Writing
the Body: A Feminist Reading of the Poems of Rajathi Salma and Kutti Revathy
Smithalekshmi S.
Smithalekshmi S. is currently pursuing her doctoral
research at the School of Letters, Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala. Her areas
of interest are studies in feminism and postcolonialism. She has authored a
book on Muhammed Ali in her mother tongue Malayalam.
Abstract
The women poets of the contemporary
period have equipped their poetry with the power to react against the
domineering authority. Barbara Harlow, the well known scholar of Third World
literature, puts it rightly in her seminal book Resistance Literature ; “poetry…is itself an arena of struggle” (Harlow
33). Resistance literature encapsulates all such writings which aimed to
challenge the regime of power structures. For manifesting resistance through
their writings, they have employed various techniques like deconstructing
mythical hero/heroine/ villain, rejecting the tools of patriarchy like religion
and language and thus projecting the concealed. The female body created by the
patriarchal mindset in writings was circumvented when women writers described
their body with their first-hand knowledge. Women poets like Kamala Das have
brought in body politics in their writings. For them poetry is a protest
against the silence into which the female body has been trapped in, or more
precisely, it is an act of giving representation to a misrepresented entity. These
kinds of writings are characterized by highly metaphorical often unpunctuated
flow in writing which represents female body processes in an emotional rhythm.
They are not superseding biology but they prove how to give new meaning and
values to the body. Tamil women poets and activists like Rajathi Salma and
Kutti Revathy, representatives of new generation poets in Tamil Nadu, met with
the charges of obscenity and immodesty when they depicted the female body in
their poems. This study has taken some selected poems of these two women poets
which were originally written in Tamil and were translated to English by the
famous translator Lakshmi Holmstrom. The present paper tries to analyze the way
in which women write women’s bodies in the context of their traumatic
experiences. The presence of the female body in itself, outside its designated
space within the household, is an affront to caste patriarchy. The woman should
question the domineering patriarchal society that scrutinizes the dress that is
worn by her, the time at which she walks alone or the person whom she
accompanies. Being an integral part in both racial and sexual oppression, body
is directly involved in a political field. Like Foucault’s articulation on body
as a ‘site of power’, the study tries to place body as a space where various
conflicting discourses converge to form a site of differences.
Keywords:
body of woman, obscenity, privacy, resistance, moral policing, traumatic
experiences, body politics.
Woman was traditionally assigned
two major roles in society – one is of mother and the other is of wife. Of the
two roles to perform, the role of wife is more significant because of her
services to her husband. In Indian mythological texts, wife addresses her
husband as ‘lord’ to indicate the status of woman as subservient to man. The
female body has to achieve and sustain certain qualities to become a dutiful
wife. Virginity is one among such standards framed by the male dominated
society. Virginity is considered as a touchstone to purity in India. It is a
widely accepted belief that a girl should protect and give more priority to her
virginity than her life. There is a common notion existing in India that a
virgin girl, alias the ‘pure’ girl, is considered as a token of gift to her
husband and he can do whatever he wishes to do with her body. Society terms it
as the birthright of the husband and nobody questions it as it is deemed to be
‘natural’. Thus, a wife’s body becomes the personal property of her husband but
the husband’s body is retained as his own territory, as the analysis of the
literary representations to follow make clear.
Additionally, in the context of
this paper, we shall find that this is not mandatory in every marital
relationship or in cohabitation, but most of the times it becomes obligatory.
Female body becomes a site of contestation in such relationships. The dominance
of the patriarchal society turns female body into an object to use or a
territory to conquer. Like an unconquered land is conquered by men of power, the
virginity of a girl is looted of by her ‘master’ husband or anyone else like
her lover or a rapist, making her impure by taking away her ‘purity’. The
colonial man has a ceaseless urge to conquer new lands and ‘civilize’ the
native people living there. Colonization is a metaphor here because the man is
uplifting the woman to become a mother, the most anticipated status a woman can
dream of, thus ‘civilizing’ the woman. Later when she loses the charm after the
child birth, the man will set out to find new lands. As the body of woman is a
site to be explored as per the patriarchal notion, the conquered lands are
attributed the identity of woman’s body in the colonial period itself. “…from
the beginning of the colonial period till its end (and beyond), female bodies
symbolize the conquered land. This metaphoric use of the female body varies in
accordance with the exigencies and histories of particular colonial situations.
For example, in comparison with the nakedness of America or Africa in early
modern iconographic representations, Asia is always sumptuously clothed…” (Loomba
152).
Jasbir Jain, a Postcolonial critic,
notes this woman–territory analogy during the Indian freedom struggle in her
essay titled “Indian Feminisms: The Nature of Questioning and the Search for
Space in Indian Women’s Writing”;
…the
history of British rule in India has impacted women in three different ways
which are conflictual and oppositional to each other: (i) women were the site
on which imperial and colonial strategies were worked out. Child marriage,
polygamy, sati and widow remarriage all became central issues. How far the
intervention of the state was desirable or pro-woman is a larger question in
itself. (ii) Women came to symbolize nationhood and with the myth of woman as
the motherland being identified with them, they came to be treated as the
custodians of culture. (iii) They found legitimate space which promised them
identity and selfhood within the freedom struggle even if it was within
conventional frameworks and moral values which valorized sacrifice and self-
effacement. (29)
Here, woman is identified with the motherland
unless and until she follows the conventional frameworks and moral values of
the society. This analogy is only considered when the woman leads her life as
per the norms formulated by the male dominated society. To become the
custodians of culture, a patriarchal construct as well, women should have to
immolate their bodies. Jain continues, in the same essay, “The State performed
a patriarchal role in asserting its right to reclaim and rehabilitate women; women
themselves by committing mass suicides in order to prevent rape or abduction
followed the tradition of jauhar and sati” (31). Thus, it is very clear that
the body of woman becomes a site to exert power by the various institutions of
the society. The symbolic association of female body with territory/
territoriality is to be defended as it dehumanize woman to an object. Representing
female body in writings can create a unique identity of its own. But writing on
or about the body by women writers would need enormous courage and strength in
a traditional Indian scenario. Helene Cixuous’ observation is pertinent to
recall here:
Women
must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that
will wreck partitions, classes and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must
submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve- discourse, including
the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word ‘silence’… (886)
The phallocentric society will accuse such writings
about female body by women writers as obscene and immodest. So it is hard to
establish the authority over one’s own body by a woman who wants to negate the
authority the man exercises over her body. To reveal her trauma she suffered,
only strong imagery and powerful expressions are used. Luce Irigaray posits
“woman’s writing” as that which evades the male monopoly and the risk of
appropriation into the existing system by “establishing as its generative
principle, in place of the monolithic phallus, the diversity, fluidity, and
multiple possibilities inherent in the structure and erotic functioning of the
female sexual organs and erogenous zones, and in the distinctive nature of
female sexual experiences” (qtd. in Abrams 97).
The ‘ecriture feminine’ helps women
to posit themselves from the ‘other’ to ‘Self’. Helene Cixous, who proposed the
term, challenged women to express themselves without any hesitations by coming
out of the cocoons made by man to suppress them. The unhappiness of the woman in
living a ‘happy’ life as man dictates her to lead finds expression in the language
she uses to demonstrate her feelings. The language and experiences of women are
entirely different to that of man. The feminine language can be a threat to
phallocentric culture, but it helps the woman to express her in new ways.
Feminine mystique is a term which became popular by the title of the famous
book by Betty Friedan which sparked the beginning of second- wave feminism. The
very idea of this term was predominantly rooted in the society just like a
myth, in the lives of women. Feminine mystique states that women naturally
fulfil their meaning of life by devoting their lives to become housewives and
mothers. It is a false conception regarding the identity of woman. She wants to
identify herself as she is, not what she is to someone.
There
exist a number of differences between man and woman, even if man and woman
share equal political and legal rights on paper. Physique of woman is
physiologically and genetically different to that of a man. As the difference
in physique exists between them, the nudity of woman is more controversial in
degree than that in man. The patriarchal world will define body of woman as a
problematic entity when she gets raped or when her nudity becomes marketed in
porn movies. More precisely, it is an action to make the body of woman a
collective responsibility of the society and thus, a site of exploitation. The
differences it possess with that of man’s is explicitly stated in Foucault’s
observation on this matter.
The problem of how to conceive of the body
without reducing its materiality to a fixed biological essence has been one of
the key issues for feminist theory. At a fundamental level, a notion of the
body is central to the feminist analysis of the oppression of women because
biological differences between the sexes are the foundation that has served to
ground and legitimize gender inequality. By means of an appeal to historical
biological characteristics, the idea that women are inferior to men is naturalized
and legitimized. This involves two related conceptual moves. Firstly, women's
bodies are judged inferior with reference to norms and ideals based on men's
physical capacities and, secondly, biological functions are collapsed into
social characteristics” (Armstrong n.p.). When
the inferior tries to express oneself, the superior persona will make some
issues and exert its power to silence the freedom of expression of the ‘other’.
The anecdote in the life of Rajathi Salma, one of the women poets selected for
this study, shows how the patriarchal objections she faced throughout her life
from all circles moulded her to become the fearless Salma that she is today.
Rajathi Salma is a popular activist
and politician in Tamil Nadu. Her real name is Rokkiah Begum. Before becoming a
renowned poetess as now, she led a cloistered life like other Muslim girls of
her age who reached their puberty. Her love for reading the books she got from
the nearby library with the help of her mother sustained her life. Her
extensive reading never allowed the newspaper bits used for cladding the
household things to stray away. But when she got married in her teens like
other Muslim girls, her husband and in-laws drew a controlling line to announce
their authority over her. To come out of this servitude, she started writing
her poems without the knowledge of her husband. Her husband was hostile to her
writing and so she selected a pen name ‘Salma’ for anonymity. Salma published
her poems under this pen name with the help of her mother and Kannan Sundaram,
the Publisher of the journal Kalachuvadu.
When her husband detected her as the ‘sensational’ Salma, she had to face
physical abuse from him. He threatened her of acid attack. In order to defend,she
began to sleep at nights hugging their son tightly. Fate had something else in
store for her. She became a representative of people in her Panchayat and from
that point onwards, nothing could stop her from being herself. The story of
Salma proves to be an instance of victory and a source of inspiration to all
those people who aspire to write their own story by expressing themselves
fearlessly as she did. She is a survivor who subverts the impositions of a
male-dominated social order. For truthful depiction of this traumatic experience,
the writers would try their best to intermingle a certain radicalism of imagery
like breasts, vagina, etc. which are taboo as subjects of discussion and
inherently embedded in notions of chastity, chivalry, and purity.
The inculcation of such imagery in
their writing gives it a political importance, the much needed utility for
these kinds of writings. The reaction from the society is uncontrollable when
the personal is turned political. The translator of the poems of Salma and
Kutty Revathy, Lakshmi Holmstrom recalls,
In
2003, at a time when politicians and other establishment figures of Tamil Nadu
were caught up in a surge of Tamil chauvinism, a group of men and women,
setting themselves up as guardians of Tamil culture, objected publicly to the
language of a new generation of women poets, particularly in the work of
Malathi Maithri, Salma, Kutti Revathy and Sukirtharani. They charged the women
with obscenity and immodesty. (99)
The themes of their poetry like relationship of
woman with her body and the politics of sexuality incensed the fury of the mob.
The
poets received abusive letters from individuals as well as literary
organizations. … A popular song writer for films gave a much publicized
interview to a literary journal condemning women writers in general. After this,
another film- song writer, Snehithan, appeared on television declaring that
these women should be lined up on Mount Road in Chennai, doused with kerosene
oil and burnt alive. (100)
The incensed Tamil male dominance wished to show its
ascendance by ‘witch hunting’ these free willed women poets. These destructive
criticisms aimed at annihilating their spirit of openness, only added to their
outspokenness.
“The Contract” is a poem written by
Rajathi Salma in which she calls marital relationship as a contract. In marital
life, both husband and wife are the persons who entered into the vow of living
together. When the bond goes balanced as both get the same privilege and same
acceptance, there will be nothing to worry. If someone in the bond is forced to
do sacrifice for leading the marital life in equilibrium, then problem will
arise. This is the issue in most cases of marital breakdowns and to restore it
into normal is not an easy task to achieve. Salma begins the poem by calling
her to be the guilty “for all that goes wrong in the bedroom” (34) by her own
mother and sister. The hegemonic atmosphere where one has been brought up can
exert pressure on the cognitive domain and thus act as an enemy to the same sex.
The mother and sister in this poem act like the blind followers of patriarchy. They
are criticizing the narrator to surrender before her tyrannizing husband.
The dominating husband’s rhetorical
question “So what is it, today?” becomes the first and last words in the
bedroom. This shows how powerless she is in her private room where she shares
her powerlessness with her powerful husband. Her husband has treated her as a
sexual object and so she degrades herself as a whore. Among all these traumatic
experiences she bore, she still yearns for the love of her husband.
To receive a little love
-however tarnished-
from you (35)
These lines show the acceptance and care she
desperately is in need of. Even if the love from her husband is “tarnished” in
nature, she craves for it. She wishes her husband to buy “sanitary napkins and
contraceptives” and “many other little favours” .. More importantly she wants “to
hold a little authority over [her husband] if possible, To strengthen what
authority [she has] just a little” (35).
The contraceptives in her wishlist
denotes a politics of its own. Pregnancy becomes a problem to woman alone. Man
has less concern over it as it does not affect him primarily. Hence the speaker
of the poem “The Contract”, a woman,
yearns for contraceptives and sanitary napkins to be bought by her husband.
Buying sanitary napkins by man is unusual in ordinary society, but the poetess
wants him to buy it. Like a new woman, she wants to make man buy it. The
cultural inhibition stops man from buying sanitary napkins. Being a poetess of
resistance, Salma speaks out the indigestible and breaks the cultural taboo.
She gravely wants to have a little authority over her husband, even though it
is “just a little”.
The speaker in the poem who accuses
herself of being a whore to her own husband is trying to be good in bedroom,
just to get a little favours from him. She once states that she needs the
‘tarnished’ love from her husband “to fulfil my responsibility as [her
husband’s] child’s mother” (35). It can be noted as a resistance to the
venerable customs that are blindly followed for generations. Here the poetess
is questioning the tradition as the tradition teaches us the duty of mother is
to look after her children. The mother of her children or the wife of the man
in the poem is not a stereotyped woman of Indian social traditions; she is very
different from the commonly believed woman created by the patriarchal society
we live in. Here, we find a new woman who questions the traditional way of
attributing certain duties that are bestowed upon woman to commit solely to
woman. She wants to resist the existing pattern of victimizing woman with the
burden of familial duties. The traditional woman may be proud of the childbirth
marks, but the new woman presented by Salma calls it as her ‘downfall’. The
traditional mother may not mind it at all. Yet the poem concludes with the
lines, “In full knowledge of all this, my vagina opens” (35). Here, the opening
of vagina is marked as a demerit of woman. The speaker ridicules the opening of
her vagina as the only thing it knows to do. Amidst the boasting of womb power
as woman power, the poetess points out that woman’s own body traps her to be victimized
before the dominance of man. This is highly metaphorical expression of female
sexuality.
“A midnight tale” is another poem by Salma which portrays
the longing for her lost chastity and beauty. The Speaker in the poem is a
married woman who laments on her indifferent husband who shows sexual
dissatisfaction to her as she has lost her past charm due to childbirth.
These nights
following the children’s birth
you seek, dissatisfied,
within the nakedness you know so
well,
my once unblemished beauty. (32)
Here, the speaker of the poem is lamenting about her
faded beauty after childbirth, not because the childbirth was unwanted but she
became unwanted for her husband after it. The sexual satisfaction sought by her
husband “within the nakedness [her husband] know[s] so well” is not there now
and so he becomes dissatisfied. The speaker, the wife, is mourning on her “once
unblemished beauty”. The usage of the word ‘unblemished’ is very apt here as
the body has undergone natural changes after childbirth.
Childbirth is considered, in the
patriarchal construct, as the exaltation of conjugal relation. For achieving
this extreme happiness, the body of woman undergoes many pressures and
sufferings. Jasbir Jain in her essay “Indian Feminisms” perceives motherhood as
a “cultural imposition which denies woman personhood” (32). The pain of
childbirth often goes unmentioned and also the mental trauma that is experienced
in post-partum may not even noticed by others. But when the father discards the
mother for her blemished body after childbirth, one cannot tolerate the pain it
creates.
You are much repelled,
you say,
by a thickened body
and
a belly criss-crossed with birthmarks;
my
body, though, is unchanging
you say
today, hereafter and forevermore. (32)
Interestingly, the woman, having internalized the
repressive mechanisms under which she exists, seemingly attributes this
critique of her body to her husband. The husband is said to be dissatisfied
with the “thickened body” of his wife. He observes that her belly is now “criss-crossed
with birthmarks”. He continues that these changes that caused to her body are
“unchanging”.
True
indeed,
your
body is not like mine:
it
proclaims itself,
it
stands manifest.
Before
this too,
your
children, perhaps, were born
in
many places, to many others;
you
may be proud
you
bear no traces of their birth. (32-33)
After facing the body shaming comments by her
husband, the narrator is comparing her body with his. The body of a woman was
controlled by the patriarchal morality, and by the roles of wifehood and
motherhood. But when her husband humiliates her by pointing out the changes
happened on her body, she seeks out to establish her right to her body. Her
endeavour to establish selfhood or project her subjectivity has to work through
her body – “[her husband] bear[s] no traces of their birth” – is a very
powerful line which contains the soul of feminist spirit. The difference
between the body of man and woman is explicitly stated here by mentioning the culturally
attributed function of it.
These
birthmarks cannot be
repaired,
any more than my own decline-
this
body isn’t paper
to
cut and paste together, or restore.
Nature
has been
more
perfidious to me
than even you;
but from you began
the first stage of my downfall. (33)
The assertion on body as “not a paper to cut and
paste together or restore” is not only a play of words with the commands in
this computer era, but also signaling on the damage caused by it not healed
with a single stroke of any machines. The poetess strongly declares that the
body of woman is not a machine that can be restored or reformed into the unblemished
beauty once it owns. “Closure” is also a poem written by Salma where she says
“Always/ you have plucked away/ by force/ all that was mine” (38). These lines
reiterate the idea depicted in the poem “A midnight tale” on deprivation of chastity which is believed as a sin.
Kutti
Revathi, one of the bold women poets and a contemporary of Salma, became a well-known
personality of Tamil literature when her poem titled “Breasts” got published.
Apart from the traditional view of reducing breasts as a sexual organ, Revathy appraises
it as any other part of the body like eyes or nose. A doctor by profession, Dr.
S. Revathy, generally known by her pen name Kutti Revathy is a practitioner of
Siddha medicine. The profession of Kutti Revathy gave more importance to body,
so her poems are full of images of human body. The poetess strives to bring out
the physical and emotional impact of them. Kutti Revathy, it may be presumed,
does not have any hesitation in giving a title like “Breasts” to her poem. She
uses a disruptive language to represent a colonized entity like body of woman
and the emotions it owns inside. Calling a spade a spade is heroic deed when it
is done by an upper class man, but when a woman does it or a Dalit does it, the
misogynist and anti- Dalit high class society will harshly criticize that
practice. Kutty Revathy was influenced by the village legend of Nangeli, a bold
woman from Kerala who resisted against paying breast tax. This tax was collected
in order to prevent lower class women from wearing upper body clothes. Nangeli,
unable to pay the tax, cut off her breasts in protest. She treated her breasts
as any other organ on human body like hands or legs. Nangeli raised her voice
of resistance against the patriarchal supremacy with her body. This incident
influenced Kutty Revathy to write a poem on breasts. She acknowledges this in
an interview to N. Kalyana Raman, a famous translator of Tamil Nadu.
The poetess handles breasts as a
‘normal’ body part, not something that should be whispered in shame, in her
poem “Breasts”. The speaker of the poem watches the growth of breasts ‘in
amazement’. The poetess tries to draw her connection with breastsboth
physically and emotionally during her “changing seasons”.
At
times of penance
They
struggle and strain;
and
at the thrust and pull of lust
like
the proud ascent of music
they
stand erect.
From
the press of an embrace
they
distil love; from the shock
of
childbirth
milk,
flowing from blood. (58-59)
Unlike the common notion of seeing breasts merely as
a sexual object, the poetess is attributing a place of companionship to it.
Breasts are a living reality for her and not a commodity that is projected on
the body of woman to extend ‘its’ market value. Society will crucify the poet
for using ‘such a dishonourable’ image in poems to win popularity. But the male
gaze of society can only see breasts as a sexual organ of woman and hence
denounce Kutty Revathy as a poet who uses such images to get attention from the
public. Breasts are compared to ‘bubbles, rising from marshlands’ and ‘two
teardrops’ in her poem. These two comparisons show the impermanence of
everything around us which was once a part of us. The shape of the bubbles and
teardrops instills the image of the object in reader’s mind. Sometimes
articulating the very name of breasts is considered as a taboo, even though all
the human beings and animals are directly connected to it by sustaining their
lives. Yet the ‘so called’ morality of the society punishes those who are
outspoken. The publication of the poem “Breasts” evoked a controversial
situation in Tamil Nadu.
Other
than “Breasts”, there are several other poems by Kutti Revathy which bear the
idea of body of woman. Her “Childbirth” is
an example of such kind of poems. In “Childbirth”, she says
on
the very day I put forth
a
cluster of flowers, ready to fruit,
your
sickle felled me,
flayed
me, tore apart my body.
All
the same, around my feet,
right
up to my ankles,
again
and again they will rear their heads
my
majestic crests. (71)
Here, the poet is accusing a dominant power for
plundering what she has. Her body was “ready to fruit” but the ‘sickle’ of
dominating power tore her apart. The poetess may be speaking about a rape that
took place within or outside a conjugal relationship. Marriage is considered as
a sacred relation, but at times it can become scary in the sense that marital
rapes have increased . According to a report,
Every
third women, since the age of 15, has faced domestic violence of various forms
in the country, reported the National Family Health Survey (NHFS-4) released by
the Union health ministry. (Saaliq n.p.)
In another instance, Kutti Revathy draws out what
she needs in a marital life but what it turns out to be. The poem “I have
invited this summer for you” shows
what she expects from her nuptial relation;
My
body is tender and limp
as
if it needs to be wrapped around
with
many hands. (69)
But it turns out to be an utter failure as she
states it;
my
body is a land that is alive,
and
our quarrels stained with salt tears,
has
been opened, between my sleeping
and
waking. (70)
“Rain-River” is a poem by Kutti Revathy which
manifests the union of two lovers, one is compared to rain and the other is to river.
The poem recounts the intensity of their union
The
fierceness of your embrace
whirls
me about
tosses
me against the rock-beds
makes
me lose my breath. (60)
Yet the lines show a clear picture of the dominating
spirit of the lover who makes his beloved breathless.
Most
of the marital relationships in India face a kind of similitude towards
colonizer- colonized dichotomy. The husband always acts as the ‘centre’ and
wife as the ‘other’ in more than half of the relations. The familial ties, the
fear of society and lack of support from others are the main reasons why a
woman is inclined to the dominating and subjugating power of her husband. Some
pertinent questions like how to survive and how to face society and what will
the society think of me are grappling the woman who is engaged in unhappy
marriages to lead her life as ‘normal’ as it is ‘programmed’ by her husband. Thus,
the husband manifests the similar dominating-drive of the colonial power or
what British was to countries like India and the wife becomes a colonial
subject or the colonized.
This
colonialist ideology created colonial subjects who behaved in the way the
colonizer had programmed. They willingly accepted the superiority of the
British, and their own inferiority. It produced a ‘cultural cringe’, so to
speak…They (the colonial subjects) developed what is called a ‘double
consciousness’, that is, perceiving the world through the consciousness of the
colonizer as well as through their own vision provided by their native culture.
This is also termed unstable or double identity… [Thus] one becomes a
psychological refugee, in not being able to feel at home even in one own’s
home. (Nagarajan 187)
Becoming
a psychological refugee is a very complicated situation. The existence for
namesake makes one revolutionary or depressed. In Kutti Revathy’s poem titled “Suicide-
soldier”, the protagonist Selvi is
using her body to destroy the system she hates.
Carp-eyed
Selvi,
you
are about to cast aside your own clothes
and
lock them away, as if they are your body.
The
mirror sets to right your nakedness
which
you wear as your dress. You proceed
to
assemble your uniform; your weapons
and
suicide belt become your body now. (63)
The woman in the poem selected her body, which was
considered as a sex object by the patriarchal society, to destroy a group of
people. She is a suicide bomber and what she does is revolutionary for her
beliefs but foolishness to others. After all, she is using her body as a tool
or an object and does what she wants to do with it. . The traditionally
attributed ‘weak’ feminine image of female body gets manliness in this poem.
The body of Selvi turns out to be a man-like entity that can exert its power on
others. This is a noteworthy poem as it renders masculinity to female body.
Holding
your breath, you scream.
Before
you yourself are aware, the shock
of
that blast photographs your blue face
for
a blinding minute. Then, roaring,
your
body bursts apart, Selvi. (63)
Thus, turning out to be a rebel is a way out
solution and becoming depressed and clueless on the meaninglessness is not a
right method to look at life. In “Sleeping seed”, Kutti Revathy describes body as,
My
body, lacking anyone to seed and nourish it
dries
out, cracks open into fissures. (66)
The incompleteness and the rootlessness which later
turns out to be in an ‘unhomed’ condition make the woman perplexed about her
existence. In one instance, the poetess draws an image of a lover who cannot
lead a normal life without the company of her lover in the poem “Floodgates of memory” as, ‘The flood of your memory/
opens the sluice gate of my vagina” (73). These lines emphatically state the
male dominance and female subjugation in the female psyche.
Susan Bordo, a modern philosopher who
works on body studies, asserts in her essay titled “Feminism, Foucault and the
Politics of the Body” that female body was “a socially shaped and historically
‘colonised’ territory”. She further adds that “Feminism imagined the human body as itself a politically inscribed
entity, its physiology and morphology shaped and marked by histories and
practices of containment and control” (250). The male dominance has subjugated
female psyche by the ‘practices of containment and control’. Rajathi Salma and
Kutty Revathy have brought in the metaphorical usage of female body in their
writings to abolish the practice of treating female body as the central site of
exercising patriarchal control. Kutty Revathy, a Siddha doctor by profession,
has no inhibition to use the names of body parts, both private and public, as
it is. It is part of her daily life and this ordinariness is explicitly stated
in her poems as well. According to Lakshmi Holmstrom,
…a
woman’s experience of herself and her body is either manipulated or distorted
in some way by social, cultural and political means, or is denied altogether.
It could be said that Kutti Revathy is deeply influenced by that strain of
Siddha thought which claims that our bodies are ourselves: it is through the
body that we understand the Natural world, gain knowledge of ourselves and
achieve a connectedness with the universe. Perhaps it is this that drives her
to call for a much more nuanced language in the current debates on sexuality
and the politics of the body. (114-115)
The poems of Salma depict the metaphors from female
body to show the strong feelings of woman that cannot be stated vividly without
the use of such body images. Her poetry is evolved out from her life
experiences and that experiences have turned her poetry into the poetry of
resistance. The society had cut off her spirit of freedom when she reached her
puberty and she was imprisoned in the familial prison. The secluded life in a
closed room has shaped her to use images of body parts to represent the extreme
emotions and feelings. Her direct deploy of images like vagina gave a new
meaning and values to the female body. Her poetry reclaims the idea that every
essence of the female lies in her body. Salma was born as a Muslim but she
never tried to cover her emotions with ‘purdah’ of servitude.
In a male dominated society, a
woman empowered to express aloud her desires and dissatisfactions is a threat
to the status quo of power structures that persist in society. Hence, the
patriarchal society tries to cover the body of woman with the customary cloth
of social codes and customs. Writing the body by women can remove the
masochistic and voyeuristic pleasures existing in our society. It urges to
reconsider male dominated assumptions of sexuality and desires. When such
social codes and customs are removed, that is, when that covering is removed
and the body comes to the public as naked, the patriarchal society will lose
its equilibrium. The female body in the poems of Rajathi Salma and Kutti
Revathy is represented as an image of resistance against the exploitation a
woman suffers in her marital and social life. Kutti Revathy portrays the
resistance by explicitly writing about the organs of human body while Salma
manifests it by throwing light on the degradation of sexual relations. This
foregrounding of female body, a technique of resistance literature, can disrupt
and subvert the existing order of male supremacy by usurping the very prominent
male territory and thus reclaiming it as one’s own territory. Writing the body
by these two women poets have succeeded in bringing it up as a discourse of
resistance.
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