Book Review: Brickmakers By Selva Almada

I'd read prize winning Latin American author Selva Almada's The Wind That Lays Waste (read my review here TWTLW) and knew I had to read everything she's written. Brickmakers doesn't disappoint. 

To open with the two protagonists (Marciano and Pajarito) dying, knowing at the outset how it's going to end, yet keeping you glued till you have turned the last page is the adeptness of a master storyteller who is thorough with her craft and wields her pen as sharp as the knives used by the two young men  in the novel. 

Central to the book are two brickmaker families where the men rake up a feud almost as if they need something to keep themselves occupied, and the rivalry is passed on to the sons, despite the attempts of both mothers to prevent it. 

It lays bare the violence that is rife where life is an everyday struggle. The studies in masculinity, and the need of the men to portray themselves as macho is well wrought. The fights are almost orchestrated, as if the men were at a dance, each movement studied, it almost seems like it's an excuse to touch. Since gentle touch is barred to them, they choose another way, fighting each other. 

The men are driven to prove their virility, and the homophobia that goes with hypermasculinity is well portrayed. Homosexuality has no place in these men's lives, whether it is one's own sexuality (Pajarito's) or one's brother's (Marciano's brother Angelito) and once revealed it can end only with violence. 

The women don't get much of the spotlight yet they sneak up on you, with bits of tenderness. The lonely widow who tries to manipulate her son, the wife who manoeuvres her husband into becoming "self employed", trying to make the best of their circumstances, to provide for their kids. These are the characters and bits that will stay with me for a long time.  

The bits of domestic violence (though not graphic) did throw me off and the sex was a bit too explicit, but nowhere does it stall the flow of the book. I was engrossed till the end. The prose is spare yet the book is a page turner. 

There are characters and events which I'd love a follow up on, I'd definitely read a sequel! 

5 stars. Must read! 

Book Review : Afsaneh : Short Stories by Iranian Women.

            

This was a heartbreaking book to read and I wept through reading it. I had to put it away and take breaks from it. I must add I read it while I was grieving and it just wrenched my heart out. Perhaps my grief had something to do with my reaction, I can't be sure. While reading a few of the stories in this collection earlier, I'd had a similar response though I never got around to completing the entire collection at the time. Yet, I wouldn't miss this book for the world.                                               

This particular collection is part of a series of women's short story collections from all over the world. I have read the Indian collection. The Pakistan collection called Kahani and Galpo the collection from Bangladesh lined up next. There are also collections of stories by Palestinian, Czech and Lebanese women, all of which are published by Saqi Books.

The editor's foreword provides a short introduction to modern Iranian literature by women. Kaveh Basmenji is the editor and translator. I probably shouldn't hold his gender against him, but I can't help feeling a woman would have done a very different and better job of curating this collection. 
The characters who inhabit these tales are overwhelmingly women characters.

There are two stories featuring men taking a second, younger wife, both told from the perspective of the daughters of the first wife. In the  the protagonist is a child living a charmed and happy childhood when she realizes that her father is not really on a trip but is gone forever. In Mansoureh Sharifzadeh's The Stranger the teenaged protagonist's father has abandoned her mother, and the daughter now faces threats of violence similar to the violent attacks and abuse her mother had put up with. 

Indeed violence and its threat is the ghost suffusing the pages of this book, its presence lurking from the words, casting a pall over the lives of the women who live in them. 

Most of the stories are pictured in rural settings life and the descriptions are rich with depictions of nature. Agriculture has been a basic mode of living of the people of the land and it is natural that the stories use the agricultural practices and mentions of flora and fauna as regular backdrops to the stories. Gardens are an intrinsic part of Iranian culture.  
Indeed the Mughal love of gardens and their laying them out wherever they went, be it Shalimar Bagh or Srinagar or the rich greens in the cities can be traced to a very large Persian cultural influence. 

A few of the stories with magic realism were difficult for me to understand, and the genre not being a favorite of mine, the convolutions that went on did sometimes get the better of me.The magic realism of Shahrnoosh Parsipour in two stories Crystal Pendants and Mahdokht, though set in very different backdrops,  are tied to their characters' yearning for liberation, even if only in another life. 

Moniru Ravanipour's The Blue Ones and  also rife with fable images of weeping mermaids and sailors who are down to them and thus drown in the sea, was as gripping as it was surreal, yet made me very uncomfortable. The comings and goings of people in a hospital which seemed more a place of cruelty than healing, I couldn't wait for it to end, and the ending left me mystified. I really wasn't sure why the protagonist patient wasn't going home and why she's push her own daughter to help heal the broken heart of a soldier returning from war.

The tragedies of old age, the helplessness that comes with it and the dependence on children who have less and less time for you even as you languish lonely, is depicted in heart breaking detail in more than one story. Whether it is To Whom Shall I Say Hello? or Goli Taraqqi's character Mahin Banoo in  A House In Heaven, the tribulations of old age are poignantly brought to life in these stories.


Mahsid Amarshahy's story of a chance encounter on a train, in Khorramshahr-Tehran tells of a woman who takes a risk with a sexual in nature. A woman with agency and control over her body and her desire is such a welcome departure. 

My absolute favorite story was The Shemiran Bus so wonderfully crafted by Goli Taraqqi. A woman taking a bus ride with her daughter reminisces about her own childhood riding a bus to school and her attachment for the driver of her bus, who by all accounts seems like an uncouth untrustworthy character. It reminded me so much of Rabindranath Tagore's "Kabulliwallah".

There are twenty stories in all, with a few authors getting multiple entries. The editor uses the time frame of the Islamic Revolution to categorize the stories. The revolution however, is actually featured in only two of the stories and it does not seem to have brought any discernible change in the (mis)fortunes of the women who populate these stories. At least no drastic change is portrayed in the stories featured here. A little bibliography states that most of the writers were born in the time period 1931-65 with a mention of one or two more works of each of the authors. 


As for the translation, the attempts to use Americanisms becomes glaring and the translation is jarring at times. Even though I am not conversant with the Persian language, I could still guess where the translation has floundered. When the sensibilities of the speakers of two languages differ so widely, transferring the syntax to another language is always a challenging task and here the gaps show up. 

This is my first introduction to modern Iranian literature, and I am not aware of the variety of writing available, but perhaps the collection could have been a little more varied.  The stories can get a tad repetitive. The depiction of the harsh realities of ordinary working class women's lives in Iran may come from a place of truth-telling, but the relentless misfortune that dogs the women in most of these stories does get a bit harrowing. 

 Afsaneh  a word commonly used in Hindi and Urdu, is familiar to me. The word itself is magical to me, with it's connotations of fable. And much of the delight I took in reading this book was the pleasure of stumbling upon familiar words, from having been absorbed from Persian into Hindi. Realizing how the culture of this vast, ancient land has influenced Indian, specially the Awadhi culture of Lucknow was another bonus.

If you are at all curious about Iran and the lives of its women this book comes highly recommended.

My Rating: 

Book Review: Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi

                                               

 Although it is touted as a book about three Omani sisters Mayya, Asma and Khawla, this slim volume contains the stories of a multitude of characters, all connected through the three sisters and the men they marry.

Many of these characters get a page or two to themselves. However, the book isn't long enough to flesh out each of these lives. Yet, one still ends up sympathetic to most of the people populating this book.

The books has numerous allusions to bits of black magic and the often the narrative shifts between different time periods. At other times, it is just the hallucinations of the characters, but with so much going on, it all gives rise to some confusion.

The allusion to the moon is made often, as it is an icon of traditional Arabic poetry, specially the classic love poems. In the midst of it all is a strange, passionate love story between the father of the three girls and a typical femme fatale character. In itself it seems lively enough yet somehow its attachment to the rest of the narrative is wanting. Why is there absolutely no explanation of why he cheats on his wife? It seems to have been thrown in almost as an afterthought.

 The character who is most sympathetically fleshed out and who I grew grew quite fond of is Abdallah who falls in love with and marries the eldest of the three sisters, Mayya. However even in their relationship all is not smooth sailing.

Abdallah loses his mother when very young and grows up under the watch of the strict disciplinarian of a father and the violence that he faces at his hands makes your heart break. Throughout the length of the book Abdallah keeps on trying to recreate images of his mother trying to remember whatever little details he can. Her death, narrated rom different perspectives is like the unravelling of a mystery. Here is another convoluted story which remains unpredictable till the end.

 Abdallah faces violence that is father's hands and the trauma of it never really leaves him. On the one hand the desertion by his mother- at least that's the story told to him-haunts him all along. His desperate attempts to establish intimacy with his wife also leave you sympathetic to him, as she remains aloof.  

The reasons why Mayya refuses intimacy are not very clear other than her short lived romance with a young man before her marriage. Does she holds onto his memory, or is it simply depression does not become clear.

 The second sister who is desperate to get out of her parents home so she simply latches onto the best offer that comes away and she gets married. This is as much a reflection of the lives of so many women at least in parts of Asia where marriage is the one step which ensures at least some degree of freedom because till a woman is married she is not even considered an adult.

 The third sister Khawla gets the least time in the book

 This slim volume is populated by so many characters

 the various threads are all woven into each other and that the author is able to hold on to the various threads in making them into a coherent wholes is a definitely a big achievement

 It is also reminiscent of a lot of the customs and mannerisms of Indian women. The effort to keep up with the joneses specially in the matters of gift-giving to the bride at the time of the wedding in terms of a trousseau, the need to show off via the various customs, the internal wranglings between the women in the household and ultimate the word 

Patriarchy is more powerful than any law-these are the aspects that seemed very familiar to me.

 Even as these women live traditional lives they are hemmed in by the rules that bind them. They are able to find strength to not only guide their lives in their own way, how they best see it fit, but also navigating the different courses of life as it unfolds.  The book is also an intimate peep into Omani society, how it functions and how it is transitioning from the days past when it was a society of nomads of the bedouin tribes and now mostly city dwellers, living modern day lives in large metropolises.

If you, like me have had no introduction to Omani literature, this is certainly a great place to begin.

Book Review : The Creation of Patriarchy

                                                      

"The Creation of Patriarchy" by historian Gerda Lerner is a work of scholarship which took eight years of hard work to produce. In order to explain women's subordination, Gerda puts it in a historical context. 

Lerner's work shows insights into how women have been systematically subordinated over centuries of building the structures of patriarchy. These structures kept women in inferior positions, tied them to norms which they -apparently- willingly conformed to. 

It is not an easy book to read, specially for a romantic feminist like me. It took me longer than an average book does, for I had to put it away every few pages. Here is a book  which disturbs deeply. 

The book and its findings are based on the study of western civilizations, largely derived from Mesopotamian, and Hebrew sources and a study of Abrahmanic religions.

Man has been the default human now, for centuries. Patriarchal thinking and its norms are so deeply entrenched in our society that we take it for granted. This default is so much part of our cultural and mental landscape, we do not even notice it. Not unlike the furniture strewn around your home for months, in the same position. You notice  a particular piece only when you move it around into a new arrangement. 

                           

Historical scholarship has seen women as marginal to the making of civilization and as unessential to those pursuits defined as having historic significance. While no man has been excluded from historic records because he is man, yet all women have been.

                                                   

Though numerically, women are the majority, society is structured as if we are the minority and and have therefore been victimized by it. Women were essential to creating history, to creating society. They are and always have been agents and actors in history. Women have simply been kept from knowing their history and from interpreting it. They have been excluded from writing symbols, philosophies, science and law, and excluded from theory formation.

                                             

Gerda explores how, as laws evolved and religions grew, women's inferior position in society deteriorated. They were kept away from any learning or intellectual pursuits. She shows us how the lack of women's access to learning and religion was increasingly reduced, till their eventual cutting off from all sources of history making.

The book is divided into chapters, each of which investigates a different topic in great depth and with detailed and painstaking research, comes to its conclusions.

Starting with prehistoric details Gerda hypothesizes that gender is created out of the fact that women must mother the child. Prolonged and helpless infancy of the human child lead to the fact that most nubile women would devote most of their adulthood to pregnancy, child bearing and nursing. 

She finds that around the time when hunting and gathering or horticulture gave way to agriculture, kinship arrangements tended to shift from matrimony to patriliny and private property developed.

The vast body of research accessed and studied by Gerda Lerner includes the codes of law of Hammurabi, one of the first codes of law to be codified and written down. 

Women's subordination was institutionalized in the earliest law codes and enforced by the full power of the state. The archaic state was shaped and developed in the form of patriarchy, and it continues to be so today. 

A startling revelation of the book is that men learnt and perfected dominance by practicing it over women and exerting control over them. Later, these lessons  were transferred to the control of other men. The first slaves were women. 

While men could establish class or transcend it based on their relationship to the means of production, for women it was always  determined through their sexual ties to a man.

Veiling of women began when women came to be segregated into  the categories of respectable women and non respectable. Guess what established respectability? Sexual ties to one man was equated with respectability while the sexually available woman became branded as non respectable. The respectable woman had to be veiled, others could go unveiled. This was written into law and it was the duty of upright citizens to report women who flouted these norms. Women's class status came to be defined differently than that of men, from that period on to the present. 

The codification which began with the laws of Hammurabi, marked the beginning of the institutionalization of the patriarchal family as an aspect of state power. It reflected a class society in which women's status depended on the male family head's social status.

The most disturbing passages to me, were the removal of the goddesses from mainstream religion. All over the ancient world,   goddess worship was prevalent in one form or another. The goddesses would be worshipped for the sacredness of female sexuality and its mysterious life giving force, which included the power to heal. With the ascent of Abrahamanic religion, began the erasure of the goddess. Simultaneously, woman came to be painted as the harbinger of death and sin into the world. Women's sexuality came to be linked with sin. From progenitor of the universe, life giving force and healer, to harbinger of sin- patriarchy wrought the ultimate fall for womanhood!

The historical processes of the development of abstract thought and symbol making began to shape civilization. These developments coincided with the marginalization of women. Males alone became mediators between god and man while women were denied equal access to learning, and to priesthood. Women thus came to be denied the capacity for interpreting and altering religious belief systems. Women's subordination was complete.

                                                                          

                                                       

In a passage that I found stunningly evocative, Gerda outlines her call to action plan. She uses the image of a play to demonstrate this. She compares life to a stage where men and women are performers, both acting equally important roles, without either of whom the play can't go on. But the stage is conceived, painted, defined by men. They have written the play, decided on the props, fixed the lighting,  assigning themselves the most interesting parts and have given the supporting roles to women. 

Women have begun the struggle to get "equal" roles, but are only now beginning to realize its not enough. Men control which women will get which roles. They punish and ostracise those who try to challenge the script or try to rewrite it. 

Simply adding women to the patriarchal framework won't do. Only by placing women's vision at its centre will be able to dismantle patriarchy. Its a paradigm shift waiting to happen.

Patriarchy as a system is historical. If we can show it has a beginning, it follows we can show it to have an end and thus begin the work of its dismantling. 

                                                          

 I found myself underlining and annotating para after para and as I read this book. This is a book to keep, to read, to go over its pages over and over again, to mull its contents over in your mind.

                                                   

(The question of how patriarchy evolved in the Indian context, with its overlap of culture with Hinduism, is something I'd love to explore. I'm curious to read any available material on the subject. Anyone reading this, if you have any leads please let me know.)

Book                     : The Creation of Patriarchy 

Author                  : Gerda Lerner

Publisher              : Oxford University Press

Number of Pages : 243

This book review appeared on the website of Feminism In India

Book Review : Sarpanch Sahib by Manjima Bhattachaya

                                          

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the social and economic status of women in India is woeful, if not downright pitiable. It is fair to assume that in a democratic set up, involving more women in the democratic process, would lead to balancing out these inequalities. Moreover, what good is a democracy if half its population is left out of the decision making process?

However, the way it is structured, Indian democracy is deeply flawed. It vests power in those already powerful, while the marginalised are often left out in the cold. Women happen to be one such group.

The 73rd Constitution Amendment Act 1992 mandated reservation of seats for women in at least one third of all Panchayat councils and a third of the Pradhan (or head of the Panchayat) seats.
The idea was that having confirmed seats in elected bodies would enable women to better engage in the democratic process at the grassroots, change the systems and help mould the laws that govern them.

Beginning in 2000, the NGO The Hunger Project-India has worked to encourage women to participate in the political process. They trained women representatives in 14 states across the nation, in order to equip them with basic knowledge and impart skills training.

The book "Sarpanch Sahib" is a project to document the stories of seven of these remarkable women leaders in the panchayat system, across the country. The seven different women leaders were interviewed by different authors or journalists who went out to meet them. Putting these stories out in the public domain helps make us aware of the struggles these women face. Their successes are all the more noteworthy, considering the odds stacked against them. At the same time, as these stories show us, leadership can't always be imbibed; some are born leaders.

As the stories unfold and we visit these women in their villages and homes, one is struck by the grit and determination the women display. The authors bring home to us the fact that despite little or no education, these leaders bring their own unique perspective to the problems at hand. Almost each of these ladies has prioritised funding schools, and bringing access to water, roads and electricity for her village or block.

The support for these women leaders, from their people, is usually palpable; though a few times there is hostility in evidence, too. Yet each woman soldiers on, fighting the good fight, determined in her belief that her work will benefit her people in the long run.

This is a book that should be made mandatory reading for high school students. Copies should be distributed in Parliament, specially the Lok Sabha. The accounts in this book are proof that women make as good people's representatives as men-if not better- given a chance. Closing the gender gap in political representation is but a small step in improving the overall gender imbalance in our society. Now that panchayats have shown the way, it's time we stepped it up to the next level. Maybe, some sense will prevail and the bill for reservation of seats for women in Parliament which has been hanging fire for over a decade now, finally gets to see the light of day.

Book                   : Sarpanch Sahib, Changing the Face on India
Edited by            : Manjima Bhattacharjya
Published by       : Harper Collins
First Published    : 2009
Number of pages : 150

                                                                   

                                                                       

Book Review of Ismat Chughtai's works : A Trio of Collections of Her Writings

Shame on me, for I have only recently realised the full import of Ismat Chughtai's writing and what the heritage of her work means for feminism in India. It is even more astounding to think how much impact her writing must have made on her contemporaries, specially women and girls. Undoubtedly, she must have ruffled many a feather of the establishment!

Admittedly, I don't know much of her position in the Urdu literary pantheon, nor how she was looked upon by her contemporaries. But it isn't too difficult to see that she is a huge iconoclast of her times. What delights me the most about her writing is that she pulled no punches and in essay after essay she has blasted people, naming names and shaming people. I barely suppress a chortle as I imagine her delight in pissing off the establishment of the day.

I base my observations on the three books which I read recently, "A Life In Words-Memoirs" and "Lifting the Veil-Selected Writings" both translated by M.Asaduddin. The third book is "My Friend, My Enemy" a collection of essays, reminiscences and portraits, translated by Tahira Naqvi.

A little personal note here. I read all three books recently over a span of a few days, while on vacation. Having never lived alone, I was now vacationing for the first time by myself, enjoying the absolute solitude this time away from responsibilities afforded me. And here was a woman who lived well over half a century ago, on her own terms when it was unfathomable to do so.
She had courage and grit I could never dream of, setting on her own path from a tender age. A generation ago, she dared to be a non conformist when being one was not only difficult it could literally cost you your life.

She fought tooth and nail to gain an education, telling her parents she'd run away from home if they didn't let her pursue her matriculation. Though from a progressive family, Chughtai's parents were forced to withdraw their two elder daughters from school on pressure from the extended family. Dark hints about the girls' loss of character left the parent perturbed. The final clincher had been "who will marry them?". One relative went so far as to say "better to pimp your girls rather than send them to school" With this background her fight becomes all the more poignant and her courage, more stark. The subversive power of her characters and stories hits you like a blow to the gut.

A lot of her personality is reflected in her writing. Smart, witty and full of satire, her metaphors are at once rooted in the ethos of her times but also lyrical and beautifully evocative. You can see her sympathies lie with the women in her stories and you can't help but be swept along. The poor beggar woman, who, it turns out is also a thief, in "Tiny's Granny" yet leaves you bereft in mourning for her loss. The heartbreaking story of the two women who live and die in the hope of one of them getting married off, in "The Wedding Suit" leave you with a lump in your throat. "Vocation" is a cleverly told tale where the protagonist casts aspersions on her neighbours; she assumes them to be prostitutes. Later, on revelation that they belong to the aristocracy, she's taken aback. This serves to highlight the hypocrisy and sexism of our society in our attitudes towards women.

Some of her most beautiful and thoroughly fleshed out sketches of scenes and characters are of childhood, be it from her memoirs or her short stories like "The Net". Her most well known story "Lihaaf-The Quilt" for which she was prosecuted by the British government, with charges of obscenity, is included in the collection. An account of this trial is also incorporated in her memoirs.

Personally the most searing piece of her writing, to me, remains the short story "Gainda". A poignant tale of how a little girl from a lower caste is sexually exploited by an upper class man, then slut-shamed, and abandoned, once it's discovered that she is pregnant with his child. The psychology of the child and her playmate is brilliantly explored. The image of the frail Gainda in her hovel living in false hope has not left me.

Over five decades have passed and much of our attitudes towards women remain unchanged. That's the sad reality of our country.
 A path breaking feminist of her times and an iconoclast to boot; Ismat Chughtai's works are a must read!

    AUTHOR  :  ISMAT CHUGHTAI
          BOOK : A Life In Words (Memoirs)
                       (Translation of Kaghazi Hai Pairahan by M.Asaduddin)
PUBLISHER : Penguin Books 2012
                         278 pages

    AUTHOR :  ISMAT CHUGHTAI
          BOOK:  Lifting The Veil (Selected Writings)
                        (Translations by M.Asaduddin)
PUBLISHER : Penguin India 2009
                        261 pages

  AUTHOR    : ISMAT CHUGHTAI
         BOOK  : My Friend, My Enemy (Essays, Reminiscences, Portraits)
                        (Translation by Tahira Naqvi)
PUBLISHER : Kali for Women 2001
                         284 pages

 

Book Review : The Intrusion and Other Stories by Shashi Deshpande

                                   

Finally I begin the long planned book review section of this blog! As my reading had slowed down to an almost non-existent trickle, naturally this had taken a back seat. Towards the end of 2015, I set my mind on making a few small changes at a time and hoped the cumulative impact would be something meaningful. Now that it's mid-April, I'm happy it looks like I'm on way. So here goes.

Stories and fiction have so much power, to move and to convey a message without overt moralising. What many a march or occupation may not be able to achieve, art quietly can. Be it a piece of fiction or a play or even cinema, if it is powerful and effective, it leaves its mark on the psyche of the audience without loud declarations of intent. I've been mulling over this as I've restricted my reading- or, as I'd like to put it- opened it up - to the exclusive authorship of women. I will try to read only women's writing in 2016.

A collection that's moving as well as thought provoking at the same time is Shashi Deshpande's "The Intrusion and Other Stories". I've been a fan of Shashi Deshpande for long and I've read most of what she's written. This collection of stories is lovely in the way she conveys in little vignettes the dilemmas and the conflicts of women's lives -the overwhelming majority of protagonists  of these stories are women- all the while providing insights into their minds. The women who inhabit her stories are a varied lot, not just in age and the lives they lead but also their milieu.

She depicts struggles which are exclusive to women and some which are simply human dilemmas. The protagonists of these stories come through the narratives, their voices ringing clear in your ears long after the stories have ended. They may, at times, be beaten, but often the most unlikeliest of characters manage to transcend their boundaries and circumstances.

I was pleasantly surprised to find in this collection, the tales of women ranging from ambitious career women and the lonely new widow who struggles with an empty nest. There's also the widow who will not let all the gossip or even the physical and verbal abuse from her extended family keep her from forging new paths for herself.

The housewife who is on the verge of adultery, or the bored first lady who scoffs at those around her, each bored out of her wits by her humdrum existence or even more interesting, the woman who has given up a full time job to relocate and become a housewife. Yet each woman asserts herself in her own unique way, usually quietly, sometimes not so much! But none of these women sees herself as a victim.

Each story is unique and told with sensitivity. More than a few of these tales left me with a lump in my throat. Vintage Shashi Deshpande and a thoroughly enjoyable read!

AUTHOR : Shashi Deshpande
     BOOK : The Intrusion And Other Stories
Publisher  : Penguin Books, 1993 (Reprint 1994)