Writing as a Woman

Most feminists seem ambivalent and reluctant to take a position either in favour or against writing as a woman or having their work classified as writing by women. On the one hand, it can be fairly argued that writing from the conscious subject position of a woman might lend the writer a vision that is unique and sensitive, so a vision marked by gender or some other particularity like race or class for instance, need not always necessarily be undesirable.

On the other hand, writing from a sex-unconscious position, the way men might write would have different implications. Beauvoir is sure that men do not experience this dilemma of writing as a man the way women face the dilemma of writing as a woman. Men also do not have to deny their gender. A denial of gender generally results from a provocation or a response to some kind of accusation to something almost like: ‘Oh you are saying so or you have this worldview because you are a woman’. And this statement is made not in an appreciatory, adulatory kind of way but it is meant derogatorily or reductively, is the position Toril Moi takes when reflecting on Beauvoir’s engagement with the dilemma.

How can one ascertain for a fact that a woman is writing from a gender-unconscious or a sex-unconscious position? Writing from the margins is a politically viable act as the margin is a strategic place to position oneself and articulate from.

One writer that comes to my mind who is capable of writing and perhaps has written both, as a woman and from a gender-unconscious position is Arundhati Roy. When I read her novel The God of Small Things, I could sense the autobiographical element coursing strong through it. Roy in fact, confesses to having written her body when she says that if she is asked to change something about the novel she would not be able to do so since it would be like asking her to change her gall bladder, thus implying that she has actually written her body. She went on to also say that since she had written all that she had to say she couldn’t possibly write another piece of fiction which is perhaps why it took her nearly two decades to come out with another novel, which in every way is very different from her first novel.

In the meanwhile (and I shouldn’t and will not call it an interim period because that will imply that I am positioning the rest of her work, her prose pieces and her essays as ‘in-between’ writings between two magnum opuses or masterpieces), Roy went on to write essays that affirmed and asserted her politics. Not to say that one could not have had an idea of her politics from her first novel but the pieces that followed, positioned her as an activist whose concerns were not confined to those of her gender or sex. Her subjects were the generally objectified and mostly invisibilised, the forcefully muted and the naturally voiceless, the tribals, the Dalits and she went on to talk about, what in her idiom could be described as the ‘untouchable’, the ‘unseeable’ and the ‘unknowable’.

Her latest work The Doctor and The Saint which is a foreword to Dr. B R Ambedkar’s The Annihilation of Caste is activism on paper. She launches a scathing attack on Gandhi but what is more astonishing is that she even goes on to deconstruct Ambedkar at times, though cutting him a lot of slack and attributing his, occasional myopic worldview and misconceived anticipations and prejudices to external realities and circumstances like the politics of the time or the social context of the struggles and movements or his own cultural conditioning and so on and so forth. One can obviously wonder then that why does she not show the same generosity of spirit to Gandhi. But that is a debate we can save for another time.

What is in fact the subject position from which Roy is writing? The conversational, almost chatty tone of the essay gives it a semblance of a personal narrative. The objectivity which at times is compromised with the scale tilting towards Ambedkar adds to the subjective element of the narrative. Nonetheless, though we can say that Roy inserts her subjectivity in the narrative, can we say that it is a gendered subjectivity? What about the essay gives away the fact that it has been written by a woman? Yes, there certainly are passages where she criticises certain practices of Gandhi calling them sexist and chauvinistic but that could be done by a male writer too who empathises with the feminist cause. Does Roy situate herself within or outside the narrative of the essay at any point as a woman? Is it her female subjectivity that determines the trajectory of the essay or the arguments it posits? Or can the supposed gender-unconscious tone of the essay be attributed to the genre which demands expression in a certain idiom and register unlike the sensitive and intimate language of fiction? And to extend the argument further, does her second work of fiction read like it is narrated from the point of view of a woman? Is there a deliberate obliteration of a gendered consciousness or a transcending of that consciousness or is it a transformed consciousness?

The debate is not so much as identifying the presence or absence of a gendered authorship in a text as it is in understanding the implications and nuances of a gender-conscious narrative and whether a text ought to be analysed and read, bearing in mind the gender of the author. In all of Roy’s works, there is an unmistakeable foregrounding of the marginalised which, can we say or infer, could be a result of her lived experience as a woman and thus in many ways, her life as a marginalised being? Is it possible that because she embodies her gender and therefore naturally the subordinate situatedness of it in the binary, she is able to ‘see’ the ‘other’ better? And if that were the case, then can we really say with certainty and conviction that men’s writing is not gender-conscious? It may not be gender-conscious in the sense a woman’s work is normally understood or received or even anticipated - as a parable of her woes or her oppression but does men’s writing not have the universalising consciousness of the masculine gender which reflects features like absolute instead of ambivalent arguments or stable and pronounced instead of shifting empathies, or a distantiated instead of intimate engagement with the subjectivities in the text? Of course these are conjectures which can evolve into trajectories of study. And just like it is not viable to homogenise men or women as monolithic groups, so also it is not viable to homogenise their writings by trying to pin or map some essential features on them. Nonetheless, despite all the differences within men and women, the categories do exist and so it is only logical that one way of reading their writings are done in the light of their lived experiences as men and women.

Doing away with the author is perhaps a privilege and a luxury which the white world can afford. As for the rest of us, especially women at that, finding a voice and asserting it through the narrative space of a text is a political act as much as tracing a distinctive authorial agency in the works we engage with, without undermining or overlooking the dynamic discursive field they offer for deliberation.