by Mara Ziyad
Women have been bleeding their hearts out on paper for long, but our narrative, as women, has recently evolved as our voices have become our own. Mara Ziyad explores her thoughts around what writing means to women and men, and of women as readers and women as writers.
Think about writing and men. A man, writing. Then, think about writing and women.
A woman writing. Which image was more personal to you in its component parts? Which gender has the more intimate attachment to paper?
I’m not trying to make this a competition. Instead, I wish to highlight the fierceness with which our sex has clung to the power of representation, the secret, subversive voice of words on a page. When Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell were published, it wasn’t the strength of their voices as women that won the day. It was the fact that they were men (at least, so society thought). Read on paper women and men were the same. On paper, Charlotte, Emily and Anne were taken seriously. We can just imagine them – sitting in their boudoirs, working away in their corsets and petticoats, telling the world their stories.
When we talk about women and writing, we know that it’s not only feminist treatises like the Second Sex, or the Feminine Mystique, that held sway over the world, our world. When a woman sits down and puts pen to paper, she enriches the world in a way she generally cannot otherwise. It is the voice that cannot be heard, that is being heard. It is the pain that is not spoken of, being spoken of.
This is not just an abstract narrative I am talking about. It has personal implications for me. Born and brought up in a fundamentalist cult, that I am still (externally) a part of, and that I cannot name for security reasons, my voice has been sat upon and squashed in all ways – except: this. You can hear me. I am a woman. And I am writing. I am writing.
Where would I be, right now, without my words?
Unspoken of, unheard, brushed aside. I would be less than dust – I would be invisible.
That is what writing has been about for women. Making us more than invisible. You see, for men, writing is about dispersing ideas. For women, it is dispersing ourselves.
But it’s also about more than who is holding the pen, man or woman – such inconsequentialities as gender are transcended through a sort of union by the complex female protagonist: a voice not necessarily Woman, and yet. Whether it is well-written characters such as Emma Bovary, or Anna Karenina, or Margaret Atwood’s unnamed protagonist in Surfacing, writing has shown women as more than the fair sex. It has shown us as weak. It has given us the luxury of making mistakes. And of not being defined by them. Of defining our mistakes, and ourselves. Of shaping our narratives, whether by being flawed protagonists or flawed authors – living testaments to our being. Of acknowledging our complexity. I have no compunctions about a well-written woman written by a man – it shows he has an understanding of women. Some might feel it “contrary” to the spirit of Woman’s selfhood, to allow a man’s representation of her to be complex, or at all deserving merit. ‘Too long have we been the muse!’ they might cry. I have caught the undertones of such sentiments myself, in feminist literary critiques – an almost petulant lack of openness. But I believe women can embrace being the Other, embrace being the object of a man’s artistic energies as well as (yes!) foibles, as long as they get to do the embracing. And what better place for women to embrace themselves, than the mirror of their own reflections, in the myriad voices of pages turned?
There are things women would rather subsume, eat, swallow along with her breakfast – consequences of a long training in dollhouse femininity, placid maternity. Words keep these things together for us, stringing them on a common pulse, a hidden pulse. A woman gets to explore what makes her do, what makes her be, when she reads of other women; she sees the leash whose existence society will never admit to. She remembers parts of herself she has pushed under the rug. Just imagine: a housewife. Sitting up in bed, waiting for her husband to come home so she can switch off the night light, very Betty Draper-esque. She is reading Madame Bovary. She remembers hidden longings – secret desires. Outside, the string of women her husband flounces around with could go around the block. She does not know. Well, part of her does. That part, deep down stirring to life, is trawled out to the surface. Do you think then that Madame Bovary is just a story for her? It is her life. She is remembering the days she was hungry, the days she had desires, the days it wasn’t justso. She is remembering she has flaws, and secrets, and she is part lies, and she wasn’t born on an assembly line.
Ah, Madame Bovary. My first introduction to her, when I was twelve, was in the form of an excerpt. I could not persuade my mother to let me buy the complete book – and even now, she remains something of a mystery to me. Her tragedy mirrors Eve’s, doesn’t it? The forbidden apple we are always reaching for. Through the book she came to represent to me all the forbidden aspects of my character. Think about her embrace in the arms of her Rodolphe! The words: ‘there’s no precipice, no desert, no ocean I shall not cross in your company’. Isn’t there just the smallest part of us, the schoolgirl giddy for girlish love, the woman crazed with idealized passion, which makes us feel sorry, feel very, very sorry indeed, for the parts of us we’ve lost, and of which we stand in helpless recognition? Do we not read something of our own fates in Madame Bovary’s tears, something of the world’s cruelty to us in the cruelty of her lover?
Writing is not just something for women. It is something which makes woman. It takes shape as we take shape, as our reflection, it is mirroring us, our collective beats of consciousness. Our relationship with the written word may be reflected in our relationship with its seemingly original proprietors – Man. As we come into our own, Man recedes. As books and words become our own, Man’s narrative of us becomes swathed in history’s shadow, doomed, mostly, to a dusty chronicle of struggles. And now women are, finally, at the age-old turnstile, we have come full circle, and now own not just our strengths (embodied in our rather tiresome Strong Female Characters), but our milky romantic “weaknesses”, our tender passions, our dependence on men. Do they not? Kamala Das, so unashamed to admit that her poem the Looking Glass is about ‘how to get a man to love me’. And why should we be ashamed? We desire love, and we desire it on paper – although sometimes our efforts are less than literary (I’m looking at you, Stephanie Meyer.)
In Surfacing, a woman loses her sanity and, with it, comes into her identity, encountering herself in a broken mirror-shard. As women readers enter into its pages, do they also lose, with this protagonist, that part of their identity holding them back from entering her world of fuzzy boundaries, of unseen lines keeping them “just so”? Maybe. What do women authors give to emerge out of the well of sanity, and raise their heads in an animal world, into a world where everything seems right, only because they are “wrong”? To wear their own shoes, to walk the paths of experience and their never-explored, but deep within well-trodden ways – that is the work of the writer. To return to a sort of primitive insanity – to unleash their own peculiar beast. To bleed all over the page their innermost frothiness, the warm shock of their menstrual blood. To touch, and let themselves be touched, as Woman.
Women have been writing for aeons. But only comparatively recently, only in history’s now, have been able to own their own words. And for being born in an age where a woman can write as Woman, without having to hide in name behind Man, I am strongly, irresistibly, thankful.
Mara Ziyad is an ardent devotee of the Temple of the Written Word. She is also a hopelessly hopeful novelist, who will one day finish her book. In her spare time, she talks to her imaginary friends and gives herself bad haircuts.
