At the start of her second memoir, Parisian Days, Banine, a French author of Azerbaijani descent, arrives in the promised land. The year is 1921. Paris has newly entered the Roaring Twenties, a time of short respite between the two Great Wars. Banine is only nineteen, and she has just miraculously escaped her detested husband, the distant city of Istanbul where she left him behind, her homeland Azerbaijan and, perhaps most significantly, the grips of the Soviet Union, a newborn Empire that had recently claimed her native South Caucasus – once again:
When the Russians recaptured the Caucasus, (my father) was thrown in prison for the crime of being rich, and at fifteen years of age I was thrown into the prison of a forced marriage. During those deadly years, in the depth of my despair, I took refuge in dreams, constructing entire worlds, imagining the craziest things—incredible happiness, conquests and victories. (11)
But when the Orient Express carrying Banine pulls into Gare de Lyon, all that used to be part of her childhood dreams – Paris, exhilarating freedom, a fully different life – starts sipping into reality.
It is noteworthy that Days in the Caucasus, Banine’s first memoir masterfully translated from French by Anne Thompson-Ahmadova, distinguishes itself by the ironic, unapologetically humorous tone. The stylistic contrast between these two books, whose narratives flow smoothly from one into the other, is hard to miss: while talking about her childhood in Baku, fraught with family drama, ethnic massacres, and revolutions, Banine doesn’t shed a single tear of sentimentality. On the contrary, she remains sarcastic, all the way through. Parisian Days, on the other hand, while much calmer in terms of events and upheavals, is full of deep and at times ruthless melancholy, and the reason for that is not the loss of money and status Banine had back in Azerbaijan. No, that part even comes to her as a bit of a relief:
As a child of multimillionaires, I had dreamt of poverty; was it the reaction to the pressure that money exerted from them? (…) Pul, “money” in our native tongue, was the word I heard most often as a child. It commanded fratricidal wars, fortunately only verbal, and consumed all the energy of the combatants. (67)
So, the issue lies somewhere else and we, readers, soon realize where exactly. As someone who has always sought refuge in imagination, Banine had long dreamt of a fantastic life where she would be the main character – radiant, shining, witty, fabulous. “It was obvious to me that a life worth living had to dazzle,” she writes (68). In reality, it takes her years to stop feeling like a duckling, a shadow of other people, most of whom, to Banine, seem to be more beautiful, more interesting, more gifted and more courageous than she is. Be it her older sister Zuleykha, who dares to ask their father for permission to marry a Christian and succeeds, or the shrewd gold-diggers at the Parisian fashion houses where she works as a model, or her ravishing cousin Gulnar, who arrives in Paris not much later than Banine herself and immediately, unapologetically, takes possession of everything she desires: money, men, and the public’s wholehearted admiration. As a result, it takes Banine a long time and numerous inner battles to find her footing in Paris, the city that she will call home for the rest of her life.
So, until that happens, she lets go of the role of the main character and instead, takes on that of an observer. A foreigner in a foreign land, Banine starts to keenly watch both the locals and the immigrants like herself – who, in her case, are the other human shards scattered across the city by the fallen Russian Empire. Working class, aristocrats, former revolutionaries, conmen, artists, intellectuals, all sorts of people cross Banine’s path, and she takes mental notes on all of them. Interestingly, it is exactly this experience that, with time, sharpens Banine’s understanding of herself as someone who is definitely Azerbaijani, definitely in love with France— and clearly, and defiantly not Turkish, not Persian, and not Russian: “I felt myself deeply other, so I was and still am shocked when I’m lumped together with them. When anyone says to me, ‘you Russians’, my non-Slav heart skips a beat” (144).
Consequently, the chapter titled “White Emigration in the Wake of the October Revolution” becomes one of the most thought-provoking parts of the memoir – not just because of the unique perspective it’s written from, but also because of its dazzling resonance with the current times and the happenings in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine. In fact, this is the part of this remarkable book, written a century ago, that made me – a reviewer who shares both Banine’s ethnic origin and immigrant experience – feel seen as rarely ever before:
I felt so distinct from them, the Russians over there and Russian over here, with their nationalism, not to say chauvinism; their need to cling with their whole emigre outlook to a dead past. Something else immense also distinguishes them from me, perhaps to my discredit: a love of their homeland, a love I have never known, because Russia is nothing to me (…) I felt at ease in the West without denying my part of the East, which I feel alive in the depth of my being. In this reward, too, everything separates me from the Russians who seem to me to be located halfway between East and West, so specifically themselves and nothing else. (145)
The stylistic flow of Parisian Days, while somewhat uneven, also reveals the author’s continuous development in search for an identity. Just like in the first book, Banine continues to drop words in Azerbaijani, Russian, or German here and there, using them whenever they carry a distinct undertone or a connotation that would be impossible to convey in French, the book’s original language (Banine’s decision to write in French, and not in Russian, despite the advice of her prominent friends like Teffi, is also a significant one). The translator, Anne Thompson-Ahmadova, who herself has lived in Azerbaijan for many years, once again carefully preserves those words and masterfully adds an English version whenever needed. Consequently, the fabric of the narrative keeps reflecting Banine’s diverse milieu in Paris; and for those readers who speak the languages and recognize the connotations, it adds a new layer of depth – or irony.
“(…) They spoke loudly, dismissive of those around them, their attitude typical of many emigres who treated France as a hostile country, holding it somehow responsible for their misfortune, criticizing everything, dissatisfied with everything, crying at every opportunity: “Oh, at home… U nas…” (73)
However, it is exactly this complexity that Banine carries within herself that, in part, makes her deeply insecure, “disgusted with everything” (254). Lost. “Don’t you think we would have been happier if we had stayed veiled like our grandmothers? We wouldn’t have had any problems with work or men or freedom!…” (251), she blurts out at her cousin’s wedding, while deeply drunk. The disgust ends only when she realizes, upon another moment of melancholic reflection, that there is something that would make her feel capable and worthy after all – and that something is writing: “I felt so much lighter, not that I was cured of my despair, but I glimpsed a remedy for it, and it wasn’t death.” (255)
Writing is what brings her back to herself.
This memoir, created a hundred years ago, feels ahead of its time – so painstakingly modern is the story that it has to tell. War, immigration, emancipation, colonies and empires, and a woman’s search for an identity that would bring together everything that makes her uniquely herself. The answer Banine finds in the end is, definitely, an optimistic one: it is not the language, or the origin, or even the place we live in or were born in that makes us who we are. It is that something in us that transcends all the labels, merges what seems to be impossible to merge, and, as a result, brings out what is unique and unmistakably, undeniably ours – as long as we find the courage to step out of the box and claim it.
Banine. Parisian Days. Translated by Anne Thompson-Akhmadova. Pushkin Press, 2024.
Leyla Shukurli (Leyla Shukurova) is a writer and researcher from Azerbaijan, who has been living in Germany for the last decade. She holds an undergraduate degree in English philology and two graduate degrees in intercultural communication and media studies, from Hochschule Fulda, Germany, and New York University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Words Without Borders, Turkoslavia, AGNI, and Tint Journal. She currently resides in Frankfurt am Main.