A feminist perspective

Granta: The F word
Edited by John Freeman
Penguin
2011, pp 272
Rs. 699

While seeming to have a Western bias, the selected pieces do reflect the universality of feminine experiences and perceptions.

One of the interesting aspects of this collection is that it is a potpourri of personal narratives, short stories, poems and even a photo essay. It may be hard to name them all and their authors, but several of them do need to be dwelt upon in some detail.

“The Aftermath” by Rachael Cusk deals with the dissolution of marriage. The author’s use of imagery is worthy of as much praise as her analysis of her situation and her confusions. When wanting custody of her children, she writes, “I would not invoke the primitivism of the mother, her innate superiority, that voodoo in the face of which the mechanism of equal rights breaks down.” The essay effectively brings out the dilemmas and peeves of a feminist, like when she objects to her husband’s saying he “helped” her.

“And my husband helped. It was his phrase, and still is: he helped me to be it, to have it. But I didn’t want help: I wanted equality.”  

There are interesting reflections in A S Byatt’s “No Grls Alod, Insept Mom” (sic) too. Byatt gets her first taste of gender bias when, as a clever 15-year-old, she is taken by her Barrister father to meet his lawyer friend. When the latter asks her what she wants to be when she grows up, her reply is, “An Ambassador.”  “You mean, an Ambassador’s wife,” is the correction from the lawyer. To compound Byatt’s sense of shock is the elaboration, “Women can’t be Ambassadors, I’m afraid.” The biases continue through college and her academic career, though the short narrative does end on a happy note.  

Julie Otsuka’s “The Children” is an extract from a forthcoming novel. It tells the tale of immigrants and their problems of adjustment, including the anxieties for their children when they are small and grown-up. Gender issues are also touched upon here, but most poignant is how children change and assimilate the new culture whilst becoming ashamed of their parents. “They longed for real fathers with briefcases… They wanted different and better mothers… They never invited friends over to our crowded homes… and with each passing day they seemed to slip further and further from our grasp.”

“A Train in Winter”, by Caroline Moorehead, brings out the horrors of German concentration camps after a crackdown on the French Resistance Movement in the spring of 1942. The women live in the most debasing of environments in the camps. Yet, the story is about the triumph of the human spirit as the women band together to plot and plan to express solidarity and stay alive.

While Lydia Davis uses satire to convey a message in “The Dreadful Mucamas”,  Laura Bell’s, “A Kept Woman”, is a sensitive portrayal of a woman who gives up her job to live in the mountains with her husband and pursue her writing dreams. Even though she has her lows, the story ends in a positive acknowledgement of her choice — “I am sure, now, of my substance in a way that I never was at twenty or thirty or forty.  Except in my lowest moments, I no longer measure my worth by the dollars I produce.”

“The Sex Lives of African Girls” by Taiye Selasi is the story that really shakes one up. It is written from the point of view of an 11-year-old girl who comes to live in her uncle’s house and watches life around her unfold. The story touches on the sexual dynamics between people living in the house and is gripping in the way it is handled.

Francine Prose does a wonderful job of presenting her story in “Other Women”. She writes of a time when feminism was big news and how she and the other women gathered together to discuss the subject. Some passages are brilliant like, “If I’d imagined that the group would collectively generate a higher consciousness about ourselves in relation to other women and men, I soon realised we’d recreated in microcosm the Darwinian power relationships of the boardroom, the cabinet meeting, the office, the nursery school.”

“Mona’s Story” by Urvashi Butalia speaks of the unlikely friendship that develops between the author and a transgender called Mona and the tragedies that befall her. The most interesting aspect of the story is the friendship and the questions that the two ask her each other like, “What did it mean to be a feminist?”  “What was it that so attracted her about femaleness? Had she really wanted to be a woman so badly that she was willing to give up everything...?”

Granta has done a good job with the compilation. The anthology is a must read for the average woman who will willy-nilly be forced to hold up her life against the reflections of the women writing here.