Textualization of Self in Pakistani Women's Vernacular Short

NUML Journal of Critical Inquiry Vol 15 (I), June, 2017 ISSN 2222-5706 Blue Roses for Women: Textualization of Self in Pakistani Women’s Vernacular Short Fiction Mirza Muhammad Zubair Baig Abstract The present research paper is based on the compiled volume of Pakistani women’s short fiction translated from the major vernaculars of country into English. These short stories noticeably encourage the women to be vocal about their issues and write their silences back erstwhile muffled in the traditional Pakistani society. These writings respond to Cixous’s call to write a woman, make her public through writing and narrativize her personal self that would enable her to reclaim her body back from patriarchy. These fictional writings trace back the tough journey of vulnerable Pakistani women since the historical moments of partition of India and creation of Pakistan. The women have put on a brave face to the difficult and hard times of dictatorial rules. The study reveals that the women have been beset historically, politically, socially, and locally with the communal biases, political conflicts, social constraints and local myths. Most of the stories are descriptive of women’s suffering though very few of them challenge the patriarchal structures and invite women to resist them. The close reading of the texts shows that the fictional selves and their textualization correlate with the real life women. The existing parochial social and cultural milieu in the present day Pakistan has worsened the life of an ordinary woman due to the absence of social justice. Even in the postcolonial times, women lack institutional support. The stories consistently build the argument that the Pakistani society is still rooted in the age-old social taboos, patriarchal customs, structured mores, paternal norms, and feminine archetypes which, collectively, are like poisonous blue roses for a woman. Keywords: gender, patriarchy, textualization, reclamation Introduction The current study is based on Women’s Writings (1994)1, a special issue of English biannual magazine Pakistani Literature that is published by the Pakistan Academy of Letters. The academy works for the promotion of Pakistani languages, literatures and women of letters. Women’s Writings is the compilation of Pakistani women writers’ short fiction originally written in the major Pakistani vernaculars and later translated into English language. The present research paper synthesizes the divergent experiences of women to weave the voices of different women together into a colorful tapestry. These female-authored narratives reflect on the structured silence of a traditional Pakistani woman. The “Foreword” 130 acknowledges that the selected writings foreground “feminine sensibility, depicting the intellectual and emotional landscape of Pakistani women writers” (p. 13). Later on, the editors express the limitation of the volume and relate that these voices are not “necessarily” feminist (p. 16). The feminist reading of these stories shows that the anthology primarily accommodates the various feminine voices. The writers try to raise female consciousness through writing. These fictional stories address the factual concerns and genuine problems of Pakistani women. Many real life incidents, events and stories in the society make these fictional characters come alive. The Pakistani woman is still putting up with the societal taboos, stereotypes and fixity. Yasmin Marri, one of the writers, explains that the mythical blue roses are deadly poisonous and are comparable to the societal traditions, customs, laws and norms which are equally venomous for women. Paradoxically, the journey of women characters is strewn with blue roses all their way instead of the traditional red roses associated with muliebrity. Theoretical Framework The present study is primarily informed by the French post- structuralist and feminist thinker Cixous’s (1976) theorizing of women’s writing. She enjoins a woman that she should “write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies—for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement” (p. 875). By textualizing their selves, the women have responded to Hanisch’s slogan, “personal is political” (as cited in Selden, Widdowson, & Brooker, 2005, p. 116). They have narrativized their personal lives and acknowledged the beauty of their “bodily functions” (p. 876). They voiced their concerns, and made themselves public in order to gain their political, biological and social rights. The reclamation of their bodies by Pakistani women writers is likely to encourage the other “unacknowledged sovereigns” to record their sufferings and discover a “new insurgent” within (p. 876). Though most of the women characters remain vulnerable to the social institutions, yet very few subversive characters make some of these writings as “female-sexed texts” that openly challenge and override the patriarchal assumptions in the attempt to confront the patriarchal violence (p. 877). Barring women from writing their own body experiences for themselves is the worst type of patriarchal violence since it furthers antinarcissist agenda of “antilove” that makes women hate what they have and cherish what they lack (p. 878). These women writers have braved the shame associated with the body through the textualization and 131 narrativization of the real self. They seem to have turned away for the Sirens who are actually men to look straight on to the beautiful and laughing woman Medusa in order to find new meaning and renew images (p. 885). Cixous suggests that the women can only break the institutional structures if they tend to their body and write through it in order to “break up the “truth” with laughter” as Medusa did (p. 888). Writing about her “womanly being” and sexuality erstwhile tabooed as “personal” by the patriarchal culture provides a woman with the access to her inborn strengths. These Pakistani writers have triumphed over the “torment of getting up to speak” by voicing and documenting their concerns, and interrupted to some extent the phallogocentric Pakistani culture (p. 880). They have recorded the gendered, social, political, historical, biological, physiological and economic aspects of a woman’s personal self in these writing. Though the characters could not subvert the vindictive patriarchal law completely yet they have raised consciousness among the readers on how important it is to write and reclaim their bodies, history and self. Writing a Woman in Pakistani Short Fiction The fourteen selected stories in this research paper have embodied diverse experiences of women from the third world postcolonial country Pakistan, and documented the estranged husband and wife relationship in “And he had an accident,” problematic early marriages and health issues in “Descent,” the stigmatized story of troupes and a whore in “Munni Bibi at the Fair,” the abduction of women during communal riots in “Farewell to the Bride” and “Banishment,” the economically impoverished women in “The Naked Hens,” the tumultuous married life of a political activist in “To be or not to be,” the saga of brave old woman in “Testimony,” the troubled marital life of a woman with impotent husband in “The Cow,” the harrowing story of a child rape in “The Magic Flower,” the story of an unwanted birth in the war-torn region in “The Valley of Doom,” the life of a mad woman on streets in “Dilshada,” the coerced marriages in “The Poison of the Blue Rose,” and the woman’s claim to her body in “The Spell and the Ever-Changing Moon.” To begin with, in the Urdu short story “And he had an accident,” the writer Hijab Imtiaz Ali tells the story of a man whose mother first hated Munnoo, a puppy, but later accepted it out of pity only when it was run over by a bicycle on the road. Likewise, the narrator’s wife Feroza tolerates his friend Ahmad who meets an accident when his craft is overturned at sea. The interesting point is how the writer compares and contrasts his mother with his wife “Who would tolerate a woman who did not resemble his mother in some ways? . although seemingly alike they were still dissimilar” (p. 24). His similarity stance, “like mother, like wife,” is based on 132 the empirical evidence that his mother accepted the dog and her wife a friend after they met an accident. Metaphorically, he has lost his wife and is feeling lonely and estranged. He is temporarily relegated to a condition related to widowhood what Emile Durkheim terms as “Acute domestic anomie” that is a type of crisis experienced by a widow or a widower after the death of his or her counterpart and results into offering “less resistance to suicide” by the surviving spouse (Thompson, 2002, p. 112). Platt and Salter (1987) have also worked on parasuicidal tendencies in this connection and found that parasuicide is an “attention-seeking behavior” (p. 207). Though the man in the story does not actually want to die yet his self- immolation may be interpreted as a behavior seeking his wife’s attention. He jumps over the building to seek his wife’s sympathy and end his loneliness. Mumtaz Shirin in her short story, “Descent,” narrates the story of an impoverished couple. The writer boldly depicts the pangs of stillbirth that a poor woman experiences. The woman in her labor forebears “more intermittent and more severe” pain shooting “through her spine, her hips, her belly.” The excruciating pain is accompanied with “cold shivers” and “perspiration” (p. 26). The twenty five years old wife’s body completely lost its “physical attraction” (p. 29). The writer shares how patriarchy indoctrinates a woman about a husband. A husband is an adorable “lord” worthy to be worshipped and a wife should devote her life to “his service.” Similarly, a wife is a “delicate being” given to his “care” through marriage bond.

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