PERSPECTIVE
Exploration of the self
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If finding one's voice as an artist is challenging, finding it as a woman artist is more so. ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM reflects on the problems of transcending gender.
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DASHRATH PATEL
FELLOW poet Anand Thakore told me the other day of a poem he was writing about a dialogue between the left and right hand. In the process he found himself resorting to certain traditional images of femininity and masculinity: the passive left hand as the Bride, the dynamic right as the Groom. He couldn't help having misgivings about the easy taxonomy to which he found himself resorting.
He was, of course, drawing, unconsciously or otherwise, on the legacy of some of the greatest mystic poetry across the world — from St. John of the Cross to Bulhe Shah, Jayadeva and innumerable others — in which the feminised individual soul or seeker yearns for communion with the masculinised Divine. That this imagery is compelling and seductive is undeniable. But Anand's question was whether one could use it uncritically in one's creative practice today. Can we still equate passivity and surrender with the feminine condition and power and volition with the masculine? I had no ready response. I knew where I stood on the issue ideologically. But artistically, all I could suggest is that he explore the question, rather than clinch the issue with what is now a pat option in the arts: transcendence. Better a halting dialogue between the right and left hand, full of gaping pauses and impasses, I suggested, rather than a glib ambidextrousness.
I believe this "glib ambidextrousness" has in recent times become symptomatic of our discourse in the arts and spirituality. I refer to all those attempts that seem in a hurry to transcend before they explore, to wish away boundaries before probing the interstices. There seems to be a hasty jingoistic attempt to align our artistic and spiritual truths with current wisdom, in which process, the vital element of creative discovery is lost.
And yet, a simple reversal of attributes is clearly not the answer either. It makes for some of the facile quasi-feminist artistic statements we've seen in literature and the performing arts that end up being politically trite and artistically naïve. Dancer-choreographer Chandralekha once related an interesting account of her approach to her dance production, "Sri", which addressed the basic question of what it is to be woman. Her first impulse, she admitted, was to create the image of the woman as Devi vanquishing the man who represented Patriarchy. But her genuinely exploratory sensibility soon rejected this as far too simplistic a strategy. "I found I had no real reference points but my body," she said. "So I decided to start with the central image of women having lost their spine, and moved on from there."
Today there seems to be growing tribe of creative practitioner that would squirm at the label "woman artist" almost as if it were descriptive of some intimate gynaecological ailment. The artist knows no gender, is the credo of this tribe. The province of the imagination, they would hold, is unsoiled by conditioned categories of gender, culture, history, class and race — all the definitions that circumscribe us in various ways.
It is easy to see where the position springs from: the anxiety of being counted on the basis of gender rather than merit. And there are times when the creative process is irrefutably mystical. These are the heightened inspirational moments that everyone has experienced — when frontiers between self and world seem to be erased, when time holds its breath, when individual will seems so perfectly aligned with providential design that the barrier between self and other, intellect and intuition, mind and gut, left and right brain, blur into insignificance.
But the point is that we're seldom able to sustain this immaculate state of unforced connectedness. A great deal of the time we're simply trying to get there. Much of the creative process is about sheer hard work, strenuous striving for the breakthrough. In this realm of duality, issues of culture, gender and history certainly cannot be wished away. Besides, if we looked closely even at those moments of epiphany, what would we find? Is it the erasure of all difference into bland undifferentiated homogeneity? Isn't it more accurately a state of creative tension when all apparent contradictions are held together in a state of dynamic equipoise? And then comes the fact that a refusal to locate oneself in time and place — an easy assumption of a cosmic identity, as it were — often makes us vulnerable to all kinds of unexamined sexist criteria. For if finding your voice as an artist is challenging, finding it as a woman artist is doubly so. It entails interrogating all the sexist biases that have insidiously become the norms of the aesthetic mainstream without us quite realising it.
Consider some common predicaments. A woman writer who evokes an intensely personal landscape still finds she is dismissed as slight, precious, trivial. I recall British woman poet Vicki Feaver telling me of a male critic who acknowledged that her work was good "despite the ubiquitous menstruation poem". (Menstruation is, of course, embarrassingly narrow, navel-gazing stuff; a male writer writing about War, on the other hand, is obviously relevant, profound, universal!) Then there is W. H. Auden's staggeringly patronising preface to Adrienne Rich's first book of poems where he observes that the poems are "neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them".
On the other hand, if a woman artist speaks of militarism, imperialism, war and capitalism, she is still frequently rapped on her knuckles for inauthenticity, for transgressing into areas beyond her area of competence. Denise Levertov discovered this when she was labelled hysterical and hectoring for turning explicitly political. Arundhati Roy surely discovered this when she was rebuked for talking dams instead of writing novels. And Gujarati poet Sarup Dhruva says that the more her poetry is accepted by the dispossessed tribals and Dalits of Gujarat, the more the literary mainstream is inclined to dismissively christen her an akhbaari poet.
The spiritual quest is not so different either. It is easy to believe that existential questions are gender neutral, but if one looks hard enough one finds that things seem far from democratic for women seekers. Feminist theologian Mary Grey points out that the theology of the cross with its emphasis on self-denial often serves as a spiritual reinforcement of a social climate that encourages women to remain passive and powerless. Given that the abnegation of the ego is enjoined by almost every spiritual tradition, this becomes relevant across the spectrum of faiths. The challenge, then, is to interpret the spiritual quest as an invitation to growth and self-empowerment, a "call to end crucifixions", as Grey says, "not to prolong them".
Simply shrugging off the "woman" prefix, then, doesn't necessarily mean freedom from trivialisation or marginalisation. The artist or seeker certainly doesn't want to be a woman to the exclusion of her humanity, but surely she doesn't want to turn into a surrogate male either. She may long to be assessed on the basis of merit, but can she forget that merit is far from being an absolute category untainted by variables of culture, class and gender? Let's not be in such a hurry then to turn ambidextrous. We needn't essentialise ourselves, but we needn't erase ourselves either — at least not before we've given ourselves a chance at self-exploration. After all, neutering the self isn't androgyny, and homogeneity is emphatically not equality, though it's easy to mistake one for the other. Maybe both Bride and Groom simply need to remind themselves that in the seeking is the finding.
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