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Magazine
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY
Lessons in self-assurance
KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH
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Celebrating three women who have made their work the hub of their lives without excluding other things of the world.
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Doing their own thing: Shanta.
So many Women’s Days past, one is still a little nervous about saying anything, because for everything one says about women, the opposite is also usually true, and celebratory events in this world usually sit wobbling on the tip of a mammoth sh
ameberg of victimhood, lack and suffering .
This Women’s Day piece is about work, about three women who have made their work the hub of their lives without excluding the things of this world or having to separate work out from the business of living as asides from texts, in the way that women, including this writer, find ourselves doing.
Nature poet
One of her paintings.
The first is Mary Oliver, the celebrated nature poet, recently named one of the seven wonders in Massachusetts; the second a little-known painter named C. Shantha, whose works have made the art crowd in Kozhikode sit up and take note; and V.I. Warshawski, the iconic, fictional ‘female’ private eye, whose stride in the books that are her home often breaks into a vigorous run.
Mary Oliver once said: “Poetry isn’t a profession; it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that”. And she has: for over 40 years, she’s made poetry from the ways and means of her life, looking at the world as raw material to craft into poetry, without ever losing the ability to delight in nature.
In a poem called “At great Pond”, she watches as the sun “scrapes his orange breast/on the thick pines” and orange feathers come tumbling down and a white bird standing like a candle or a man in the “clasp of some meditation” and the lilies “breaking open …from the black cave of the night”.
And as she watches, this is what she tells herself: “Later I will consider what I have seen what it could signify, what words of adoration I might make of it” and that afterwards she will go indoors to her desk, sit in her chair, and swim into the lost morning “...so smoothly, so peacefully, that I am almost the lily, almost the bird, vanishing over the water…”
What is especially stirring about Mary Oliver’s writing is that in it we can see her “… walk out into the world / to be dazzled, then to be reflective” and also thrill at the assurance with which she says that running through this world “ …there is the thick paw of my life”
Then there is Shantha, the painter. I first heard of her when we got an e-mail invitation to an exhibition of her paintings at the Kerala Lalitha Kala Akademi Art Gallery at Kozhikode. The note that accompanied the invite said “Shantha is about 50 years and lives with 200 rupees a month. She’s from a very poor financial background and needs help and support.”
The painter
The person who had sent the invitation responded to my questions about Shantha with some details of her life and several images of her paintings. The story, as you will see, is incredibly thrilling.
Shantha is 55, unmarried and lives in a small house with her aging mother, two siblings and their families; a goat, a dog, several cats and chickens. She makes a living by selling eggs and milk and she needs Rs. 200 a month for her painting materials. It is often impossible for her to set aside that sum from her meagre earning but that does not stop her.
She says that she needs the painting material as immediately as she needs oxygen for breathing, and so borrows money on interest to purchase her materials (As she did while doing the paintings in the Kozhikode exhibition.)
Shantha paints many things: herself, other women, the landscapes around her, animals and children. And she paints in many styles. And with no training whatsoever. Her pictures speak more than words.
The detective
Mary Oliver’s poetry looks the world as raw material.
And then there is V.I. Warshawski, Chicago-based private eye. By now, enough has been said about this path-breaking creation of crime writer Sara Paretsky to know that she is tough in work and love, uncompromising in engagements with crime and generous in relationships, womanly and professional, enjoys exercise and loves good food and that she indulges herself and others and is hard on the villains.
V.I. Warshawski lives life to the brim, she neither lets the blackness of crime drag her under nor does she let the invitations of life distract her; she puts her life into work and her work is part of her life. So, of course she says things like “I’m the only person I take orders from” but also things like “I put on jeans and a yellow cotton top and surveyed myself in the mirror, with critical approval. I look my best in the summer; I inherited my mother’s olive colouring and tan beautifully.”
V.I. Warshawski’s poise in combining these apparently different aspects of her life is a lesson in self-assurance and a great philosophy of work .
“I put on white linen slacks and black silk shirt — clean elegant clothes. ... I put my driver’s license, my gun permit and my P.I license in my hip pocket and checked my gun.”
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