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Society
Women and Worship
by Humera Afridi
By the second
day of the World Voices Festival 2006, hosted by the PEN American
Centre, it did not seem far-fetched to think that a Women's World Voices
colloquium may be a necessary corollary. Many of the more provocative
ideas and points of debate appeared to spin - sometimes unspoken -
around issues of feminism and faith, feminism and globalization and what
it means to be a woman writer in our current political environment.
Perhaps, this year's theme of Faith and Reason spearheaded this
accidental, but highly charged, focus - after all, the constructs of
faith and reason have been critical players in feminist struggles around
the world and continue to be negotiated in the daily lives of women
writers.
At the inaugural event, Orhan Pamuk and author Margaret Atwood engaged
in a conversation in which her first question to him addressed the word
'shame', that had cropped up in his speech, but one that also appears in
his work, sometimes coupled with guilt and sometimes with pride. As
Pamuk described the contexts in which shame resides for the hero of his
novel 'Snow' - in Germany for not being western enough and in Turkey for
not being Turkish enough; sometimes feeling ashamed of himself, and
sometimes of his fellow citizens - one could not help but think of
another male writer who had tackled the subject - Salman Rushdie,
chairperson of the World Voices Festival, author of the novel 'Shame',
who was sitting in the audience.
But what does a contemporary woman writer have to say about the topic of
shame, of the modern-day signifiers of a word that has historically been
linked - even if falsely - to the domain of women? Shame is a sentiment
that is frequently linked to taboo, so is it even reasonable, given how
far feminism has come, to beg the opinion of a woman writer? The
questions loomed silently in the auditorium.
But the following day, the topic of shame was invoked heatedly, if
indirectly, in a panel on honor killings. Ritu Menon, author of 'Borders
and Boundaries: Women in India's Partition' rejected, outright, the
appendage 'honor' to killings that are "sexual, criminal, murderous and
cannot masquerade and mustn't be allowed to masquerade as such
(honorable)."
Fellow panelist, Necla Kelek, a Turk who lives in Germany, and the
author of 'Foreign Bride', blamed Islam, a religion she considers
"archaic" and "demeaning", for the existence of 'honor' killings. In
harsh, unyielding terms, she delineated the Turkish immigrants in
Germany as an obscurantist group, resistant to change. The moderator,
Robert Pollock, echoed Kelek's sentiments, chiming in with shockingly
low-brow statements, such as the one he kept repeating: "Can you expect
respect from a culture where women wear headscarves?"
It was left to Menon to navigate the commentary back to the discourse of
'honor' killings. "In India, we are not speaking of migrant communities
and not about a transition to modernity..." she countered, and went on
to speak of the large-scale murders of women - Hindu, Muslim, Sikh - by
their own families during Partition, in an effort to prevent them from
falling prey to other communities. She challenged Kelek's thesis that
Islam, today, was solely responsible for abhorrent crimes against women
by pointing to the unarguable fact of India's religiously diverse
population, where research has shown that as far as crimes against women
are concerned, "one community is not more reprehensible than the other".
Menon's delivery had the audience clapping and cheering. "Why is there
this consensus when talking about women?" she asked, pointing out that
it was economic and social factors and a patriarchal consensus that
propagated the violence. "If a woman chooses to marry outside (of class,
or caste), the resources of the family have to be divided..."
Nevertheless, it was hard to ignore Kelek's absolute and authoritarian
refusal to think beyond the bogey of Islam. Her ploy to pit her own
enlightened, secular identity against the convenience of a
simplistically constructed Other - Turkish immigrants in Germany - who
serve as a synecdoche of the 'Muslim world' at large.
Unlike Pamuk's fictional hero in 'Snow', Kelek's shame at her own
community is not complicated by feelings of guilt, but instead, is
simplified by a complete disavowal of her own history. It is an
isolating position for a writer but, perhaps, in Kelek's case - a
Turkish immigrant woman in an increasingly anti-religious Europe - it
has become an opportunity to have her voice heard in much the same way
as it has for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an immigrant from Somalia, and author of
'The Caged Virgin', who is currently a member of parliament in Holland.
By contrast, Vietnam War veteran and author Duong Thu Huong came across
as a woman who stays her ground and fights the oppressive system from
within. "From all the bravery to die, we didn't have the intelligence to
live decently," she declared, taking responsibility in a collective
shame. "That's why I became a troublemaker...I write to tell my people
how to live a life that is fit to live." Huong continued to reside in a
country that banned her books and whose government sent out letters
naming her the number one enemy of the State. She, it seems, demanded a
different exegesis of history, and fought to achieve it, even as she
drew strength from aspects of an ambivalent legacy. "I have two persons
in me, " she claimed, "one is a fighter for democracy...The second
personality is a woman with black teeth. If there was no such woman
inside me, I'd have been dead a long time ago. This Vietnamese woman
teaches me to be patient and understanding...When I am sad and
disheartened, I think of the Vietnamese woman carrying a load up the
hill...Such old images give me strength."
If globalization is the perceived antidote to the residual 'medieval'
influences lingering today, then the world is in for another shock. In a
panel titled 'Globalization, Fundamentalism and Women', Menon suggested
replacing the term globalization with 'market fundamentalism' and
stripping away the advertising hype around it. For, she said, "then we
would see why [globalization] was so comfortable with fundamentalisms of
all kinds, that they are not in opposition with each other...and they're
never good for women because...all fundamentalisms make for a certain
patriarchy." She pointed out that "the globalization of the West's war
on terrorism has made it very easy for Hindu fundamentalists - and every
religion has fundamentalists - to terrorize Muslims with impunity,"
adding: "It's a strange place to be in, especially as a woman writer who
has been trying to alert the world to all this for a long time. It's a
bizarre and unsettling context in which to write. It's a kind of a
siege."
Festival participants Menon, Huong and Croatian author Dubravka Ugresik,
who has been targeted for "insufficient nationalism", brought critical
feminist perspectives to bear on debates that would have been anemic
without their insight. Their writing deliberately seeks out the
splintered truth, exposing the shameful mechanisms by which violence is
perpetuated.
May 14, 2006
By arrangement with
Women's Feature Service
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| Society
The Week of May 21, 2006
War or Peace? Middle-East Great Game Approaching
Climax by Rajinder Puri
Unprovoked, Unwarranted Papal Assault on India
by V. Sundaram
Did Jesus Die in India? by Kusum Choppra
BJP Needs Reinvention by Dr. Subhash Kapila
The Da Vinci Tsunami by V. Sundaram
Whither South Africa by Kusum Choppra
Children of Secularism by J. Ajithkumar
Is Equality Really Possible? by TA Ramesh
Damned by Dam by VK Joshi
Think Tank Propaganda Machines & the Death of the
Free Press by Gaurang Bhatt, MD
Are the Kashmiri Pundits abandoned Dregs &
Derelicts? by V Sundaram
And, the Way Up is the Way Down ... by Pradip
Bhattacharya
Ahalya: Incest and Temptation by Satya Chaitanya
Hinduism: A Holy Water Religion by Dr. V.
Sankaran Nair
Liberty, Inequality and Enmity of State-Sponsored
Quota Raj by V.Sundaram
The Reservation Hurricane by MH Ahsan
Reservations about Quotas by Usha Kakkar
Data Backup to Avoid Disasters by Ruchi Gupta
Police Story Kolkata Diary by Dr.
Prasenjit Maiti
The Witty Side by Melvin Durai
A Gallery of Failures by Deepti Priya Mehrotra
Geetli A Long Story by Kusum Choppra
Love, Struggle and the Poetry of Nepal
by Dr. Amitabh Mitra
Rama Suresh : The Rural Aesthete by
Aparna Sharma
Child Labor to End in a Decade? by Nitin Jugran
Bahuguna
Women and Worship by Humera Afridi
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