Anxiety of the female ghetto

Anxiety of the female ghetto
Arundhati Subramaniam

On Women’s Day, I was on a panel of women writers at a symposium organised by the Max Mueller and Majlis. It proved to be a stimulating encounter, largely because the participants represented a rich variety of contexts. There was Tamil short fiction writer, C S Lakshmi; Dalit writer, Urmila Pawar; Marathi novelist, Meghna Pethe; and German poet, Ulrike Draesner, in addition to myself.

To me the very act of bringing together such heterogeneous female voices on the same platform in a spirit of celebration was a significant one. How do female literary practitioners of vastly diverse specificities in terms class, caste, culture, chronology and literary genre map their personal journeys of creativity? And how do these journeys fit in with broader narratives of women’s quests for an empowered selfhood? The tricky issue came at the close of the discussion that of ‘gender neutrality’. Is it ever possible to be free of gender? The question was sparked off by Meghna Pethe’s unequivocal declaration that it is. In the act of writing, she explained, she was neither man nor woman, and this transparency enabled her to enter the consciousness of male as well as female characters.

The debate has remained with me over this fortnight. Let me start by clarifying that I’m sympathetic to Meghna’s position (although it’s not my own), mainly because I know the anxiety that fuels it. It’s the anxiety of the female ghetto. Of being locked into what might seem from the outside as an incestuous bunch of disgruntled women, shaking a collective fist at the inequalities of the universe.

Also of being patronised of being counted because you’re a woman, rather than a writer of merit. The fact is, however, that we live in an unequal universe where some voices are heard more often than others. And even if some of us haven’t personally experienced this condition of marginality (though it’s difficult to escape it in all its subtle guises), there’s a danger in forgetting that it’s a very real historical fact. If you look close, you realise that ‘pure untainted merit’ has rarely existed anywhere in history. Literary canons down the ages have been shaped supposedly on the basis of objective merit, buthave actually excluded wilfully or otherwise several voices.

Today, anthologies continue to spew forth, based ostensibly on objective reference-points, but which still frequently reflect insidiously sexist selection criteria ironically, sometimes on the part of both male and female editors! When Higginson told celebrated American poet, Emily Dickinson, that she needed to brush up her craft, he unknowingly reflected the biases of the male literary establishment of his time. And yet, he probably thought that he was nobly operating on the basis of universal formal yardsticks!

The right of a woman writer to represent other women in the literary mainstream is a relatively recent one in most cultures of the world. Today, if we aspire to the mainstream without an informed critique of it, we run the risk of accepting its biases all over again. That seems to me like a far more real danger today than ghettoisation.

Yes, I still understand Meghna’s resistance. I know that at the moment of creation, all of us aspire to skinlessness, bodilessness, unconditional freedom, to the exultant state of virtual being. But apart from a few such transcendent moments, how often does that really happen?

And is the alternative really so bad? Can’t we have an empowering notion of gender? Why does a woman’s consciousness have to be regarded as blinkered and limited? Isn’t that buying into a male prejudice? Many of us often forget that feminism is actually about the process of becoming deeply human. I’ve heard many young female collegians avow that they believe in ‘gender equality’, but hastily add that they aren’t ‘feminists or anything’. It disturbs me that we can talk of ‘gender equality’ as if we coined the phrase ourselves. There’s a very real danger in dehistoricising ourselves. After all, female rage has a history, female unrest has a history, our seemingly private angst has a history even our refusal to look at ourselves as historical beings has a history.

It’s not a linear history, so we don’t need to feel oppressed by another fascist legacy. There can be no formula for self-empowerment, and the rich plurality of women artists’ quests across the political spectrum testifies to that. But yes, it’s important not to forget that the universe we live in didn’t exist for our mothers. Still less for our grandmothers. Perhaps our daughters will inherit a better one but not if they have to reinvent the wheel all over again.

And finally, perhaps those of us who still harbour that suspicion that ‘feminists’ are a tribe of snarling, hairy-lipped, humourless women, need to remember that we’re only endorsing a deeply insecure point-of-view inherited from males who are no less gender-neutral than we are!