül Savaş’ creative approach brings to mind the opening of Steven Spielberg’s 2022 fictionalized autobiography of his beginnings, The Fabelmans. Sammy (Gabriel Labelle) is sitting on the stairway and watching his sisters take in the divorce news of their mother, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), and father, Burt (Paul Dano). His middle sister, Natalie (Keely Karsten), cries out, and his mother rushes to console her.
The camera trains on a mirror, and we’re witnessing their world through the reflection, seeing into another world. In this world, Sammy imagines a camera perched on his shoulder, one eye looking through the viewfinder, filming this family scene. Sammy conveys the visual representation of the writer: offside, looking on. To create is to look at the subject from the outside in, trying to make sense of it with one foot out of the action, one eye gazing through the mirror – the other world.
These are the parameters within which Ayşegül Savaş operates and succeeds. Across her fiction — Walking on the Ceiling (2019), White on White (2022), The Anthropologists, and the memoir The Wilderness (both 2024) — she grapples with the outsider status of an artist, the feeling of societal ostracization that creating art can incur, and notions of normalness.
Her protagonists are typically Turkish women who recently immigrated from Istanbul to a European city. All of them are academics and major in the humanities: literature (Walking on the Ceiling), art history (White on White), and film (The Anthropologists). Across her short stories, the list expands to linguistics (“Long Distance”, New Yorker), working for an arts organization (“Twirl”, Yale Review), and an artist research grant (“Layover”, Paris Review). The character in her novels most concerned with her Turkish identity is Nurunisa, aka Nunu, of Walking on the Ceiling.
Nunu travels from Istanbul to Paris via a literature program and meets a writer called M. Their friendship develops as they spend many days walking together. M. is not Turkish but has featured Istanbul in a chapter of one of his novels that, while laden with clichés, has nonetheless made Nunu feel seen in the first months of her Paris stay. His writing gives her an outside, or mirrored, view into a familiar world “where insight was spared, where tragedy occurred in parentheses, and moments of great joy were subdued.”
Through his writing, he creates a fictional life that cannot be shaken at its core, unlike Nunu’s “real” world, which is marred by death, geographical upheaval, and societal shame in her home country. Her relationship with M allows her to embody a role she’s intimately familiar with: that of the “local expert”, where she is believed by the sheer strength of being Turkish herself or ordering meals in Turkish just to seem a better, more capable, person, to the writer she admires.
However, Nunu also yearns to be as unique as M. is. When she catches herself telling a tall tale to M. involving her family friend meeting James Baldwin, his “darting eyes” watching over the “city hills”, she realizes she used the same detail M. did in his novel. To mask what she considers humiliating, she coldly contradicts M. the next time they meet concerning a student’s story of his family, then stops their correspondence unilaterally.
A storyteller-listener relationship is also featured in White on White, although the roles are reversed this time. Agnes, the storyteller, has a domineering presence. The text leaves no room for the protagonist’s name, age, or ethnicity, stating only her PhD candidate status — even chapter headings are absent. Early in the beginning, she becomes the lower-story tenant of Pascal and Agnes. Agnes is charming and smart. She occupies the protagonist’s mind, who seems already disinclined to think of themself, as evidenced by the introduction:
Mornings, the apartment expanded with light. Light flitted across the walls and curtains, streaked the wooden floorboards, lay dappled on the sheets, as if a luminous brush had left its mark upon my awakening.
From my bed, I could see the small, trellised balcony, lush again with thick foliage and purple flowers of a clematis climbing up one wall. White geraniums lined the railing.
In the year that I lived there, I had the sense of having stepped inside another life.
Light is on the protagonist’s mind and repeated twice, while personal pronouns are settled near the end of the first paragraph. It calls to mind methods of concealment, similar to the medieval statues the doctoral candidate researches.
A painter, Agnes has decided to draw white on white for a new project. The effort initially suggests Agnes’ lofty ambitions, but, like clothes on a statue, is “a thin film obscuring the subject from view”. To “[unravel] each layer of thought with all its prejudices and assumptions” is always personal and “profoundly difficult”.
Most of the novel is centered on Agnes unraveling to the protagonist, detailing squabbles with her daughter, her cousin, and her husband. The protagonist listens on, both apprehensive and attracted to Agnes. The introduction repeats in the novel’s penultimate chapter, witnessing Agnes’ charisma peeling away to reveal somebody stiff and forceful.
The loss and regaining of identity echoes throughout White on White. Midway through, Agnes prods the narrator into asking for her opinion following another lengthy anecdote, this one about how her daughter feels traumatized, whereas she hasn’t experienced hardship. The protagonist answers, “It sounded like a generational difference.” Visually, it appears as one line in a sea of text dominated by Agnes.
In a stunning last-page twist, Agnes reveals that the protagonist has been the subject of her recent work, “deformed” and “gargoyle-like”. “I know how much work it requires to strip your life of everything unwieldy,” Agnes says. The narrator expresses her repulsion, but Agnes does not seem to hear her. The narration continues,
She was waiting to see what would come through, she said. She had so much in store for it. She felt something rising steadily inside her. It might erupt suddenly, or it might be a slow, burning spill.
For now, she could only imagine the damage it would cause and what would remain in its wake.
Art, in Ayşegül Savaş’ works, reveals temperament but also an attitude, even a moral theme: that, if left unchecked, art can become a means of egotism, not communication.
A character like Agnes also appears in The Anthropologists. She is referred to as Grande Dame. The protagonist of the novel, Asya, notices her at the park. Grande Dame is a movie director who saw some success with her work, but, as Asya notes, “it seemed that in breaking free altogether, she had no one left besides the group of fawning strangers who got on her nerves.”
Too much art leaves one out of the humdrum of life. This is a major theme in The Anthropologists, an episodic novel in which filmmaker Asya and her husband Manu try to find a new apartment. Asya is desperate to belong to life. She lashes out at Manu for not attempting to socialize, is jealous of Lena’s ease as a “native” of the city, and gets upset that her friend Ravi flirts with her, then ghosts Lena.
Asya has a deep fear of seeming so strange that she becomes a stranger to her family. Her family already considers her strange since Asya wants to film a park. This makes no sense to her grandmother: she’s named after a whole continent (the Turkish word for Asia) and focuses on a mere park instead. Asya has her defense ready: by seeing people do everyday acts, they will, in her view, reveal their weirdness.
Unlike the “juvenile” desire of Irish author Sally Rooney’s characters for normalcy, as Ryan Ruby argues in New Left Review, Ayşegül Savaş’ narrators yearn for a matriarchal society they experience in Turkey. In Europe, they find themselves adrift in a society that alienates them. Even when declaring her intent to film weirdness, Asya wriggles herself out of being weird. In her ordinary rage, She becomes, in her ordinary rage, joy, jealousy, and stress, ultimately universal. By doing so, she winds up being connected with everyone around her. There is only one way to live, after all, “one way forward through the fleeting hours of a day.”
It is also true that the most extraordinary acts happen in our everyday lives. The Anthropologists was completed a little after Ayşegül Savaş’ birth of her daughter. The novel makes a brief appearance at the end of The Wilderness, a nonfiction book about the first forty days after her birth.
Forty days after birth is important to Turkish culture, as Savaş explains early in The Wilderness. It is “considered one of extreme fragility for the mother and baby alike.” The days after birth are also marked by “pregnancy brain”, which is said to muddle faces and events. By noting those crucial days after a child is born, we’re given reconstructed access to Savaş’ mind. In this short read, we see her moral clarity:
That this common experience, happening everywhere in the world, is a space of fascination and wilderness, neither extinct nor rare. Its dense topography has to be navigated through the call of spirits, the metamorphosis of its fragile bodies, and the surfacing of its ghosts; traversed through the constant and myriad connections that bridge its fledgling life forms. It delivers us to the body, and insists that we stay in it, that we remember we are animals.
Her unnamed baby seems like an animal to Ayşegül Savaş in those early days, feral and distant. Savaş herself can barely sleep. She dreams of her eyebrows falling off, hides from her friends that her baby drinks formula is terrified of her daughter, and hates her mother. Throughout, Savaş tries to conceptualize her situation by situating herself with Lilith, jinns, and the Anatolian figure, the Scarlet woman.
She writes, “Over and over again, I am seized by sadness and anger, a wish to be cared for and an inability to accept care.” She lashes out at her mother but earnestly attempts to reconcile with her. Help, when it comes, is accepted with overflowing gratitude.
She dubs this phase of her life as wilderness. This, too, is an attempt to understand the unpredictable: her point of reference is a real-life account by French anthropologist Nastassja Kamchatka, who was attacked by a bear. Even as a mother, she can’t help but be a writer. What begins as an intellectual curiosity ends up in a diagnosis of distress: “I think too much about everything. I am always reading, always in my head. I have gotten things into a tangle.”
Past the crisis of early motherhood, Ayşegül Savaş laments a lack of the mythical in our everyday lives. By trying to define what happened to her, she argues, humanity loses “the challenge to feel our way without perfect vision, and move haltingly toward no apparent exit sign.”
In times of distress, the first Turkish word across Ayşegül Savaş’ bibliography appears: “merhametsiz”, written in cursive, hurled at her mother. A more modern alternative of the word translated to merciless would be “vicdansız”. It echoes a theme of The Anthropologists: that language taken from its geographical root is merely the ghostly remains of a person’s ancestry.
Asya and Manu teach each other their native languages but are more content creating their own. Diaspora community is no different; Germany’s “youth slang” regularly winds up being Turkish words, such as “kral” (king), “hayvan” (beast) or even filler words such as “çüş” (“whoa”). In this way, language grows despite a hostile ethnic majority and government of a given country.
Preserving a bygone Istanbul is another interest. As a child, Nunu built a little paper city and populated it with paper citizens. Some of them she places in the same house where her father still lives. As an adult, she tells M. stories of her mother’s friend, an erstwhile poet, in part to keep M. interested. She is wary of M.’s romanticization of Istanbul in his novels but entranced by it, too. She also reminisces on Istanbul, which is continually changing:
Istanbul was once an innocent place, with all its trustworthy names. But those names are mostly gone. There is a fear of time passing. And everywhere the signs of age are eradicated.
Elsewhere, she states:
Those who continue to talk of Istanbul’s beauty are certainly far away from it. Inside the city, first and foremost, there is that constant hum. And the crowds. So much loneliness in the midst of so many people.
The past, across all of Ayşegül Savaş’ works, is porous and brittle, the future uncertain. Each of the protagonists must contend with constant change. For all the anxiety that each character possesses – of her social standing, the future, the present – Savaş herself looks forward: “And the past, before we set foot in the wilderness, appears so tame in my memory.”
In The Fabelmans, Sammy meets his idol, John Ford (David Lynch). Ford imparts the following advice: “If the horizon is at the top, it’s interesting. If the horizon is at the bottom, it’s interesting. If it’s in the middle, it’s boring as shit”. This leaves Sammy so energized that the camera puts the horizon line lower.
The horizon line isn’t the same for people from a country in continuous political upheaval. However, honoring what was and having the grace to look ahead with cautious optimism leads to an act of creation. Everybody may be weird, as Asya says, but it’s through everyday weirdness that one can accept their own quirks. For all the apprehension of artists that Ayşegül Savaş’ characters possess, they eventually realize that all art is a means of communicating.