Monday, August 21, 2006

Why should women think beyond the present

As a woman what I missed most was an epic heroine who would make me travel my own dreams in my own terms. I miss that still. There was no world for me beyond being a secondary mate on the back of a horse riding along with the prince or the villain or the story. I was never deemed the centre of my own story except for in Romances where there was no flavour beyond what the man-writer thought I was all about. My voice was never there. I was never me. I was living in someone else's dream. I wanted my own story where I am something beyond a final prejudice and an approximation of something multiple, higher and extensive. I wanted to be so special with all the effort a man-writer or a woman-writer would invest in me and make me not so much of a woman but a free spirit. Idiosyncratic, human, a social construct and yet tearing away from it all the time.

The present is full of such monotony and without any understanding of where to start defining a woman. I think a woman is not a definable object. She is a summation of her own quests and achievements. That's where we talk about histories and women. A woman is an epic of experiences and her present is a matter of subjective documentation. Discourse is the very field of wrestling and women should try to derive their own sense of history and thereby create it for our pasts and our futures. A woman or a generation without a voice in the histories is again a story without any place for her. She is a shadow of error.

Woman and her politics is never resolved until she herself write her agenda beyond the present.....

1 comment:

Shamik Chakravarty said...

I do think it's sad that there are no such heroines and new fairy tales have to be made(actually Hansel and Gretel is one, where there are no dragons but there is courage. Sad you missed out Alice in Wonderland where she had her own adventures. Cinderella had her own courage to look beyond. Well, as a conclusion, it seems that what you wanted was a few Dragons and a cyclops and war.)
So maybe it's our obsession with war-oriented tales and heroes that needs to change.
I think Elizabeth Bennet(if Pride and Prejudice can be called an epic) was a woman of character and she didn't have to be the woman on the prince's steed.
And the parts in old tales with sexist overtones we can safely bowlderize in our minds and enjoy the rest. Men's minds and women's minds need not have that much of a dichotomy. We perhaps can see them mainly as human's minds.

Just being cocky.