“Opening a Window and Cracking an Egg”, Contemporary Women Literature: Questions of self, sexuality and cultural identity

The opening lines of Manju Kapur’s novel “Difficult Daughters” (1998), reads like this:

“The one thing I had wanted was not to be like my mother. Now she was gone and I stared at the fire that rose from her shriveled body, dry-eyed, leaden, half-dead myself, while my relatives clustered around the pyre and wept.”

It is the first line that hits you in the face. No daughter wants to be like her mother, she thinks she is different, will be different. The unhappiness of the mother is visited upon the daughter early in life. It shows in the mother’s eyes, in her watery smile.

The contemporary writer still continues her search for identity, her definition and place in a patriarchally skewed society. The woman’s protest, so evident in my writing before and even now, is because the woman is still trying to make a statement of self.

A WOMAN’S CRY

I am sometimes bowed down
by my long hair,
and my bosom.
My tits and tresses torment me.
Maybe if I
Cut them off
I could stand up straight
And tell the world:
Look at me
I am a human being
Just like you.
Not
Just a woman.

-Abha Iyengar, 2001, (It’s About Time Writers Reading Series)

The search of self to the search of a cultural identity, and the self within that identity is indeed a difficult one. In trying to define ourselves in a particular cultural milieu, we find that we have to keep breaking the boundaries.

It is not that we have not made progress. Last winter, in my interactions with a British artist, Clarissa Upchurch, conversation over coffee did turn to women and their sexuality. She talked of past times where women had to fight their sexuality to achieve equality with the likes of men. Today women flaunt their sexuality and wear it on their shoulder like a badge of their liberation, she said. They are comfortable in their skins and are proud to be women.

And yet, there is so much more than this that needs to be dealt with.

The larger issues confronting us of multi-culturism, migration, globalization, war and peace, commercialization of self, importance of girl child, right to education, right to meaningful work, human rights, etc., all come under the purview of women literature today. But the writing is a comment on these issues through the microcosm of the domestic or the family, and how political issues create upheavals in the personal lives of those affected.

Kiran Desai in her book, “The Inheritance of Loss”, which won her the Man Booker Prize for 2006, writes on colonialism, national identity, immigration, cultural displacement, religion and race conflict. All this is entwined in a love story between and Indian girl and her Nepali tutor, along with the reminiscences of an old man, her grandfather.

Sai, the Indian girl, is appalled at where Gyan, her young Nepali tutor lives, when she goes there unexpectedly to make up with him. Class conflict becomes poignantly evident here:

“The house didn’t match Gyan’s talk, his English, his looks, his clothes, or his schooling. It didn’t match his future. Every single thing his family had was going into him and it took ten of them to live like this to produce a boy, combed, educated, their best bet in the big world.”