Gynocentric Discourse and Resistance in Meena Kandasamy’s Poetry
Abstract:
This paper explores the concept of gyno-centric discourse as propagated by Elaine Showalter such as Gynocriticism, Feminist Phase and Female Phase in her critical essay ‘Towards a Feminist Poetics'. Furthermore, the paper aims towards applying Showalter’s concepts in the poetry of Meena Kandasamy, the present paper deals with the collection of poems titled Ms Militancy published in December 2010. This paper interprets the fundamental concepts of Showalter and the poetic practice of Kandasamy. The paper is formulated into two parts dealing with Showalter's theory and Kandasamy's poetry, respectively.
Keywords: Gynocriticism, Gynocritics, Feminism, Feminist, Discourse
Introduction
Feminism is a series of movements advocating women rights talks about her place and propagates to establish equality of female sex in the dominant male society. We have its traces in literature early from ‘Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ (1792) by Mary Wollstonecraft. Later on, Virginia Wolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929) celebrated the space for women in the domain of literary tradition.
Elaine Showalter is an American literary critic and feminist. She focuses on the cultural and social issues in her writings. She is one of the founders of feminist literary criticism in the United States of America. Her essay ‘Towards a Feminist Poetics' is the leading source of the present paper. And Meena Kandasamy is a contemporary Indian feminist, poet, fiction writer, translator and activist. In her writings, Kandasamy focuses on the condition of women and Dalits in Indian society.
Showalter’s Points
In her essay ‘Towards a Feminist Poetics' Elaine Showalter introduces the term ‘Gynocritics' originally from French term ‘La Gynocritique’ in her discussion over Woman as Writer she talks about woman as the producer of her own discourse which is completely woman-centric, in other words, Gynocentric.
The second type of feminist criticism is woman as a writer – woman as a producer of textual meaning, with the history, themes, genres, and structures of literature by woman. Its subjects include the psychodynamics of female creativity; linguistics and the problem of a female language...no term exist in English for such a specialized discourse, and I have adapted the French term la gynocritique (Showalter 126).
Showalter by giving such term proves herself a new kind of feminist critic who wants to develop a new discourse for female writers; she thinks that a woman cannot express herself in a language which is made by her exploiters who are of course men. She advocates for the language of women.
In her later discussions in the same essay, she gives three phases of feminism, the Feminine Phase (1840-1880), in which women imitated men writings and their style with the conscious acceptance of their being inferior to men. The second is the Feminist Phase (1880-1920) where they get some upper hands such as voting rights, and their movement gets a height. They expressed their sufferings during this period. In this phase, women resisted against male dominance. And so, Showalter calls this phase the Feminist Phase. And the third phase is the Female Phase which is continuing since 1920. Here woman rejects the ‘forms of dependency', which are ‘imitation and protest' and focuses on autonomous art. And the writings in female discourse became the most crucial need of feminist writings. Authors like Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf wrote in such discourse successfully. One should think of male sentences and female sentences during writings. Following the practice of the female discourse Meena Kandasamy in her poetry expounds the theory.
Kandasamy’s Poetry
In her preface to her book Ms Militancy she titled the preface as ‘Should you take offence …’ which itself could be translated as being a woman you should take offence to go outside the male discourse and write something in your female voice and language.
You are the repressed Ram from whom I run away repeatedly. You are Indra busy causing bloodshed. You are Brahma fucking up my fates. You are Manu robbing me of my right to live and learn and chose. You are sage Gautama turning your wife to stone. You are AdiShankara driving me to death. You are all the men for whom I would never moan, never mourn. You are the conscious of this Hindu society. Your myths put me in my place. Therefore, I take perverse pleasure in such deliberate paraphrase (Kandasamy 8).
Kandasamy here focuses on the suppression of women in the Indian Hindu myths, which are indeed man-made and portrayed women as such obedient and slave-like to the men. But here the poet tries to refocus on those myths which are quite famous and followed as sacred in the society. Maybe because these narratives have roots in our minds since the beginning that people are not finding the patriarchy, the exploitation of women pre-existed in them. And as Showalter said about the need for woman discourse and her language, one can see in Kandasamy's writings, and she is developing her discourse which has nothing to do with the discourse of men. In the patriarchal set up of myths, Ram is an ideal man although he disowned his wife. But Kandasamy's Ram is someone to whom she will leave and is raising her voice over Brahma, who is the maker and she blames him for the condition of women. She is attacking sage Gautama as well Who turned hir wife into the stone. Shein her writing presents the feminist discourse by which a woman can resist, and of course, make her way as a Gynocritic.
I work to not only get back at you; I actually fight to get back to myself. I do not write into patriarchy—my Mariamma bays for blood. My Kali kills. My Draupadi strips. My Sita climbs on to a stranger’s lap. All my women militate. They brave bombs, they belittle kings. They take on the sun, they take after me (Kandasamy 8).
These lines show how the ideas of Kandasamy and her treatment of these Hindu myths are different from the treatment these women get in their respective myths created by patriarchy. The poet is trying to make a new way to treat them with a woman-centric approach where she says, 'All my women are militate.' One can say that she is doing a feminist analysis of culture as Showalter talks in her essay. She distinguishes the men-mad language with overlaps of her women-made language. Showalter says about Gynocritics that they can differentiate between male sentence and a female sentence
My language is not manmade; it is beyond the white-hot roofs of your seminal texts. My language is dark and dangerous and desperate in its eagerness to slaughter your myths. My lines are feverish with the heat of the bodies you banish in your Manusmriti and Kamasutra (Kandasamy 9).
In her poems, she talks about the different shades of a woman. In a verse called 'Backstreet Girls', she says “I am a bitch with tattoos on my lusty thighs this dark lady has a storm in her speech" (Kandasamy 14). She is challenging the set images of a woman in the society where she is weather Madonna or only a Witch. But Kandasamy in her poem shows the other shades of a woman, which male writers have never demonstrated.
Title of her book Ms Militancy itself is very suggestive of women being militant against the patriarchal system of society. She hits on two most subaltern entities of Indian culture, which are women and lower casts. She presents the two main oppressors; the caste-based Hindu society and patriarchy in her writings.
A woman’s will always have to be the subject of investigation in the patriarchy. And Kandasamy opens her book with such a poem. The poem titled 'A Cunning Stunt' is the first poem of the book. She shows how in the society a woman's will gets investigated, filtered and censored.The norms constructed for women in society disallow her for any choices. She works for her family and community, all except herself.
I am torn apart
to contain the meanings of
family, race, stock, and caste
and form of existence
and station fixed by birth (Kandasamy 11)
The poem ends with the woman being cunning. She starts pretending in an attempt to please the man. She doesn’t want him to be unpleasant to her. “I am frightened. I turn frigid. I turn faker” (Kandasamy 12). The line which sums up the poem and shows how awful circumstances she faces because of her gender discrimination.
In one of her poems titled 'Big Brother: An epic in eighteen episodes', she rewrites the story of Mahabharata where Yuddhisthir the eldest of Pandava loses his kingdom, his brothers and his wife as well. But the myth since centuries portrays Yudhisthir as Dharmraj, meaning the one who is 'dutiful.' This dutiful portrayal of Yudhidthir is challenged by Kandasamy. She analyses this incident with Gynocentric lenses.
In that Sin City, with its slot machines,
This gaming guy lost all to loaded dice-
His brothers, his bonds, his villas, his wife (Kandasamy 15).
A poem titled 'Princes-in-exile (Kandasamy45)' is about how a woman is disgusted and scornful of her failed marriage and how she finds peace in the world of a new age guru in saffron clothes and caramel words. This is a protest poem that denotes how the women of the world are tired of the dominating male society and also states that to leave one man, she needs another's caramel words to save her. She learns to walk out and disappear but only with the help of another man. This shows the self-dependency and how the self-discovery of oneself is yet to come for a woman.
A poem titled 'Ms Militancy (Kandasamy36)' describes a woman in the pain of having lost her husband and how she became a human form of a hurricane in her own house. She thinks she is dying, and it is like ants are crawling on her skin, and she cannot even seem to eat. But when her husband is ditched and duped by his dancer mistress, she accepts him again. She is the woman shown in the novels of Shashi Deshpande through the characters of Jaya and Urmi, who accepts their husbands in any form. There is a protest in Kandasamy's voice, but not until the man returns. She also forgives the woman he had been with, forgets all the bad blood, sells off ankle (jewellery) only to find a body bag at her house, of her dead husband. There are only failures for women in this society, as described in Kandasamy's poem.
In a poem called 'Dead woman walking' Kandasamy reflects upon the conditions of women of contemporary times as mostly dead or brainsick in asylums. She shows women with positive steps, probably in the patriarchal world with felted flying hair, denoting grace. The hollow of the cheek might refer to the tiredness of trying. The same goes with the description of offset bulging eyes. The seizures of speech and song with every single piece between her sobbing, pendulous breasts seem to be denoting her failure in her feministic endeavours in every poem she writes.
She also gives the incident of a wife whose husband was shifty-eyed. How she gave away the most delicious self to make him stay is described in her words. He felt her for another fancy formless wife, and she found it. The predicament of a woman in the male-run world is present in Kandasamy's poetry. She is the 'Feminist' mix with the 'Female' phase of Showalter's phases.
Conclusion
In this paper, the key concepts of Elaine Showalter's essay ‘Towards a Feminist Poetics, such as Gynocritic, Feminist Phase, Female Phase, the discovery of self by writing in a female language and a female framework are reflected in the writings of Meena Kandasamy. Further, Kandasamy is practising these concepts along with the differences as well. Her focus on myths and more on protest and less on female discourse make her a blend of Showalter's Feminist and Female Phase at the same time. And that is because of the situation of women in India. Showalter's essay can be persuasive worldwide, but it let it be evident that she is writing from the experience of feminism in American society. Kandasamy, on the other hand, focuses on the needs of the Indian community. And Indian society still needs feminist resistance apart from the female framework. The situation of women in households is still bitter, and it is still in need of fight and resistance. Kandasamy's retelling the myths from a woman perspective tries to make a female discourse tries to make a framework for Indian women. They will not relate with American persona of Showalter whom she calls 'Critica' in her essay, but they will associate themselves with the women of Kandasamy such as Kali, Draupadi, Sita and Ahyalya. Thus, it is clear that Meena Kandasamy's poetries reflects the critical concepts of Elaine Showalter's essay and yet, at the treatment of feminism Kandasamy at some places differs from Showalter and takes her own opinion as per the demand of women of her respective region.
Work Cited: