An Inherited Melancholy: A Guest Post by Kenan Orhan

Living in exile, Dilara feels the constant pull of her homeland, until an unexpected prison materializes within her home in this haunting tale steeped in magical realism. Read n for an exclusive essay from author Kenan Orhan on writing The Renovation.

Miraculously, the month before my story collection was to be published, The Renovation fell straight into my lap. I’m not usually the sort of writer who has great ideas come to them in their dreams, but I awoke around 2.00 with a voice repeating to me over and over again: “I don’t know how they managed it but the builders installed a prison instead of a new bathroom.” I went at once to my computer and wrote in a whirlwind the first page or so of the story. I feared in the daylight I’d find the sentences tarnished with sleep and barely literate, but instead the next morning I dashed out another six pages.

I’m quite lucky that most of my stories come directly from a strong voice, from a narrator who keeps repeating to me compulsively a few lines (how lucky to be in a profession where you can admit you hear voices!). The Renovation was no different. Suddenly to me came Dilara’s frustration, the years of trying to make a life away from the one she abandoned in Istanbul. The dichotomy of Dilara wishing only to remember while her father is absolutely incapable of it seemed so natural a skeleton for the story that so many of my own anxieties began effortlessly latching on, fleshing out the novel in patches. I think the best thing an author can do is to trust their subconscious obsessions. We start to organize our interests, focus our emotional energies even without our notice.

I had not been back to Istanbul in ten years when I started writing, not since the Gezi Park protests. My family is the anxious sort and with the unrest that followed, the crackdowns and witch hunts, and the wave of terrorist attacks spilling over from the Syrian Civil War, we stayed away, my parents fearful of returning. The years dragged on. I hadn’t seen my aunts and uncle and cousins since I was still in high school. I was slowly forgetting the wondrous city, the beautiful view of the Bosporus, the emerald hills and azure water. It was being replaced, oppressively, by images from further protests, headlines of draconian new laws. Turkey was changing behind our backs. The country had seen massive democratic backsliding; censorship of artists, writers, and journalists; an economy in tailspin; and negligent policies that exacerbate natural disasters. In the interim I had missed the deaths of great grandparents, the weddings of cousins, the births of new relatives, the moves across the city, daytrips to seaside hamlets. In American, we contented ourselves with communal reminiscing, my brothers and I offering up our meager memories, but all of us begged my grandmother to share stories of the Istanbul of her youth. Greedily we plundered her past as a way to hold on to the city, to ossify it and protect it from change. I began feeling homesick for a place I had only ever been a visitor—an inherited melancholy.

Very soon before I wrote the novel, however, my grandmother began showing signs of Alzheimer’s. Suddenly I was terrified; I had already been severed from my family in Istanbul, and was now even losing my grandmother’s archive of memories. I wrote about memory and exile because my subconscious had been obsessed by such stories, I wrote about the loss of a past because this was my own grief. In a way The Renovation became a catharsis, a lament of things missed. Like water from an infinite well, the story practically wrote itself, but in truth it felt so easy because I put so much of myself in this book, more than I would have liked. I prefer the lives of others, people who are not very much like me (writers are generally such boring characters after all), but the voice of Dilara kept reaching out with my own enormous fears, my own frustrations, my own deep angers—I could not deny her.