Porcelain Moon and Pomegranates: A Woman's Trek Through Turkey

Laila Abdalla is an associate professor of English at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, and former professor at McGill University.

Ьstьn Bilgen-Reinart immigrated from Turkey to Canada at age 18. After
a career as a CBC reporter, she returned to live in Turkey. Porcelain
Moon and Pomegranates is part memoir and part travelogue (with
historical, sociological, and theological commentaries) of her life
journey. Her accounts range from describing the personal pain of
confronting her mother’s waning body to a discussion of Catalhoyuk,
the ancient goddess who was the first deity of the land, and how a
society that initially revered the feminine changed into a patriarchal
one that often seeks to exclude it. While Bilgen-Reinart celebrates her
beloved culture, she does not close her eyes to its “darker”
elements. Indeed, she devotes a chapter to the despicable “honour
killings” of women that are not infrequent in rural areas; another to
the hypocritical system of state-controlled prostitution (the main
objective of state-run brothels is to protect the “Johns,” in effect
turning the government into a quasi pimp); and yet another to the
regime-sanctioned plunder of the earth by a gold mine. She also does not
shy away from the current “bugaboo” of Islam and these practices,
which are considered cruel, exclusionary, or aggressive by many in the
West, Middle East, and elsewhere.

Bilgen-Reinart has written a fine memoir. Her prose is clear, if
sometimes a little self-conscious when endeavouring to be poetic, and
her topics intriguing. The accounts reveal a nostalgia, freely confessed
by the author, of an adult woman seeking her individual and communal
origins. Some first-generation immigrants eventually experience the need
to recover their roots—not just to understand them more fully, but
also to face and negotiate the conflicts both within the motherland, and
between it and their adoptive country. This is an intimate rite, and
Bilgen-Reinart’s journey is personal, but she allows us to share it.