Beyond the tyranny of ‘performed’ gender

In her book Politics of the Female Body (2006), Ketu Katrak writes about the typically patriarchal claim that women are the “guardians of tradition”. Katrak says claims like these are aimed at controlling female sexuality and fertility. There’s a perception that Northeast India is more gender-sensitive than the rest of the country. While one may easily debate this, there certainly are poets and writers from the North-East who challenge stereotypes by writing about the female body — its wants and wantonness, its contextualisation as well as abstract valence, its position vis-à-vis the dominant gender, and its graceful and seamless transition to the un-gendered space.

Naga poet Monalisa Changkija’s long years in journalism and activism manifest in her direct, no-nonsense lines. She is the sole editor, publisher and proprietor of the newspaper Nagaland Page. There were violent protests in Nagaland recently against reservation of seats for women in the legislative assembly — even after the Supreme Court directed the State government to implement the decision. In the coverage of this and other urgent issues, Changkija’s voice has been unflinching. During a recent interview at Indian Cultural Forum, she said: “In Naga society, women are always expected to play the subservient role and inevitably women do so. The patriarchal ethos are dominant and embedded in women’s psyches. It is sad that ‘keeping the peace’ within the home and the tribe becomes more important and imperative than gender justice.”

Aphorism-like, her poems strike at the root of gender-based strictures. In ‘Rose That Was’, the withered rose is a marker of passing time. Gender binaries through the ages have obfuscated the need for a non-gendered space.

“the Rose that was / in my ceramic vase, / read it not as a statement / of my housekeeping (in)ability”

‘House’ and ‘keeper’ are both integral to the traditional system that society propagates. Changkija’s use of parentheses for ‘in’ shows the strange exclusion — rarely questioned in society — where women are housekeepers. She addresses patriarchy directly thereafter, delineating the fact that the object ‘rose’, signifying passion, love and femininity, and an invented tradition of the feminine symbol, perpetuates binaries.

In ‘Take This Name’, Changkija questions the norm of a woman taking her husband’s name after marriage.

“Take this name, / Take it. / It’s the only part of me unused, / Except on pieces of paper”

More than anything else,these lines investigate ‘give’ and ‘take’ here, the social contract of marriage under scrutiny. One realises that this “possession” stood for several elements. The patriarchal possession of the female body, marriage documents, legal signatures, changing the ‘maiden name’ — the normative possession of cultures, rituals, practices and preaching aimed at keeping the male-female binary functioning.

“Like all women, / With nothing left to give, / That’s the only possession / That can be returned.”

In the Ao Naga custom, a married woman is supposed to return her name to her family and clan; the lines above refer to this practice.

Anupama Basumatary’s ‘Snails’ is quite unusual in its presentation of the female body and its juxtaposition with nature. She takes the memory of a particular Bodo tribal practice to state what a mollusc within the shell-body might have gone through, being sucked out and destroyed in an erotic frenzy, almost. Every act of eating by hunting or catching is also an act of the body sensual, claiming the un-gendered space and through a time-tested Bodo tradition.

“It was fun removing the shells / and watching their recoiling tongues / before I boiled them. (...) Now I crawl around the sea-shores / clamber about on land and water / to look for the roots of that strange note / as the marauding waves / draw me back and fling me away. / Strangely, an unseen hand picks me up”

(From ‘Snails’, translated from the Assamese by Pradip Acharya)

In a Literophile article, Rini Barman points out: “It is worth noting that the words used in this poem to describe the mobility of the poet-turned-snail are neither stereotypically masculine nor feminine (‘crawl’, ‘clamber’) before an ‘unseen hand’ picks her to suck her inner sap (...) The anatomy of the unseen hand is further symbolic of the subterranean social force that prohibits gender trespassing as the shell of the poet’s body ‘cracks’ in the end.”

Nitoo Das’s poem ‘How to cut a fish” revels in the ‘dissection’ of the body by way of pleasure — the body being that of a fish in the context.

“you have to sit / properly / woman-like on the floor”

The kinesis one experiences through the neologism “leftrightleftright” is also a space of transformation and, therefore, discovery.

“hold the fish with firm hands / head and tail and swing / him quick leftrightleftright”

Das’s fish is male while it’s the housewife or the female cook who undertakes the fish cutting chore:

“feel the resistance of white flesh staring eye / and open mouth but keep at it let him feel the pressure / of your fingers until it is done and the head / sits isolated with a hole / dripping with stuff and then halve / him down his body and pull out the red mess

The ‘red mess’ — blood, gore, innards — is an element of life and death, of ritual and rejection, and of people’s narrow perception of gender. “make equal pieces cutting him so that / the bones do not disturb / afterwards” (From Boki )

Dawngi Chawngthu’s Mizo poem ‘Vannei Zo lanu’ (translated by her as ‘Lucky Zo lanu’) again visits the politics of gender in female attire and normative behaviour. The narrator of the poem resists society’s move to induct the patriarchal tradition-bearing child, employing sarcasm in these staccato lines:

“We shower her with advice / Our Zo lanu / At home / And in society / Over Radio / And television / Why even on weeklies / On how a good girl should behave / on what to wear / and how to talk / on how to cook / and manage home / on how to raise children / and be a model daughter in law!”

One must note that ‘Zo’ here also refers to the Mizo identity. The marker of tradition or ‘nationalism’ is manifest in the proper name, the name of the proud ethnic tribe that is Mizo. Coupled with ‘lanu’ or ‘girl’ it is a symbol that is heavy with Hobsbawm’s “invented tradition”. Zoram or Mizoram, apparently, will suffer if male supremacy is not guaranteed, and/or female empowerment is not kept within check.

Poet Nabanita Kanungo, who has lived in both Meghalaya and Assam, is the author of ‘The Mushroom-Picker’. This poem speaks of the woman as nourisher as well as someone who has to toil for her own nourishment:

“In the remaining certainty / between a suburb and a dying forest, / the knobs of her fingers will open the ancient door / to a livelihood.”

The “knobs of her fingers” touch the mushroom she picks and swap their form with vegetation. The natural world, through her touch, becomes a conduit of love where gender is fluid or even non-identitarian in a body-cognitive framework. A core feature of Kanungo’s poetry here is that she treats gender as not simply a female-male binary and certainly not limited to biological form. The imagery in this particular portion is lush and indicative of this point.

“today, again she will look for frog’s umbrellas / that rain has flung open / in a woodland washed soft, / in the mossy heart of her despair / and grace. /She will tie the air into knots / to sift the unwieldy growth; / and the motley of greens / will keep her from going home / or the market too soon.”

The folklore and oral literature of Assam has also emphasised this fluidity between life forms, bringing alive the murdered young girl Tejimola as a creeper. Uddipana Goswami’s poem ‘Tejimola Forever’ draws from the popular tale of a young girl killed by her stepmother.

“I am a survivor, I am. / Didn’t that stepmother of mine / Try a thousand and one ways to kill me? / And didn’t I survive still?”

The poem reaffirms the feminist critique of everything passed off as tradition. Tejimola, the young girl who lives many lives and dies many deaths, is an indomitable female spirit. From her human form, she reappears as a creeper, a sapling, a flower, and thereby breaks away from gender binaries. She adapts land as well as water for her rebirths.

“What a pathetic creature I was! / Crying and cringing, letting her grind me in the mortar / And throw me away in the backyard. / Only I grew back as a creeper. / She cut me and threw me in a ditch / I started blooming. / She tried to drown me / I became a lotus.”

Meghalaya poet Gertrude Lamare’s ‘Who We Are’ grabs this problem by the horns. The female voice in her poem brings about the complex connections between social and political concepts and the violence that they lead to.

“I thought I was human / Until you arrived and called me Girl / Wrapping me tenderly with ideas and violence. / And told me I was more, I was Tribe. / I thought we were all human / But you cartographed our bodies / Into “zones of exception” and called them States.”

Touch is realised in ‘tenderly’, ‘cartographed’ and the fusion of ‘I, we and you...’, where the subject of the poem is graced with imposed nomenclature and a so-called agency. The powerful hand that draws the dividing lines, governs the female body, designates the label of ‘Tribe’ on to a people, or creates arbitrary ‘zones of exception’ is the one reflected in Anne McClintock’s postulation that “male political power is heavily dependent on a naturalised, and none too ‘accidental’, ideology of gender difference.”

Given the generalised myth that the North-East is zero-tolerant about gender oppressions, this writing serves to become a guide to understanding the region, bundled under the extra-nationalistic tag of ‘North-East’. The only way such nationalism can be contested is by examining gender equations. And here, McClintock rings true: “Nationalism is constituted from the very beginning as a gendered discourse, and cannot be understood without a theory of gender power.”

An excerpt from Mamang Dai’s poem ‘Floating Island’ is an appropriate summary of all that we’ve discussed.

“Deep in my centre a woman is asleep / pressing her cheek on my pillow / vivid with dreams. / The birds of summer are nesting in her breast. / Who knows which way the spinning current will spin. / Farewell, blind mountain, pasted on the sky, / when the day is folded away / my heart clings to the life of water. / Into the deep, into the sea green / navigating on a heartbeat, / the lilies are shooting up like swordfish / and the woman is laughing, laughing.”

Nabina Dasis a Hyderabad-based poet who teaches creative writing

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