Many lands, many hungers of the body & the spirit

The progressive pain and occasional smile in these writings by women from all over Asia is clear enough for the anxious reader. “Why writings? Why Asian? And then, why women?” were the questions that Sukrita Paul Kumar and Malashri Lal flung at themselves to begin the adventure. Ah, availability. For instance, in India it is easier to get western publications than something from Vietnam, Japan or Iraq. But nothing really daunts the committed Asian woman.
So Sukrita and Malashri faced the problem of choosing translations from several languages. The result? According to Sukrita and Malashri, there is enough on hand to give a clear perception that “physical proximity, many historical and cultural movements and socio-political contexts have contributed in creating a similar philosophical strain and temper in the peoples of various countries of Asia.”
Indeed it is so. When I watched Rie humouring Ichige Masutoshi in the railway station, I knew they are very, very familiar to me. Such a life-long marital enslavement stoically borne has not been outside the experience of Indian marriages. Japan’s Rie is no different from Pakistan’s Hajera. Mad young men, if they are rich, can buy a nurse in the guise of a bride!
As Guddu’s mother says pompously to Hajera’s mother: “If we were greedy, we could’ve got a girl from a rich family long ago. But it is our belief that among the daughters of poor families one can find self-respect, love and honesty.” How gracious of her!
There are the political tragedies that have clobbered great nations like Vietnam, Bangladesh and Tibet. What were the social fallouts, especially for women? The abhorrent ways of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia are swiftly, sharply crystallised by Putsata Reang. Zong Pu records the Cultural Revolution that splintered a million dreams in China.
The heartbreak of women who are condemned to work as labourers, mothers who must need sell their flesh to feed their hungry children, the shame-word of the twentieth century, ‘exile’... It all seems to be the same everywhere. The pity of it all!
What is most striking about these Asian writers is their vivid style. Sumatra’s Ratna Sarumpaet comes up with a crushing subject: the murder of a girl activist standing up for worker’s rights. The hurt to the body and the psyche of underprivileged girls is ejected as spurts of helplessness when Marsinah’s ghost rises in the graveyard, “cruelly isolated, smothered by anger and hatred, suffocating in a shroud of fear, helpless to defend myself.”
For the likes of her, even death brings no peace as living persons squabble over the nature of her death, the marketability of such a death for activists and the carrion-eyes of the creative writer. It is a tremendous internalised passage drawn from Ratna’s drama, Marsinah Accuses. Ratna is herself no arm-chair activist.  
So many lands; so many women writers; so many hungers of the body and the spirit. Whether it is Taslima Nasreen or Benju Sharma, Hanan Mikha’il Ashrawi or Pratibha Ray, the reader feels always at home. Most of the anthology is short fiction with just a sprinkle of poetry. Many titles (Zarrinkolah, What the Scar revealed, Giribala, A Letter) leave inexorable echoes. It is also good to know of spaces outside one’s own socio-geographical experience where plucky women do affirm their individuality.
Life in a tiny bar in the mega Japanese shopping paradise, the Ginza; a leper colony in Macau; a Muslim girl’s dread in a Christian School in Malaysia; buying bus tickets in China.
Never a disappointing page in Speaking for Myself, for one can even come across the names of Kunty or Sita in an unlikely place. Three cheers for the two editors!