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A
spirited Arab activist Making
waves
Price
the bride pays for prejudice |
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A spirited Arab
activist
M.L Raina introduces Algerian writer Assia Djebar, who finds her voice in integrating the rhythm of her Berber origin with the French influence of the colonisers.
Assia Djebar (born 1936), a native Algerian, writes in French and is an academic in America. A novelist of distinction, she is also a playwright, filmmaker and teacher of history. Her principal concern as a writer is to highlight the pathos of an Arab woman’s life in the hide-bound Islamic ritual and custom. There is a strange paradox here: She is a feminist opposed to the Islamic proscriptions against women, yet she does not reject Islam as a religion. Nor does she rail against the structures of feeling embedded in the community life of her native Berber society. Indeed, like many Third World writers, she finds sustenance in this life. This distinguishes her from some fire-eating western feminists and gives to her fiction a solidity lacking in much feminist fiction outside the Third World. Though Djebar started writing quite early in life, it was with the publication of the first volume of a projected quartet, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade in 1985 that she acquired a world-wide reputation as an experimental novelist .The second book of the group, Sister to Sheherzade as well as a 1995 autobiographical novel, So Vast A Prison consolidated her standing as a major feminist novelist from the Arab world, though, ironically, she has not so far been published in any Arab country. Part of the reason for this neglect could be her writing in French, but the main reason is her spirited activism on behalf of Arab women’s social emancipation. Taking head-on those ‘bumping against the walls of the past’ her first two novels, The Mischief and The Impatient touched upon what would be a blasphemous theme in the conservative Berber community of domineering men: The revolt of young women trapped in their harem-like homes. Predictably, both books were condemned in Algeria. Three elements stand out in Djebar’s fiction: linking of the struggle of Algerian women for recognition with the French conquest of Algeria in 1830 as well as the Algerian War of Independence of 1954-62, the use of the veil and of the legendary motif of Sheharzade from the Arabian Nights both as symbols of slavery and weapons of struggle and, most conspicuously, use of French rather than Arabic as the language of her writings. In Fantasia, the development of her protagonist’s psyche is woven into the fabric of the French conquest and the Independence War. The narrator begins as a young girl going to school with her father and concludes with the statement of her drift ‘away from him’, thus completing her education into the reality of women’s oppression. She hears the voices of nineteenth century women presented through actual diaries and accounts and sees her plight in their context. The personal and the political merge into a statement of defiance. In Sister to Sheherzade, Hajila throws off her veil to look men in the face and defy her husband’s injunctions. The Arabian Nights narrator changes from mere survivor into a protesting individual. So does the autobiographical protagonist of So Vast a Prison. One way of protesting is to secretly write love letters (in Fantasia and Prison) and smuggle them out of high-walled homes. As the narrator says in Prison, "I believed that writing meant getting away leaping out under this immense sky, into the dust of the road,.’ In short, freedom! And in Fantasia, the narrator speculates about Isma, "What if she has learnt to write? Her voice circulates." If we compare the young protagonists of Djebar’s novels with the venerable old illiterate Arab matriarchs whose gossip in the hammam is the staple of traditional conservative wisdom, we can understand the subversive role the act of writing plays in these works. Writing, then, is a challenge to the silence of the harem, to the small world of hierarchical arrangement even as it invokes tradition as a reservoir of stability. One needs to read Isma’s account of her upbringing in Sister to Sheherzade to make sense of this dual function of writing in Djebar’s work. In the 1970s, Djebar
temporarily gave up writing to learn classical Arabic, but chose finally
to write in French, the language of the coloniser. This ‘father
language’, as Djebar called French, helped her enter a wider
intellectual community and freely probe her world from behind a
linguistic veil. Even though she writes in French, she seeks to
incorporate the rhythms of her native Arabic into the new language and,
at the same time, experiment with various contemporary fictional modes.
This is her signal achievement. |
Glory to Gloria
A throw for her place in the sun Belonging to an agriculture family in Sabhra Village (District Amritsar), Harwant belongs to the family of world champs! Her grandfather, ex-Navy officer Dalip Singh, has prepared a cadre of young athletes from his own family, granddaughter Harwant making it to Athens Olympics, wrestler daughter Gurmeet Kaur who played in Sydney Olympics, grandson going international in 400m hurdles. Harwant believes it is Almighty who is making us do what we do. Besides that, it is her dadaji (grandfather) she gives credit to. But her family and her coach Parveen Rana say it is her discipline, hard work and simple living that has taken her all the way. She has been winning medals in Asiads, National games and Federation games ever since her childhood. Veil prevails
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One-woman army Born and educated in Patiala, Amarjit started working in the Punjab and Sind Bank, Chandigarh. A chance visit to the PGI made her aware of the sufferings of the people. Since then, she has devoted her life to the suffering masses. She won’t hesitate to take leave from the bank to help some needy person. She recalls that as a child she liked sharing wheat and rice with the poor in her native village. Fired by her zeal, she sought voluntary retirement from the bank in 2001 to devote herself whole-heartedly to social service. On May 16, 2000, she entered the male bastion by cremating the body of Shiv Kumar hailing from Bhagalpur in Bihar as none of the relatives of the deceased came forward to cremate the body. Since then, she has cremated 58 unclaimed bodies. Besides, Amarjit has adopted the PG ward in the PGI Paediatrics Department where she provides free treatment for children suffering from the Wilson disease. She has also donated various equipments to this unit of the hospital. She is also associated with the Institute of the Blind, old age homes and orphanages. She has also been organising various workshops of the Red Cross all over the state. Equally worth mentioning is her role in disaster management, especially during the Khanna rail tragedy and Gujarat earthquake. The Punjab State Red Cross had honoured her for raising maximum funds in 2000. In 2002 again, she was given the State award by the then Governor J.F.R. Jacob for taking health to the rural community. The Sri Guru Granth Sahib Seva Society, Sector 34, Chandigarh, has presented an ambulance. |
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Price the bride pays for prejudice Jyoti T. Sharma on how the dice is loaded against the bride in an Indian family from the word go
Sangeeta Bhargava, an officer in a nationalised bank, says that after 12 years of marriage, she still gets to eat the left-overs where as her husband eats only food that is fresh. Manjeet Bawa, 44, a lecturer, recalls the first day when she entered her husband’s home armed with an MA in literature, a job and a heavy dowry. First, she was told how ungraceful she was, and if she wore something without the prior approval of her mother-in-law, she was immediately told how ugly she looked. Aarti Malhotra, a school teacher, had the demeaning experience of being "reported" at home. She faced a reversed polarity at every act—she did not do sewa, dared to protest when they spoke ill of her mother, rearranged the home etc., etc. It needs greater courage to be able to live through a bad marriage to a drunken, unemployed and/or wife-beating husband, and still adjust. Such attitudes that are simply taken for granted. As soon as a woman takes on the role of a daughter-in-law, she is taken for granted and even basic politeness from a majority of family members is deferred. Adjustments begin and are demanded from day one. The ‘real woman’ is expected to be healthy, educated, self-reliant, yet submissive. Expected to be perennially cheerful and dynamic under all circumstances, in a trice, she is expected to forget her upbringing and cherished ideals. Also, she has to tailor her likes and dislikes to those of her man’s family. This obedience is expected by everyone, whether the upper crust or the weaker sections of the society. Women are socialised to be grateful for small acts of kindness which men do for them, which, in another society, would be rights due from one civilised adult to another. If men were as sensitive to the delicate situation of the entrant into the family, there would be less conflict, and for the woman, indignity. It is the family that has become the site of violence for the woman—whether it is dowry cruelty or mental torture. For the family offers protection to the lonely woman, the vagrant who will dissolve the structure of society. The family ‘protects’ the woman from all dangers, and for the woman it is a constant trade-off between these real and, at times, imagined dangers, and her personal sense of worth. The female image of herself is constantly battened down and the woman is unable to reconcile the two matrices—one given to her by her logical and human mind formalized by the societal mores that demand her to be a vessel, a carrier and a bit of a martyr, constantly relinquishing all she has aspired for. Only wondering at the patent unfairness of it. Because any adult woman who wants to show herself as a subject, as a doer of an action, not one who is effected upon, is ‘spoilt’, ‘fast’, or simply recalcitrant. For some strange reason, in many families it is still the female of the species who is seen as the person most in need of benediction. She is expected to touch everyone’s feet, while the male is absolved of this responsibility. This ‘female-only gesture,’ on a rational level, amounts to nothing more than reminding a woman of her place, in a codified ritual unto the family. Where then, does that leave education, financial independence and awareness? The woman bears the archetypal female role of home-maker as well as the hunter-male role of bread-winning, but she does not have the rights of the bread-winner. The multiple roles constantly impinge, and despite being able to articulate certain needs, she is still powerless to control events in her own life. She can only devise responses which seem contradictory. As one traditionalist put it—she sees herself as enlightened with education, and so she can adapt better to her husband’s home and his likes and dislikes. It hurts her when her mother-in-law fetches water pointedly for the son, even though both have come back from equally tiring job—it is blasphemy, of course, to serve water to the daughter-in-law. But this young professional will also teach her daughter to expect the same treatment from her mother-in-law because "These things don’t change". Despite her education and her financial independence. This woman does not have the self-worth or self-knowledge that she is important enough. She retreats deeper into the family because the family demands and threatens like no one else can. The woman is reconstituted each time by someone else. Imagine the depth of identity loss that is expected by the family when during the marriage ceremony, her is changed. Even the so-called emancipated woman is thus not a freely choosing subject as we and he and she believe it to be. By the very fact of relinquishing home ground, wherein it is the woman who is the ‘intruder’ in a home the woman is expected to give in. |
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It is indeed a feather in the cap of Punjab of Amritsar-based Harwant Kaur qualifying for the Athens Olympics in discus-throw (senior). Harwant made it recently while she was in Ukraine for a training camp. One of three girls from India who have been selected, she is currently taking practice sessions at Excellency Camp, Patiala, where a Russian coach has specially been arranged for her.
Amarjit
Heard