Had been going through another phase of life when you comprehend less though you introspect more and I didn’t post anything for almost two weeks. Had been pondering how to write next after a year of blogging and 125 surviving posts. My occasional foray into poetry was not poking me further; though being the index of my emotional life, this blog decided to remain silent these early weeks of May, when things were really emotionally heady.
But sometimes the lyrical dies, the novelistic fails and the quote of the day in my feedreader reminds Krishnamurti’s “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” I’m sorry I adjusted and did not scream. I regret I am, still, healthy.
I am not sharing three news items, I resist elaborating in details what has fouled my mood; they range from the trivial to the horrible, circumventing the symptomatic. I am sharing three reactions.
I.
Laurelin, one of those feminist bloggers whose writings I regularly browse, reacted against an onstage molestation by a buffoon named Johnny Vegas in the name of a comedy-show and then reacted against trolls. How I recall my similar experiences when this blog also tried to react against certain social evils! One of those symptoms of sickness: everyone has their reasons, everything has its reasons! I like the way she says: “You do not have a right to my space, no matter how smart/important/rational you may think you are”.
I was just checking out one of the blogs maintained by The Radical Ancient, a friend who is gradually arriving our WordPress, and then heard her reacting against one of the most hideous sickness performed by a woman: an ‘artist’ announcing her next installation showcasing her innumerable designed miscarriages. She says: “[Art major Aliza Shvarts'] real “crime”, if any, is that she is creating a life for the express purpose of destroying it. And THAT is the part I can neither rationalize nor condone. It’s not rational, it’s not natural, it does not serve towards anyone’s happiness. The most it will do is get her some attention, which she probably thinks will make her happy.”
Those two, in the name of performances and art. Sickening still: there are reasons against these reactions. The third is neither art nor buffoonery, it is a crime precipitated for a lifetime. I hate to summarize it. Another respected blogger also reacts: “Mr Fritzl is a man, not a monster. He’s just a man who took being father and husband to monstrous extremes. I know on one hand that doesn’t seem important or even counter intuitive, but I do think that if we reject Mr Fritzl’s humanity that we lose the chance to understand what drives some to this extreme. For good or for ill the forces that created this situation are echoed to some degree in each of us and in society at large. Or for a warped analogy, if one finds a cancerous tumour in one’s body, it’s neither helpful nor accurate to say “That evil tumour isn’t part of me.” While obviously the tumour must be excised, it can’t hurt to try and figure out what caused it in the first place.”
II.
Dear reader, did you travel the above links to enlighten yourself about the profound sickness of the world we are living in, where the president of US of A accuses my countrymen of triggering world-wide food shortages because we Indians are supposedly overfed? What do we deem more shocking, Mr Bush’s conclusions or the above three abominations? Probably neither, they are mere fodders for news. Johny Vegas will molest women live in the name of self-deprecating comedy after a volunteer says she liked it. Arts majors like Aliza Shvarts will maintain that she has all the rights to use her body as statements as long as it is her body. And daughters of the likes of Mr Fritzl will simply wither away to disappearance. Women will remain fodders to men’s news.
If you consider the second example as contrapuntal to the other two because it involves no men, I would beg to differ. I recall how I was admonished by many women, including my mother (the others were from the working class: maidservants), because I was watching a cow giving birth near my house. Not without shame, I realized that I was watching something exclusive to women; I was defiling shame, something I can never explain but I understood and learned to respect until I was gendered into a man by culture.
Ms Shvarts is defiling the private, if shame remains too abstruse a concept for us moderns. Apart from creating possibilities of lives only too record its destruction, her decision to display what happens with the feminine body can only be understood as an act performed for the global masculine gaze. There had been reasons inquiring if the victim to Johnny Vegas’ monstrosity consented or enjoyed the act or why Mr Fritzl’s raped daughter did not resist successfully her father’s crimes of a lifetime. Such reasons are already tainted with blood, as is the displaying the defilement of one’s own body, just because it is the body of the universally humiliated, the private body of a woman.
As I maintained in my last tirade against my own gender: “[R]ape is the ur-form of all crimes of power. It was never about lust or pleasure; it is always about ultimate control through ultimate humiliation.” I should qualify my statement further: every act of rape aspires to be exhibited and the resultant state of the victim be displayed as the rapist’s trophy. This aspiration is rendered true in states of riots, civil wars and pogroms. I can confirm this statement because I understand the psyche of my gender, I have heard male jokes for half-a-lifetime. Rape is seldom the act which it desires to be: it desires not only to be visible but also to be a final act. It wills the victims body to be exhausted of its enjoyment (let me keep the ambiguity of this expression), it desires the victims body to be displayed as being irreparably damaged. Any instance of extreme pornography will suffice, all the instances of those lesser mild ones just falls short of it. Ms Shvarts is displaying what Mr Fritzl achieved and Mr Vegas desires: the ultimate fun of the inflicted horror!
III.
Women will remain fodder to men’s reasons…
This blog, sometimes explicitly, trembles on the thin line between the double-take on gender-relations. When I wrote a lengthy note on my pen-name, I tried to clarify that even when I try to remain lyrical, I can never disavow the novelistic: it is the masculine and the feminine within a sea of history’s blood. Even when I am celebrating love, it is tinged with the melancholic; I know the bloodstain remains as long the relationship between a man and a woman remains social. The boy child grows up to be a member of the powerful of the gender-rung, the girl child grows up to experience her quotidian powerlessness. I am hyperlinking to my own posts just to recall, just to remember, just to remind…myself that we will miss the idyll of love in this lifetime; no poems, as cute as they might sound, can ring true being oblivious of the fact…
I don’t know what to feel. Guilt? That is self-pitiable and callous. Anger? That’s too subjective to objectively harbor. Regret? But I did not choose to be a man and how am I sure that I don’t feel safer that I am one?
I regret I am healthy, adjusting myself to a profoundly sick society, and not screaming. I regret that I am condemned to be only cerebral. Each day I see bodies which culture has taught me to be measurable in their degrees of attractiveness. Culture taught me to be blind to the walking experience/awareness of humiliations when I watch them walk down the streets, that is what culture accentuates in women as they temper their survival-instincts. I can only take recourse to art to undo what culture has taught. What you bodily survive, I can only cerebrally approximate: how does it feel to be not on your own…no direction home…like a rolling stone gathering societies’ moss.
NB: Please read Aniket Alam’s series on female infanticide, which he describes as The Greatest Genocide in History: Part I, Part II, Part III
It is estimated by historians that about 72 million people were killed during the second World War. Of this number 25 million died in combat, as much as 11 million were killed in the Nazi Holocaust and another 20 million perished in war induced famine. But this is not the single event with the largest killing of human beings in history.
Demographers and economists estimate that today over a 100 million women have been killed globally by societies which prefer sons over daughters.
