The glib assumption that life’s difficulties lead directly to mental illness is a problem on two main fronts. Firstly, it simplifies this extremely complex field, and thereby acts as a barrier to understanding specific cases of mental illness, diverting expertise and resources away from those who need them. Secondly, it contributes to a brittle and one-sided understanding of normal human emotion, which implies that happiness is the emotional norm and all deviations from this should be pathologised as illness.

And:

….an attempt to regulate women’s emotions according to how they ‘should’ be feeling is profoundly unhelpful. Most would agree that it is unreasonable to expect that a woman who has had an abortion will be ‘happy’ as a result. Abortion is not a choice women make to improve their lives, but a resolution to the unexpected problem of unintended or unwanted pregnancy – the least bad option in the circumstances.

If the negative emotions that may follow this event are pathologised as markers for mental illness rather than accepted as normal and understandable reactions, this de-contextualises women’s experiences and dehumanises their emotional reactions. The question should not be whether a woman feels happy or sad immediately following an abortion, because all women may feel differently and there is no ‘right’ way of feeling. Rather, the question should be: was that decision the best one for her to make in terms of the rest of her life?

The decision being hers to make. All this should be easy to understand. Why is it not? The reason I’m linking to this is because even though abortion is legal in India, social myths and attitudes persist. I once had a conversation with someone about this. I asked what he thought happened to women who have abortions. I was very young at the time so the question was a bit clumsy but he was a bit older and his answer was ‘they probably become mentally disturbed, commit suicide maybe.’ Right.

I don’t blame him for this view really because it’s symptomatic of the larger ideas drilled into many of my generation. Men, especially, often have wide-eyed and hypersensitive ideas about what it means to get through certain tough life events. I’m not sure where they get these ideas but I think it would help if they had actual conversations with women who’ve been through them. There is a fine balance between diminishing someone’s pain and defining them by that pain. Neither extreme does a woman any favours.

This Ultra Violet post talked about how we should be able to talk about abortion more openly (though not casually). This is necessary, I think, in pin-pricking some notions or at least discussing them. Achieving this in actuality is far more difficult because it remains a society where sex and sexual mistakes are quite stigmatised. Some women may not want to talk about something that was probably traumatic or emotional but others would not have a problem if they were assured there’d be no backlash. Like a host of cyber-stalkers who think they’re ‘loose’, for example.

Things may have changed in the new gen of Indians (those in their twenties now) but clearly, the assumption that someone who undergoes such a ‘terrible thing’ really has no way to live a ‘normal’ life ever again is/was quite common. There are levels and levels, different reactions and a lot depends on what attitudes shaped you before and the coping mechanisms you had access to after. The one-size-fits-all thing is so ridiculous that it’s surprising feminists have to keep refuting this.

So is the belief that you’re meant to be feeling whoop-dee all the time or you need psychological fixing. Frankly, I would find permanent happiness dreadfully boring. Not to mention, it wouldn’t help the writing any.

Annie Finch on how women poets changed in their attitude towards each other:

Jane Dowson and Gilbert and Gubar have pointed out that for generations women poets renounced and ignored the women poets before them. During the last decade that pattern seemed to change as, in new physical, textual, and virtual spaces, women poets increasingly took control of the development and maintenance of the canon and poetic tradition.

And Ron Silliman on how the technology changed access, tools and poet-reader relations:

The poet’s relationship to his or her audience is undergoing a profound transformation. The poet’s relationship to the institutions and even to the tools of her or his practice is doing likewise. Everything is up for grabs.

Some poets have chosen to embrace the new with everything from flarf to technology-based visual poetries. Others have decided that the “timeless” values of tradition will outlast even this….What’s apparent is that (a) this joyride isn’t over, and (b) we’re all in this together.

Besides the talks on writing and feminism, we also had poetry readings. Because poets must, after all, do what they do best. And making speeches is not it. Highlights:

Tamil poet Salma. There were many in the audience not paying attention because of the unfamiliarity of the language but they sat up when Swarnjit Savi, a Punjabi poet who translated many of our works, started reading his translations of her poems. There were quite a few mm’s as well. This is a sound heard at poetry gatherings when the audience sort of collectively half-moans  at a line they like. I first heard it pointed out at Poetry Africa by South African rap artist Ewok when he was MCeeing one of the evenings, and have subsequently noticed that it apparently cuts across cultures. Anyway, Salma got quite a few mm’s once the language barrier had crumbled. Some of Salma’s poetry is full of brutal, even grotesque images like this one in ‘Image’: “The cockroach was crushed / To pulp. All night,/ An army of ants have / Marauded its flesh..”. This lends a starkness to her poetry, a sense of darkness to the world she inhabits. This quality is disappointingly missing from some of the poems featured  at Poetry Web International but came through abundantly in the poems she read. Update: I know this because I have heard the English translations by N. Kalyan Raman whose comment rightly reminded me that I had neglected to mention this. She read one of the translations at this reading and the other, I had heard at a previous reading.

Tarranum Riyaz was very affecting–her ghazals are poignant without being drippy and she reads like a dream. Her voice is magical and so is her language (Urdu). Quite clearly, the highpoint for me. We had sort of disagreed on something earlier during the session on feminism, mostly because I think we misunderstood each other. But after the poetry, we (literally) hugged and made up. The healing power of good poetry? Anyway, here is an excerpt from an Arundhati Subramaniam interview with her which I found telling because the tension she describes here was evident in her poetry as well. There was a great deal of passion but it was unusually tempered with something else, something not quite cynicism, a wry sort of wisdom.

I’ve always believed in the primacy of women, not the mere equality of the sexes. That premise informs my work. I don’t see the woman’s lot as one of mere misery. A woman is not a mere sacrificial goat; she has agency and volition and that belief enters the work as well. But while there’s rage, there’s also the fact that I still love men. I call myself a Draupadi with three men: my husband and two sons. And so there’s the deeper realisation that there’s no point turning this relationship into a World Wrestling tournament. This is our greatest tragedy, isn’t it? The fact that we have to fight those we love.

Naseem Shafi

I enjoyed Kashmiri poet Naseem Shafi’s recital as well. I’ve never heard the language before and I found it very mellifluous. Her poems had great sound and rhythm and, going by the translations, were reflective of the disturbed social situation in the Valley. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything about her online.

There were two poets from Karnataka–Hema Pattanashetty and Jayshree Kambar (who was also my roommate) and we had a private reading session among ourselves the night before which was great fun. I don’t really understand Kannada very well, I’m ashamed to say. It’s not due to lack of effort; I’m just dreadful with new languages and my learning seems to have halted with the languages of my childhood.

Jayshree Kambar

But Hema insisted on reading her poems to me in Kannada and looked at me very expectantly after each line, sometimes impatiently, to see if I got it. Surprisingly, after a while, I actually started understanding bits. Maybe, I’d be able to learn the language if someone read out poetry to me every day. It would certainly be more fun than learning the names of 15 types of vegetables which is what they focused on in the class I joined for three months.

Another thing I found interesting was that the Bodo and Nepalese poets were very socially engaged in their poetry. One had written a poem about the Mumbai attacks and another talked about insurgency and violence. It was difficult to judge levels of craft because they were reading English translations of their works and these sounded a bit bereft of rhythm or imagery.

There were a lot of Punjabi poets and some of it was good, especially Punjabi poet Nirupama Dutt who was smart and funny though I think her poems don’t work as well in translation because they rely heavily on rhyme and this gets lost. In a slightly older article, Sutinder Singh Noor, Vice President of the Sahitya Akademi, talked about the state of Punjabi poetry and I’m going to quote that here:

A lot of poetry is being created each day both good and bad. So while I would say that Punjabi novel has stagnated, poetry is one medium from where a lot of material is being generated, both good and bad. However the ground reality is that bad poetry is finding its way into the market faster than good one, there by diluting the entire genre. We need to sift the good poetry from bad one. We in Punjabi literature have grown horizontally but not vertically. From a few handfuls we are now thousands but our growth intellectually has stagnated. Lesser known languages like Bodo are producing much higher and better literature than Punjabi.

I did find some of the poetry a bit stagnant in terms of theme (the preciousness of grandchildren, beauty of nature and so on). It seems to be stuck in the romantic mode and I’m surprised about that because clearly, their world can hardly be that much more conducive to that than the rest of ours. So is it a conscious choice to write in a mode that seems untouched by contemporary movements? Or is it some notion that women must write about soft, sweet things? But it’s also true that among 50 poets, there are bound to be some whose work doesn’t appeal. As Marvin Bell put it, no good stuff without bad stuff. And perhaps, it’s through gatherings like this that ideas on aesthetics can be exchanged and borrowed.

Sukrita Paul Kumar

1) the necessity of a more androgynous identity in writing and in life with reference to the Ardhanarishwara myth. I was impressed that she actually said ‘androgyny’ to this seemingly conservative audience without blinking. I also thought of this when I had to take the bus from Patiala to Amritsar and I chose to wear jeans. I find it extremely difficult to travel in salwar-kameez or saree and I think this has much to do with my associations with these garments as feminine, delicate, and therefore, vulnerable. In jeans, I feel less bound by my gender and therefore less bound by the constrictions placed on it by society. But this meant that I would have to do my reading, which was right before I caught my bus, wearing the same thing. Most of the others were dressed rather more traditionally. This makes me wonder about clothes, how loaded they are with gender constructs, and what a truly gender-neutral garment would look like.

2) the need for women’s writing to be mainstreamed in education as opposed to being treated as a niche subject. It’s astonishing that such a simple thing needs to be pointed out and fought for, but it’s true that women writers are, by and large , relegated to the women’s studies / feminism papers. I remember reading Toni Morrison and Attia Hossain in college as part of exactly such a paper. As if they were not part of the larger literary history / canon but only significant as ‘women’ writers. The other five papers we did, as far as I can remember, did not have a single text authored by a woman.

There was a session on ‘Why I Write’ which had five writers talking about their locus and labours. The common thread here seemed to be that writing is a a compulsion. It has a je ne sais quoi quality, a “I write because I must” sort of motivation. The only voice that was different was Marathi poet and writer Dr Jyoti Lanjewar who was rather strident about the necessity for socio-political engagement in writing. ‘How can I write romances when there is so much going wrong around me,’ she asked. Which was fine in itself but she also seemed frankly judgmental about those who do write said beleaguered romances. I have arguments with that sort of logic. Surely there is space for all kinds of writing. The more various, the merrier. I don’t see why people who live in terrible times and places should be deprived of their romance or fantasy or humour. If anything, they probably need it more. Such prescriptive approaches put me off but gatherings of this sort always bring out the vehement best (or worst) in people. Speech-making is inherently so conducive to extreme  positions that people tend to shear out any tentativeness from tone. But life is tentative at the best of times. (I’m tempted to add an ‘isn’t it’ at the end of that statement but I won’t because of this article.)

There was a symposium on ‘feminism in the Indian context’ in which I read a paper. There were some interesting points made about stereotypes perpetuated by religion, the silences of women affected by partition and so on. We were all coming at it from reasonably various viewpoints, which was good because it meant we didn’t say the same things. Some speakers relied heavily on examples from literature and there were at least two references to Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas. My talk was pretty simple and focused on the need to examine our own prejudices especially towards other women who we perceive as different. I drew more from posts and discussions we’ve had at Ultra Violet as opposed to literary texts–and later wondered why. Perhaps, because UV seems more ‘right here, right now’, a constantly updated motion picture? Apparently, some people in Punjabi heartland found some of my suggestions about sharing public spaces with sex workers and not expecting daughters-in-law to be deferential a bit ‘shocking’. Or so I was told later by one of the Akademi people. Funny because I was actually trying really hard to keep it tame (without actually slipping into bovine). Maybe next time I’ll talk about what I really think of the traditional institution of marriage. That should be fun.

More on the poetry in the next post…

Ultra Violet has been featured in the feminist magazine make/shift. Mostly good stuff but they have said the site would benefit from a greater variety of voices, something I entirely agree with. So please, please, spread the word and ask people (men and women) to contribute with their stories, essays, poems, vignettes, whatever. No bars whatsoever. I received a copy of the magazine and it looks really good. Do consider subscribing.

Also, my poem ‘The Kitchen God’s Mistress’ has been republished in the latest issue of A cappella Zoo. (It’s been published previously in the anthology Not A Muse by Haven Books). I don’t think I’m going to send it anywhere else so here it is:

The Kitchen God’s Mistress

Did you always smell of cinnamon?

It reminded me of a long-ago kitchen.
Mustard seeds. Mutton crackle. Hot air
condensed on window mesh while I shelled peas
on stone cool enough for sleep.
I should have barred the doors

when you nuzzled in
but a weakness for spices and memory
stopped me. Besides, I glimpsed
your feet, smooth and brown, with an arch
I could fit into. The night you drowned,
I was deveining prawns and drinking beer. I thought

it would be like any other night: we’d chew
slowly, listen to the cicadas sing. Later,
they would leap indoors and crawl
under our bed where we lay side by side
in the dark, entering each other’s dreams.

I was so happy watching the kitchen
simmer in pools of light. How could I know
they would gulp you down without a ripple?
And who would have thought you’d be so
hard to pull out? You always looked so light
with your thin beard and gossamer cap.

***

After a nod at Sharon Olds, she goes on to say that most contemporary women’s writing is tidy and boring. Her complaint:

The work of another one of the poets I was hitting my head against epitomizes the poetry of quiet, easy epiphany, which I’d sum up thus: the speaker is adult, the setting bucolic, the pretext a noticing, the tone reserved; the language is “transparent,” as is the handling of line and rhyme. The poems are inhabited by fruit, foxes, moonlight, wind, autumn, waves, birds, gardens, etc. Often cautious, afraid of offending, these poems wind up saying nothing. I wanted — unfairly, as they weren’t my poems — to imbue the work with even a modicum of curiosity or hunger. I wanted to hook them up to an IV.

Firstly, the dull or cowardly poem is hardly a reserve of women. A lot of modern, workshop-finessed poems are a bit tidy and boring. I think there’s even a school of thought upholding it. I’m also a little taken aback that she thinks women interested in poetry (readers and writers) expect Danielle Steelish stuff from it (“If you’ve been prepped by a lifetime of Danielle Steele books, you’re probably expecting some sort of vague, gushy warmth and then tender, post-coital cuddling during which both heterosexual adults express their immense gratitude for aforementioned encounter.”) I don’t remember ever reading about gushy, post-coital cuddling in a poem, by a woman or anyone else.

Secondly, I’m not sure that poems which have factories, frescoes, steel, cement, bridges and metro stations will necessarily say more than poems with nature imagery. There is no simple rule book that stipulates which kind of images hook up to curiosity, hunger, fierceness. Mentioning an IV drip does not necessarily infuse a poem with body or blood. Some of our greatest living poets demonstrate, time and again, that a poem is a not a lego set with fixed pieces and a manual. You have to choose things from the wide variety of the world, and you have to make of them what you can. Mark Doty writes about fish in  A Display of Mackarel and Jane Hirshfield writes about a horse in Heat. And both are wonderful poems.

I do agree with some of her points though. There is no reason for women to be less critical of each other’s writing because they are women. Nor is it particularly unusual to want to be free to write how one wants and not be pigeonholed as a ‘woman poet’. And poetry isn’t about fitting in a feminist agenda — or any other agenda for that matter. At the same time, identity and politics (and identity politics) do play an important role in the work of some very good poets ranging from Cavafy to Anne Carson.  So again, it’s a question of how it is done, isn’t it? Also, the fact that women write about ‘womanly’ experiences is hardly odd. After all, to us, it is not ‘subversive’; often, it’s just life.

Anyway, here is a response to the essay, which I liked, and here is another.

And speaking of poems by women, I liked a dog poem I read today. It’s by Julie Carter and it’s called ‘Bitten’. An excerpt:

…I thought hers

was the relief of philanthropy–a woman proud
when her Annies found their own pie-eyed

Warbuckses. But maybe it was the promise
of sleep, of safety. A night without alarm.

Did she curl up her hands tight around
the bite marks? Did she pull her collar

up, up to ward off teeth?

It’s not cute. It’s not cuddly. Read the full poem at her blog.

From the BBC story:

Eyewitnesses said the women had to queue up before undergoing an extensive physical examination by a female doctor before they were given a special badge which allowed them to participate in the ceremony.

Several of the women were quoted as saying that they had at first refused to submit to the test – but were told by officials that they would receive their wedding gifts worth 6,500 rupees (about $132) only if they took the test.

Imagine the women. Perhaps a bit shy. Definitely a bit hopeful, anticipating relief if not joy. You see, they’d finally stop being a ‘burden’ on the collective chest of family and society. They turn up at the pandal or hall, dressed in their best. Then they’re lined up like cattle. Their privacy is violated (mentally and physically). Their bodies become the site of interrogation and censure. What should have been a happy day turns into a horrible humiliation, a nightmare–and they have to endure it so that they can get their gift of 6,500 from a benevolent government.

It’s a positive sign that the issue has been raised in the Rajya Sabha but I’m wondering what, if anything, will come of the protests. Will this end up being just the flavour of politics for the day–or will there be some real measures taken to see it doesn’t recur? Are there going to be strict rules built into mass marriage schemes? Of course, firstly, virginity cannot and should not be a criteria for a government-aided marriage. Mass marriages are often organized to counter dowry or lessen the financial burden of a wedding on the poor. To tie up the issue of economic deprivation with chastity, to allow people to benefit from schemes on condition that they are ‘pure’ enough, is just plain wrong.

I would also think that participants in any scheme should be informed of all details and conditions beforehand. If there are medical tests involved, they should be informed and their consent sought in advance–not at the last minute. These women were not prepared for this googly. Some of them probably felt confused or disoriented. Others might have felt an additional pressure because it was on the day, a sense of ‘how can I back out now, after all this?’

The other question is: How are these women going to be compensated for the shame and humiliation they have suffered? It’s all very well to use them as bullets in the spitfire but what happens to them now?

None of the news reports talk about any of this stuff. Amidst all the foam spewing from various mouths, nobody seems to have addressed any of this in concrete terms. Or the media wasn’t listening.

Cross-posted at Ultra Violet.

“We shall disallow travel and the mingling of songs”—this line from Jeet Thayil’s poem ‘Rules for Citizens’ makes me think about the Gay Pride Parade. Because travel is of so many kinds, much of it disallowed. At this year’s Bangalore Pride on Sunday, there was much mingling of songs as well.

Travel. There was a boy I’ve met a few times. He always struck me as attractive but on Sunday, he was wearing shimmery pants, an open jacket, long hair. His eyes were lined. His skin was cinnamon. He looked beautiful. Sexy and scared and triumphant all at once. What is the distance, I wonder, between that person and the person he is forced to be most of the time? For him, how far was the journey from home to Town Hall, really?

Mingling of songs. At the centre of the march, there were flags, drums, raucous songs. All kinds of identity bits spiralled around it: hijra, kothi, double decker, bisexual, lesbian, queer, straight. The frail, the firm, the defiant, the inured to injury.

Gay pride is really about the freedom to be — and love — who one chooses. Sexuality (and love), like gender, is a continuum. Where we fall on this continuum like feathers on a clothesline, nobody can know. How strange and sad it is  that there are those who insist on legislating, moralizing, straitjacketing and politicking around it.

Even stranger that some do not believe that this is an important freedom. In a world where the pursuit of money is slavish, where we’ve beaten the environment to death with our appetites for material things, what can be more important than privileging, for once, other things like identity and love?  It’s what (barely) saves us.

And it was fantastic to see evidence of this on the streets. The parade was noisy, large, full-of-itself, serious and fun all at the same time. Just as it should be. How wonderful it would be, how colourful and joyous, if such freedom existed every day. The city could span its different stories, instead of relegating them to niches and corners, muffled and trussed. It could become all of them.

*Cross-posted at Ultra Violet

]]> http://aninditasengupta.com/2009/07/pride/feed/ 2 http://aninditasengupta.com/2009/06/a-severed-head-and-other-things/ http://aninditasengupta.com/2009/06/a-severed-head-and-other-things/#comments Sun, 21 Jun 2009 19:09:44 +0000 Anindita http://aninditasengupta.com/?p=1309 On the surface, Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head is about a bunch of tangled relationships. At the centre is Martin Lynch-Gibbon, a man who’s comically deluded about a vast number of things in his life. He’s sleeping with smart and sexy Georgie, a young academic who pretends to be much freer and easy-going than she is actually is. His wife Antonia is beautiful and elegant. Overall, he’s quite smug. Except, all kinds of things are going on around him that he’s unaware of, and as the novel progresses and more characters enter the picture, it’s hard to keep track of who’s fucking whom. So I can imagine the poor man’s bafflement.

But of course there’s much more to this than sexual shenanigans. The book is really about power and information, how closely the two are related, how they are exchanged between humans, and how quickly, surreptitiously and unexpectedly these exchanges can flip lives around. There are also huge Freudian subtexts with Oedipal instincts and incest forming an important part of the relationships. The book’s also extremely funny in bits.  Murdoch uses irony and farce to deal with Martin’s predicaments and despite the fact that she touches on infidelity, childlessness, depression and suicide, the book is quite entertaining. I would recommend it for a lazy afternoon. It’s quite a romp.

***

Phyllis Bose did an incredible job bringing Gertrude Stein alive yesterday at Ranga Shankara. Her dramatic monologue Gertrude ran for nearly two hours. It had a simple set dominated by reproductions of famous paintings done by Bose herself and there was little movement. Yet she managed to hold interest. Part of the credit must go to the script, carefully woven together from Stein’s own texts and notes but a lot of it was the energy and intimacy she brought to the telling. The focus of the script was Gertrude’s famous friendship with Picasso but there was lots of other stuff in there–insights into Leo Stein (Gertrude’s brother) and Alice Toklas (her partner), anecdotes about the Saturday Salons, and Stein’s views on life and art. Bose was funny and convincing and, quite often, transporting. It was a pleasure.

***

Afterward, some of us went to Koshy’s where among other things, we talked of how the place elicits such extreme reactions from people. Some love it and others just don’t take to it at all. Often, the same things about it bring out such diverse reactions — the ancient and faintly dingy air of the place, the lacklustre furnishings, the lack of general hipness, the sense that someone built it a long, long time ago and then forgot to do anything for it ever again. This time-warped air is exactly what some of us love about it. It lets us feel we’ve stepped into a different world, a world where things never change. It makes us feel secure. Also, the sheer variety of human type and activity at these tables — people talking, staring, drinking, gorging, playing some board game, having meetings, sharing quizzes, discussing art — is terribly interesting. Some people like these things. Others don’t. Everyone likes the potato smileys though.

As an aside, Gertrude talked about identity and memory and what happens to them in the face of eternity. I think Koshy’s was rather apt in the circumstances.

This is a picture I took some time back of the place.

Sriya Narayanan, 26, graduated from the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad (MICA) and works in the marketing division of The Hindu, Chennai. She also writes for them part-time. She is passionate about animal welfare and volunteers with Blue Cross, while trying to raise awareness through her columns ‘Four Legs Good’ and ‘Pet Pals’. She plays the violin and performed at her first classical music concert last month. Sriya writes slice-of-life fiction and blank verse, and tries to keep at it despite the steady flow of generic rejection letters.

Joshua Muyiwa, 23, started writing because he was told, ‘it is time to stop seeming arty and pretentious and actually earn the tags by doing something’. He is queer: in writing because line breaks, strophes and rhyming are strangers to him, in eating because he likes tomato sauce with coconut chutney, jam with spicy boondi. If he’s not at Koshy’s attempting to read poems over the quavering voice of Whitney Houston or smoking and discussing Alexander McQueen like he was his brother on the steps near Arya Bhavan, he’s at Jal Bhavan, Bannerghatta Road working as a dance writer at TimeOut Bengaluru.

Hmm, promises to be interesting.

“From India where I live, these extra-literary goings-on appear more unfortunate than amusing. I hope that some lessons are learnt from this, not least that the private lives of poets should, occasionally, be allowed to stay private.”

Sexual harassment = a man’s ‘private life’?

Dennis Loy Johnson at Moby Lives has been covering this quite a bit. Katy Evans Bush, who also wrote a piece on this at Guardian’s Cif, left a comment at Moby Lives which nails it:

I quoted Hermione Lee on my blog and I quote her again in my CiF piece, saying: “We are purveyors of poetry, not chastity.” As if it were just a sexual peccadillo.

Funnily enough, to the girl who was told that, unless she slept with him he would prevent her play (written for his course) from being produced, it probably didn’t seem like it was just about sex. It was more like being directly about her academic record. And if I’m not mistaken she only went public with it in the end because she heard about two other girls who had had the same treatment; one of them became depressed and the other had left the course entirely.

I’m sure Professor Lee, the great feminist biographer, would have expected to be taken more seriously than that when she was a student.

A culture that can’t even distinguish “sex” from the adjective “sexual” that modifies, in this case, the noun “harassment” isn’t anywhere near being ready even to debate the vexed question of whether this should debar Walcott from what is essentially a guest lectureship, not a pedagogic role.

The worst part is that Padel’s unfortunate behaviour has made people forget that the charges against Walcott were serious, and whether he should have been debarred or not was a serious question. It’s a question worth engaging with, because it cuts to the heart of what we expect from poets and public figures, and what we think of the relationship between ethics and poetry.

Instead, now Walcott is wronged hero, Padel is humiliated vamp, and all the real issues can go right back where they belong — under those university carpets. Plus you have some poets making vapid, dismissive statements about the whole issue like ‘who cares?’ or ‘what matters is that Poetry has suffered’ as if poetry exists in some sort of vacuum unaffected by (and un-affecting of) the real world. As if what happens in the real world, including sexual harassment, were not important to poetry at all.

Being a good (even great) poet doesn’t exempt you from human responsibility, does it? Or are poets such a back-patting, incestuous community that we are willing to overlook anything when the person at the other end is ‘one of us’?

The question here isn’t about the quality of Walcott’s poetry, which I will continue to read and appreciate. The question is about a hugely prestigious position of responsibility where he would have had power over students and been viewed as a role model. Sexual harassment is a pretty serious thing in this context.

Seth Abramson weighs in on this at his blog:

…my concern is less about Oxford University particularly, and more for (as I mentioned in my last post on Walcott, see link in next paragraph) the message it sends to young female writers, and for the possibility that Walcott, howsoever ceremonial his prospective professorship, might again be positioned to cruelly exploit vulnerable young students for his own sexual gratification.

An extract from a letter that I got from the WOMPO poetry listserve:

We are a group of women students at Oxford University and find this shocking and insulting. We would welcome your help, in demonstrating to the University and the British public, that Walcott’s sexual harassment and blackmail of women students are not mere “allegations,” as the British press assert, but a matter of record, with deeply offensive transcripts available in books and online.

Quite the opposite of Professor Lee’s assertion, we feel that electing a proven campus sexual predator, who is on record as admitting harassment in at least two cases, would shame not honour Oxford. The post is voted for by teachers at Oxford University. We feel the English Faculty is suppressing Walcott’s record. No one in Oxford or Britain knows or believes it. We find it scandalous, almost unbelievable, that it is a woman educator who is Walcott’s chief supporter in Oxford and in public.

Many of the other members of the listserv commented on how common it is for young female poets to have to deal with sexual harassment in class. I personally know two people who have suffered sexual harassment at renowned British universities and I’ve heard of many others. There’s no reason to believe that poetry courses are any different. Turning a blind eye to allegations or dismissing them as rumour probably stems partly from our eagerness to believe that poets are somehow nobler human beings above such mortal evil. But such ridiculous myths should not come in the way of justice and fair play. In most other situations, allegations of this sort would have affected the person’s chances, I imagine, and rightly so. Walcott’s withdrawal from the race is hardly a mark of sacrifice or deserving of pity. It’s probably a sign of common sense on his part because he realised that the protests would gain momentum.

The importance of the women’s vote is not confined to the three States with prominent women leaders. The evidence gathered by National Election Study series at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies shows that this vote makes a difference all over the country. An overwhelming majority of women say that they take their own decisions when they vote. The evidence also shows that their voting pattern is different from men.

The women’s vote famously worked for NTR in Andhra Pradesh and Bansi Lal in Haryana, when prohibition was an issue. A reckless excise policy in Rajasthan may have led women to vote in a big way against Vasundhara Raje. If the Congress is the overall national beneficiary of this ‘gender gap,’ the picture is variegated at the State level: women voters favour the Left in West Bengal, the TDP in Andhra and the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu. More than the presence of a woman politician, what attracts women voters is the ability of a political party to address some of the issues that affect them. In an election where a small one per cent vote shift can lead to 15-20 Lok Sabha seats changing hands and upset all equations for government formation, small changes in the women’s vote can be decisive. If this vote does not feature much in discussion on counting day, it is not because it did not matter — it’s only because it remained invisible.

This article reminded me of the defensiveness attached to writing from my location as a middle class, educated, privileged woman. Some usual reactions: ‘how dare you talk about Mangalore when there are so many worse things happening’ or ‘look at women in Saudi Arabia’. I often write about the urban, educated women because a) I know the most about it and b) I believe we need to be more involved in thinking, engaging and demanding more in terms of gender rights. To put it simply, we have more time and energy to do so. Nor are we unaffected by gender issues. After all, domestic violence, sexual assault or female foeticide are not restricted to the poor and rural. It’s amazing to me how many women are a bit blinkered when it comes to this, or don’t see the patterns of gender violence in their own lives because they are privileged in other ways. At the very basic level, female foeticide causes there to be many more men than women just about everywhere. This cannot be safe or healthy for anyone, at any level. Not all of us can work in the villages or at the grassroots level. Nor am I advocating that women in corporate jobs give up their perks or salaries and become activists. But all of us can think, write and vote. And we should.

In related news, something rather scary happened recently. I was returning from a friend’s place late at night when a man on a motorbike started driving alongside me, leering through my window and trying to get to me to stop. I was scared because I realised that if he stopped his bike in front of my car, I would be forced to stop as well. So we participated in some kind of bizarre road race with him trying to overtake me and me trying to stay ahead. When he turned into my lane after me, I was shaken. I stopped outside my gate and honked madly. The security guard came running out and the man whirled about and rode off. I wonder what he had in mind and why he bothered to follow me up to there at all. Perhaps, if I lived in an independent house or in a darker lane, he would have waylaid me once I got out of the car. I am grateful to Ganesh, who has a thick moustache and quick feet, for saving my day. The next day, I bought a pepper spray can. Now, I’m primed for the people who will say ‘but, think about how much worse it could be’ or ‘be thankful you have the money to buy pepper spray’ or ‘you have a car? you have forfeited your right to complain about anything ever again’ — because that’s exactly the sort of argument some do offer. Which is bs of the highest order. I have every right to go out and not get followed. And no I don’t have to be okay with it because women in Saudi Arabia are so much worse off. And no, I don’t have to wait until after I get raped to protest.

As India went to elections over the last few weeks, a small section of Indian women exercised their vote to protest against regressive gender stances. A recent spate of attacks on women by Hindu fundamentalist groups in Karnataka probably brought home the need to do so. The vigilante groups are widely believed to enjoy the support of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which explains why some women among India’s educated middle classes adopted an anti-BJP ballot philosophy. A first-time voter said, “Certain parties have more absurd ideas about what women should or shouldn’t be doing than others. The sort of thing that happened in Mangalore worries me and I kept it in mind while voting.”

Another expressed similar antipathy on her blog: “The one party I would absolutely not vote for is the BJP because I believe their Hindutva ideology is regressive to the point of slotting women in historically repressive domestic roles and they’ve taken the country back to the dark ages, with their heinous crimes and divisive rhetoric.”

Noted feminist author Ammu Joseph said: “I did choose to vote for a candidate I perceived as on the whole progressive and possibly ‘winnable’. I have long ruled out ever voting for a certain party (the BJP) because of the whole package that they represent in terms of ideology and attitudes towards women as well as other sections of society.

Meanwhile, some candidates of other parties addressed issues such as women’s freedom, mobility and safety this time. Even if this was just a way to strike at the opposition’s knees, it is a welcome sign that such issues found space in political discourse at all. In India, there is usually little on women’s issues in party campaigns and manifestoes. Most women vote without taking gender-related needs into consideration.

Among the poor and rural, other factors—caste and religious affiliations or more basic needs—trump gender. The urban and educated seem sceptical about the government’s ability to ensure safety or freedom, or resigned to the fact that they are a minority demographic. In a country where many lack basics like food, water and electricity, there is also a certain guilt associated with asking for anything more. But given our dismal tract record in terms of gender development, women’s problems need to be given more attention. And it’s time the country’s elite realised that they should take the lead in demanding this for all women.

At the other apex of the gender-and-politics conundrum, gender skew remained a cause for worry but there was some hope in the form of a candidate like dancer and activist Mallika Sarabhai. Sarabhai, who faced BJP head honcho LK Advani in Ahmedabad, was eagerly cheered by liberal intellectuals across the country. In the past, Sarabhai has used art to focus attention on gender bias and communal hatred. Her choice of logo—the harmonium in red and purple—is careful of what it reflects. Purple is the international colour of women’s rights and red, she explains, is the colour of human blood, regardless of faith, caste or wealth. Cast and communal politics typically play a huge role in determining who India’s largely poor, rural and immensely caste-conscious vote bank will choose. By putting women at the centre of her campaign, Sarabhai departed from the general trend.

There are other signs that women in India are preparing to play a larger role in politics, either as voters or as candidates. In some places like south Karnataka, there were more women voters than men. Then, politics has long been viewed as too dirty or corrupt for women to enter but now in small towns, many women are wetting their feet in local political bodies. In the coming years, they are likely to become a stronger force and enter national politics. All these are small arrows hurled in the right direction. It’s too early for unbridled optimism especially in the context of low voter turnouts but perhaps these ripples of change will become a whirlpool at some point. One lives in hope.