Women Written by Women

They’re a bit mad, aren’t they? These women that are conjured up by women. They’re defiant even if  they’re locked up in an attic, when they decide to leave the man who locked the invisible woman in the attic.

Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia is a passable collection of stories. The writing seems like a pretence, almost like the author is performing a role she is expected to perform. What it does have is a strong cast of women. These women are defiant, defiant to the state, defiant for the state, defiant to society, defiant with their art. And this got me thinking, what is it about women written by women?

It would be a travesty to neglect Virginia Woolf when talking about women that create women. While Orlando is wonderfully weird and Mrs. Dalloway is canonical in the Modernist movement it is another work that has a special place in my heart. Like the protagonist, Mrs. Dalloway, the writing meanders between observation, memory, emotion and the present. This meandering is also present in A Room of One’s Own. Tracing the history of invisibility of women in literature and academia, she stresses on the need for women to have their own space that is theirs physically, economically and creatively. A space that is their own is not shared by defined roles, defined expectations but is a space that allows the woman to create, experiment and grow along with her. It was Woolf that made me realise that this space that I took for granted was a right that was fought for. I could see it amongst the women I was studying with, who had to balance the different demands that their spaces put on them. It would then make sense that Woolf would then make her own space with her own writing and create women who inhabited spaces in their own minds. Women who thought, women who wrote, women who saw, women who felt.

Another woman who writes thoughtful, strong women that hold their own is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Her  women are strong, succinct and capable of breaking your heart. Ijeawele in Americanah is reminded of her race in a new country and so she navigates this strange reality where she lives with another’s history, where another’s identity is thrust upon her, shaping her identity against her will. She writes about this grapple. She lives the grapple and then she writes about it but never lets that grapple define her. She constructs and sustains her own space through her writing - economically too as she sets up her own magazine. Her voice becomes her space.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s women are not vocal or verbal with their talents. They are the quiet ones, their genteel strength being a constant feature of Lahiri’s writing. She reminds us to look at the women in our lives and the resilience they show in their lives. Lahiri’s writing is the quiet, safe space one needs; a comfort one goes back to. Ashima leaves her home with a stranger in The Namesake to go to an alien country, becomes a wife and then a mother and then a widow. All these spaces she inhabits with a character that is so quietly and carefully defined that her son, The Namesake, are a part of her journey.

I am looking forward to my adventure with these women. Till then, I will keep these words by Lal Ded ( a 14th century female Kashmiri Mystic) at hand:

Resilience: to stand in the path of lightning

Resilience: to walk when darkness falls at noon

Resilience: to grind yourself fine in the turning mill

Resilience will come to you.

Because with madness, comes resilience.