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Powerful pen
Meera Syal...scripting success
IT WAS not till the 20th Century that women discovered with Virginia Woolf a linguistic strategy that allowed them to voice their resistance in a language that was not implicated in the hegemonic assumptions of patriarchy. Woolf's initiation and the use of the stream of consciousness technique to tell stories of women was an intellectual and political tour de force. "Mrs. Dalloway" is a good example of how Woolf constructed the mind of a thinking woman and highlighted how truth was partial and subjective. This destabilising of the notion of a single absolute truth cut through centuries of patriarchal indoctrination that underscored the absolute and finite nature of the patriarchal (read rational) view of the world as opposed to the relative (read illogical and hystericised) view that women had tried to provide in their novels masked as dream and hallucination.
Post-Woolf, following the feminist revolution of the 1960s and 1970s in the Anglo-American world, a whole new lexicon was provided for transmitting gender in text. In the first wave of feminism, issues of race and class were subsumed under the larger issue of gender politics. Housewives like Betty Friedan, scholars like Germaine Greer and artists and writers like Margaret Atwood used their skills to recast the idea of woman in their works. But gender is an issue that has now been increasingly linked with issues of race and colour. Meera Syal's comic and satirical review of being a British Asian woman writer in "Anita and Me" has broadened the base of women writing about women. Whether it is the novels of well-respected and established novelists such as Rosamund Lehman or the new voice in Esther Freud, contemporary women writers continue to worry about oft-asked questions - what is woman and who decides this?
"Novel Scene", a series of films based on the works of these writers, will be screened at Sathyam Cineplex from September 27 to October 5. For details, contact the British Council at 28525002 extn. 335/329.
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