~Saguna Shah~
Yours is the weaker sex, please realize:
It is the beard, in which all power lies,
And though there are two portions of mankind,
Those portions are not equal, you will find:
One half commands, the other must obey;
The second serves the first in every way.
– Molière: “The School for Wives,” 1663
Hello Homo sapiens,
I am a human first; a woman then onwards. And it really hurts to be hurled with a prejudiced opinion as such that the French playwright holds. Hundreds of years and the ironical condition is that things still haven’t changed much for women. However, women have time and again held the pen to express them and to exercise their freedom. Freedom of expression is one of the most desired things for everyone. Women’s writings can be understood as the most non-violent way of resisting any sort of oppression, internal or external.
Writing, whenever it comes from deep within the heart, gives a heavenly feeling even if it is about hell. It gives a profound sense of respite to the tumultuous soul. Writing is an expression that should not be gendered, barred, disdained or butchered. However, articulating one’s inner feelings when it comes to personal narratives can be difficult for anyone because there you will be talking about yourself and not about anyone else. Often people may be guided by the anxiety of how the “self” will be perceived by the readers.
Coming to the feminine personal narratives, which I also have been a part of, I feel there is a need for women to liberate themselves from the dominance of language, mechanisms of internalizing the phallocentric discourse, stuffed with its codes, logic and structure, its rhetoric and automatist reactions. “Woman’s writing,” therefore should not be confused with a “woman writing.”
Women gossip and bitch, women lack lucid discourse, they are weak and inferior. The social norms are such that women should behave in a certain manner, speak as such, should do this and should not do that. Somehow, women have always been guided by a moral conduct set for them in all spheres. Their writings, likewise, are often associated with Romanticism, validating that women have a fixation for illusions, that they are irrational and that their talk is prattle. It is often regarded that women beat around the bush before coming to the key point. Well, this could be their mannerism. But chirping about the soap opera melodramas in their porticos is not the only thing women could be limited to.
So, is a woman’s identity, even in terms of writing, a biological or a social conditioning? Are women always the other, the inferior, based on the cultural, social and historical differences?
Is the age-old patriarchal ideology and practice to be held responsible for this, or women themselves, for not being able to sever their so called shackled ornaments?
Women today are still in the phase where Virginia Woolf was while writing “A Room of One’s Own.” They have shared identities and shared space because of which it becomes very difficult to express themselves freely. They often suffer from the anxiety of belongingness. Most women hold because they have a home and a family to return to at the end of the day. When they speak about themselves, all the people they are tied to may naturally be woven into their story. Women are often seen expressing their suppressed desires, their fantasies, likes, dislikes, secrets and grief and happiness with other women without any restraint. Possibly, this could be because they believe that the Venusians will understand their perspective better.
But when it comes to writing without holding any reservations, they are still unable to express. There is also a false assumption that whenever a woman talks about herself and her identity, she is talking against men. Plethora of times, even while having not so serious discussions, a man immediately jumps to defend his gender/views before a woman finishes what she wants to say. A woman mostly receives silent but reproachful scorns even if her voice raises a little that she withdraws into her cocoon. Self-pity surpasses one’s psyche at such times.
Don’t women have any right to be heard? Talking about the self may not necessarily imply to be talking against the other. It need not be seen as a battle of sexes all the time. Remember, women have always been treated as the ‘other,’ oppressed, inferior and excluded.
A woman’s writing may not only be, as some feminists think, “writing against the cultural myth created by men.” It can be related to her psyche, her sufferings, her trauma, and her fascination for clothes, shoes, something related to her body, her sexual preference, her cultural practice or her subjugation. It can be just about her flesh and blood and the close ties she has with it than the opposite sex. It is time she spoke about herself, breaking the myth of being powerless, voiceless and without desires.
But how easy can talking about the self be for anyone? Especially when it comes to issues of molestation and sexual harassment? It really needs courage to talk about being molested. Sexually abused in terms of being fondled when you are a child who does not know about sex at all and has no idea what the pedophile is doing? There are many such incidents when girls have become victims of sexual abuse by their own fathers, uncles, brothers and cousins. These memories haunt the woman for life as she is not able to express herself, not even to her mother. She wishes to unmask that person before the whole community but refrains from the aftermath that the situation can call upon. As a result of such kind of pent up trauma, she develops a kind of hatred for the opposite sex. There is a lot of violence involved in her, violence in the psyche. This is something much scarier than a husband physically abusing a wife, father abusing mother or his child. So, if a woman gathers strength to write about that, then it certainly should be applauded instead of being condemned.
There is never an identity between author or authors, reader or readers, male or female. Women’s personal narratives do not demand to be treated as something extraterrestrial. We cannot deny that we live in the society shaped by patriarchal ideologies and stereotypes. Writing and language, too, have the same root. When women have accepted the subjugation of whatever is fed through the medium of text and language, there is not anything wrong in trying to understand women language not just as prattle but as her inner feelings.
I remember Kumari Lama sharing her feeling of suffocation and out-datedness because of her long tresses in “My First Decision.” Imagine, in a society like ours, if a girl has to literally ask for permission for cutting her own hair, something that can be grown again, then how censored she is to express her desires? What could one interpret when the well known art curator Sangeeta Thapa in “All That Remains” expresses, “Am I succumbing to my own diabolical imagination? Or have the jumbled memories of past life shaped who I am today? Why is it that when I look at the paintings by some Renaissance artists, I feel as if I have known the artist intimately? And if I were to tell you that one of my ultimate fantasies is to lie naked on a canvas still wet with paint and have a lover wash the colors from my body and my hair, what would you say?”
What would you reader say? Who do you think I may be talking about in “Memoirs of Sanomaharani and the Pain Within” where I say, “It feels as though I have seen much in life, experienced much, and endured so much more that there is barely anything left to look forward to. But then life is so very erratic; it unfolds new ambiguity every now and then.”? What do you interpret?
Women’s writing is not something offensive or defensive but something that is inventive or simply an expression of what is within. To generalize texts written by women means to be dependent on texts written by men. A woman’s writing should be looked upon as something that is not actually foreign but something that practices political, ethical and aesthetic difference. Her effort should not be snapped off by saying,
• She did not write
• She wrote but she should not have
• She wrote but look what she wrote about
• She wrote it but there isn’t anything artistic about it
• She wrote it but she wrote only one of it
• She wrote it but it’s only in the canon for one
• She wrote it but there are very few of her…
I feel women’s writings should be understood through a psycho-political reading. If you consider women’s writings in terms of power politics, then it certainly can be a threat; but it is not about the ‘other’ outdoing the mainstream. Empowerment is always positive if it is used for betterment. If men are already empowered, there is nothing wrong in women being empowered, too, as long as it puts an end to gender-biased demarcations.
Yours faithfully,
Another Homo sapiens called
‘Woman’
The autobiographical narratives mentioned above are compiled in Archana Thapa’s “Telling a Tale.” Shah teaches English Literature and French Language to Bachelors Level students and is also involved in forums that promote reading culture in the youth.
(Source : Published in The Republica on August 3, 2012)
