She Pens to Protest

                      

                                             

                                                        I write

                                                        Because  I cannot bite

                                                        It’s the way

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                      The weak ones fight

                              Mamta Kalia

 Celebrated works of literature by women  have been  those that were born out of  pain and frustration, not joy and contentment. Discussing the American poet  Emily Dickinson’s fascinating yet anguished art, John Cody in After Great Pain wonders if she would have discovered the creative potentiality in her without the incentive given by suffering and loneliness. “Would art have sprung,” he asks, “from fulfillment, gratification and completeness as abundantly as it did from longing, frustration and deprivation?”. Imagination dwells the most, not on the attained, but on the unattained. Unjust and inhuman situations provide congenial soil for the sprouting of great works of literature. The protesting pen has again and again proved to be mightier than the sword.

Protest is the focal point of  modern women’s writing that intensely concerns itself with the predicament of women trapped in patriarchal capitalist societies. Living in a society that valorized silence as a desirable feminine trait, women, for centuries, had been compelled to stifle their voices of protest and their desire for self-expression. Women writers across time and cultures have had to operate against the grain of greater or lesser male prejudice and hostility. Even the bold Kamala Das had confessed that she chose the pseudonym Madhavikutty when she wrote in her mother tongue because she did not want to embarrass her family. She says, “I knew I was a misfit within my family. I think I practised writing as people practise a secret vice. Like boys going to the bathroom to smoke.”

“It is amazing,” says Jasbir Jain,the Indian literary critic , “to learn how many women have turned to writing and found both sanity and self-expression through it.” But women’s writing tends to be  different from men’s writing, because  women, cast into secondary, unvalued roles as daughters, wives and mothers, have  experiences that are  different from men’s. Women’s writing is usually marked by a sense of anger,frustration,fear, shame, guilt, and alienation. Self-censorship is the greatest stumbling block that has to be tackled by a woman writer, for, strangely, readers tend to think that if a woman is deviational in her writing, she is deviational in real life too.

Bhadra S.