BOOKS
Woman's world
|
An entertaining book about the occupational hazards of being a writer and a woman, says SUSAN VISVANATHAN.
|
THIS book is an interesting collection of interviews with successful women writers. It is about the occupational hazards of being a writer. Not all the women accept the definitive label that genders writing, but most see it as an inescapable existential condition.
I enjoyed reading each page of this book, because if one were to think of biography as a social science tool, then this book is the evidence of how volatile the matrix of individual lives are. Fathers are supportive in early childhood, but withdraw this emotional and intellectual space, as society constrains the young female to excel in domestic arts and to marry. Husbands are often confused and startled by their wives' desperate desire to write. The women themselves don't always know why they are being dragged into the furnace, or the abyss, of creative writing, but none of them denies it. That is what makes them so special and so different. They admit to exhaustion but never to a despair that would stop them from writing. Many of them write humour because they see it as the one way of entering a masculinist preserve. They are curious why the body and its exudations are denied to them as a map, why if men write about the body they are extolled, why when women write sex they are accused of being obscene.
All the writers communicate intensely and perfectly intimately to their interrogators. They never wonder for a minute whether their families will object or not, to what they have to say. Bonding with the family seems primary, when it fails, then there is intense grief, but unequivocally there is a will to survive and write.
The intellectual and supportive mother is perhaps the key to the unravelling of the palimpsest. She is there in almost all the interviews as the woman who wrote, but did not publish, who loved to read, who edited, who censored, who nurtured the author's children and the author. If the father is the early cerebral catalyst, who allowed his daughters to be educated and to cross the street alone, it was the mother's stable, life-supporting persona, which allowed the woman writer to come into her own. The support of men and the resistance to patriarchy (for companions and comrades either start demanding too much, or censor work, husbands stare when food is not cooked) is the scaffolding of the most brittle type. Finally the author keeps her singularity even when in a crowd, and picks up her pen and records grief or laughter, describing the world as it appears to her, or as it does not appear to her.
This is a great book if you like looking through a microscope that is a literary one, with the interviewers refracting light wisely, never cunningly. There are no traps for unwary women writers to fall in, each is led by the hand to a tightrope, which she must walk alone...
What do women writers really want? Recognition seems a glad and welcome space, and yet they know, each one, that writing is an end in itself. It is that fever that makes them so unique. They are terrified that they will burn up, but they exult in its consumptive force. They write before the children wake up, before husbands return from the office — there is a surreptitious quality to it all, and yet is vindicated when work is in print. Most of the writers in this volume have received rewards with which they are delighted, but then the real angst comes from the pressure they put on themselves and the fear that they will drop dead before their time, or be empty of ideas because they have aged. Time takes on a strange quality in this book, because each one asks if the years allocated to her are enough. There is a hunger to fill pages, to let the subconscious unravel and to ask the question "Why was I chosen for this work?"
The answer perhaps lies again in biography. Why do some women and not others weave a trapeze of words, why do they endanger themselves and those around them? Each writer goes back to childhood, and chooses that big bang moment, when the truth dawned on them. The years swallow up their dreams of safe harbour, over and over again they realise how treacherous the interplay between conscious and subconscious is, how carefully it must be presented.
They submit to various personal censorships such as "What will my children's teacher say? What will my mother think?" They desire that their husbands/partners/companions will approve of what they're doing ... this extends to larger clan and kin networks.
Liberatingly, these writers say "What the hell!" and continue to bash on their computers regardless. This act of will allows them to continue inspite of the censoring power of reviews which suggest they walk a conventional track, or the power of the State to recognise or ignore their talent. Many of them are willing to enter bureaucratic office through election if democratic practices in writing and its recognition can be given a chance at survival.
Storylines is a symbolic text — a clutch of writers (your daughters? All girls?) who have been chosen to represent the iceberg.
It is the result of years of work — the orchestrating of workshops across the country by a very interesting team of writers, editors and publishers.
Storylines: Conversations With Women Writers, Edited by Ammu
Joseph, Vasanth Kannabiran, Ritu Menon, Gouri Salvi, Volga, Women's World India and Asmita and C Fonds (Netherlands), Rs. 250.
The reviewer is Associate Professor, Centre for the Study of Social Systems, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
