Mothers Sing a Lullaby
(after the 1994 Rwandan genocide)

Mothers sing a lullaby
As the dark descends on trees
Shutting out shadows.
The sensuous voices swish and swirl
Around shrubs and overgrown grass
Hiding mountains of decapitated dead
And the glint of machetes
That slashed shrieking throats.

In these camps without happiness
Mothers maintain the melody of life
Capturing wistful wind
To sing strength into the souls of children
Who have never known
The taste of morning porridge
Or heard the chirrup of crickets in the evenings.

Mothers sing a lullaby
For the staring faces
Who cringe at the sound of footsteps
Whose playmates are grinning skeletons.

Mothers become a lullaby
Silencing the sirens of sorrow
Restoring compassion to the nation.

***

My Mother in Three Photographs

Her face looks out
flawless
her sexuality electric
in a mini dress and sheer satin stockings
the girls of the 1960s
beautiful beyond belief.
She is looking through the camera
like her space is here and beyond
enchanting and enchanted
by the times when dreams of freedom were young
the fortunes of Uganda
hot and sizzling.

My mother in the 1970s
More sombre but her skin
Still flawless
The abrasive years gentle on her youth.
Her body wrapped in a long nylon dress
stopping her ankles and
full sleeves touching her wrists
hooded sorrow in her posture
the flowing dress
is not because
she is a widow (which is by government action)
but it is a government decree.
Her magnificence and elegance
Seem to support the given name of the dress
Amin nvaako.

My mother in the 1990s
neat short hair
luring in its intricate curls.
She wears a busuuti
a sign of the times
a return home, a finding of
uncertain peace
a maturing of a woman and nation
an endorsement of a recognition of the troubles
she has weathered
a sitting down to count her losses and blessings
and a hand over of the future.

P.S. Amin Nvaako means Amin let me be or Amin leave me alone

***
Susan Nalugwa Kiguli is a Ugandan poet and academic. She holds a PhD in English from The University of Leeds sponsored by the prestigious Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature, Makerere University, Uganda, and has served as the chairperson of FEMRITE, Uganda Women Writers’ Association. She is published widely in national and international anthologies and journals.

Ad 1: A little girl whines about how her hair isn’t as long as her mother’s was in her childhood. The mother apologetically mentions that she has to work while Nani (her own mother) was “at home all day.” As she drops her daughter off to school in a car driven by her, the girl whips around and retorts in Hindi, “Then don’t go to office!”  The situation is resolved by the mother saving the day, her job and her relationship with her daughter by producing a satisfactory solution, namely a bottle of Clinic Plus shampoo.

Ad 2: A schoolgirl, not much older than 8 or 9, boasts to the camera about how her mother is special because she lost oodles of weight on a Special K cereal diet that requires one to eat two bowls of cereal, twice a day as one’s only form of nourishment. The mother comes in at the end, smiles indulgently at her and then the audience and fondly asks “Bahut bolti hain na?” (Speaks too much, doesn’t she?).  And the ad ends with them sharing a cuddle.

So let’s think about this:

1. Mummies must primarily attend to their children’s every whim, to the point where their own needs/career aspirations must be sublimated. Vanity and shimmering hair over all else!
2. Little girls think it’s okay to be terribly proud of not-so-skinny mums turning skinny (so if they didn’t, would they be unhappy or embarrassed?)
3. Even if it’s half-jokingly, a girl who speaks “too much” must be chided, especially by her own mother.

Some ridiculously naïve part of me kept watching in the hope that the mother in each ad would rectify the daughter’s misconception but really, are the folks selling shampoo and breakfast cereal listening to a feminist rant? Three guesses, people.

On a more heartening note, take a look at this post on Saffron Tree. As a preschool educator, I constantly struggle with poor female representation in narratives and often create my own stories to compensate. But of course, the telly will keep beaming what it will as long as cereal and shampoo sell. Knew there was a reason they call it the idiot box.

If anything, technology only seems to be ensuring that parents can select for gender more effectively. A recent book, Disappearing Daughters reveals that the female-male sex ratio across five north-western Indian states is abysmal, and worsening. Nor does affluence necessarily seem to improve the situation, because upper-caste families, more likely to have access to land and education, are no better. As InfoChange India mentions,

In four of the five sites surveyed, the proportion of girls to boys had declined since the 2001 census. In one site in Punjab state, there are just 300 girls to every 1,000 boys among higher caste families, the report says.

A few months ago, I read Elisabeth Bumiller’s ‘May you be the Mother of a Hundred Sons’, the title of this post. Though the book suffers from some generalizations that would be obvious to an Indian eye, I thought that it did a pretty good job of covering many of the issues faced by women across the country. The pity is that though the book was written almost 20 years ago, we don’t seem to have progressed much on some of them.

One of the things she brings up in this book is sex-selective abortions. The dilemma is this: on the one hand, it is important that women have the right to abort as an inalienable right over their own bodies. On the other hand, to prevent the rampant killing of foetuses identified as female, the government has made such identification illegal. Then, is this equivalent to giving a woman only partial control over her womb? You may abort, but only for reasons that we approve of–is that what we are saying?

To me, while this is a dilemma in theory, circumstances in India may need a different solution. For one thing, it is a well known fact that irrespective of what the law says, many Indian women do not actually have any control over their bodies. Whether contraception is used at all, for how long, whether to keep the foetus or abort it–these decisions are rarely in the hands of the woman, or even of the couple alone. Social norms, the economic situation and the wishes of family play an important role. (Here is an interesting account of a program to promote knowledge of contraception and change in child-bearing patterns in rural India, which shows that community involvement is important.)

In this situation, it is not feasible to say that any reason for abortion is valid–are women really exercising control over their bodies, or are women’s bodies being controlled by others to fulfil the demand for sons? (There will of course be some women who say that it is entirely their choice, but I’m talking about the majority here.)

Legally outlawing sex-selective abortion is not a panacea by itself. As the data shows clearly, it is not working, and will not work, as long there are plenty of unethical medical professionals. Poor law enforcement means that the culprits will rarely be booked, let alone punished. States like Tamil Nadu which have implemented the Cradle Baby scheme, find that there is no drop in the number of babies being dropped off there, showing that unless fundamental attitudes change, only the means of disposal will differ.

For poor families, girls are seen as an economic burden: they will not bring much into the family kitty and will deplete it as the cost of marriage is shouldered by the girl’s parents. For more well-to-do families, dowry may be one factor but there also seems to be an element of pride attached to having male children. This is closely related to a patriarchal society’s handing down of assets. So until girls are seen as economic assets–as people who can earn their own way–this practice is not going to stop. For girls to be able to do that, they need to be able to live, get enough to eat and then get to school, before they can learn a skill and start supporting themselves. This is apart from attitude changes towards dowry and marriage.

This then is the dilemma in a country where girls are blamed for being unproductive assets and killed before they can ever prove themselves: how do we bring up our girls to be productive citizens when they are rarely allowed to get here in the first place?

Ironically, in this time where the use of technology is at an all time high, maternal mortality rates in the US are also abysmally high largely due to the increase in c-sections. Not only are women questioning births attended by doctors, but by midwives or any trained person. To quote an excerpt from “Pushed”:

Unassisted birth isn’t new. In the 1960s and 1970s it was often the only alternative to a hospital birth—a strapped down, separated from husband, guaranteed episiotomy birth—and the women who did it also gave birth to organized midwifery. “That’s what we were doing in the 1970s before there were any midwives,” says Peggy O’Mara, editor of Mothering. “It was part of the whole back-to-land movement and commune movement.” It was also a natural extension of the early feminist, grab-a-speculum-and-mirror-and-reclaim-your-body ethos, she said. “And I consider it a really legitimate response to certain environments. Where I lived in southern New Mexico, for instance, the choices were so poor that we just wanted to figure it out ourselves.”…For O’Mara, unassisted birth was the best women could do under the circumstances.

Until recently, most women in India had homebirths, usually assisted by a dai (traditional midwife) or other woman experienced in childbirth. But now, urban middle-class women are expected to birth in hospitals and the rate for c-sections among this strata is virtually the same as that of the industrialised countries. Still, dais do deliver 70% of India’s babies, given the fact that the same percentage of the population is rural. Yet the role of dais is ever-changing due to the state’s insistence upon training in medical standards of care, and their traditional knowledge is not respected (see the book “Birthing with Dignity” by Diane Smith and Jagori).

Newindpress.com has just published the story of Reba Daniel, who chose to give birth with only her husband present. Unassisted birth must happen all the time here to women who don’t have other options. But this is the first story I’ve found where an educated, professional woman did this of her own accord. Equally as impressive is that the article’s author is appreciative, and not critical, of the mother’s choice, since that is not how unassisted childbirth is being portrayed in Western media. The website Ms. Daniel got her idea from is here: http://unassistedchildbirth.com/

Yes, it is true that India has the highest rate of maternal mortality in the world, the main reasons being poverty, hunger and disease. But to those women who are physically fit and considering a hospitalised birth, I ask: why not give a thought to unassisted childbirth or homebirth with a dai?

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On February 18, the body of 15-year old Scarlett Keeling, a British national, was found on a Goan beach. Police initially chalked up her death to drowning after consuming too much alcohol, despite evidence of severe bruising and rape. But investigations and post-mortem investigations revealed contradictory facts, as did eyewitness accounts by people who had seen the girl during her final hours. Scarlett had been in India with her mother Fiona MacKeown, MacKeown’s boyfriend, and her siblings. They were frequent visitors, and on this instance were on a six-month-long trip.

Allegations were quickly leveled against MacKeown for her negligence of Scarlett. The moral higher ground was quickly swamped by those chastising her for her irresponsible behaviour. One whiff of scandal led to another, and details about MacKeown’s private life were dug up. Scarlett’s diary entries were exposed in the media. The bottomline message was that somehow, by choosing to lead lifestyles that included partying, sex and substances, they had asked for the tragedy that befell them. Terms like “alleged murder” were popular, as though it could have been anything else, until today’s gruesome revelation: Scarlett was murdered by having her head held underwater for between five and ten minutes. She asphyxiated to death.

It is alarming to watch the cruelty of the media – from possibly every newspaper in the country to even NDTV’s usually fairly progressive We The People to the blogosphere – and what can be gauged of common opinion by it. Despite the horrifying brutality inflicted on a person who by Indian standards was still a child, and the overwhelming confusion and despair her loved ones are no doubt experiencing, the attacks made against the victim and the family censure them with only superficial demonstrations of sympathy. Political officials in Goa are calling for the revoking of MacKeown’s visa and a ban on her entering the country again, blaming her for maligning the image of the state. She has since gone into hiding, fearing for her life from both the drug mafia and state officials whom she has linked to them.

Scarlett’s boyfriend, an Indian citizen named Julio Lobo, has been taken for medical tests to see if he is “sexually active”. A DNA test of substances found on or in the victim’s body would not be unreasonable, but pray tell, what does his being or not being sexually active reveal about the horrific tragedy? Is it necessary, given that in her diary, Scarlett had written not only that she had sex with him, but that she felt he used her for it? Is there a test that proves sexual activity in males? Or is this like one of those repressed, backward ideas about broken hymens and being able to pee in a straight line? That this person’s private life is being pried into in a manner that is unlikely to shed any light on the senselessness of the incident is nothing more than one of the many ways in which the blame is being pinned on “the wanton Western way”. The boyfriend, we are to assume, has sinned by his affinity to this lifestyle of debauchery, which – we are also to assume – is imported to India by the likes of the Keeling family. But even that doesn’t quite crack it: Lobo is being tested not because of his character – but because of what the conclusiveness of science is meant to tell us about hers.

Lobo, in turn, has retaliated by attacking MacKeown because she had been aware of Scarlett’s lifestyle (but she says Scarlett was neither a binge drinker not drug abuser, to her knowledge). This, too, is reprehensible. At 25 years old, a decade older than Scarlett, his relationship with her could amount to statutory rape. Clearly, prior to the murder, MacKeown’s liberal parenting style benefited him. His attempt to deflect attention from his actual law-breaking by ganging up against the bereaved mother with the rest of the patriarchy squad is sickening.

In other words, the condemning of the murdered girl, her family, her friends, their lifestyles and their choices is a typical misogynist response – the wicked woman gets her dues. And this time, there are not one but two “wicked women”: Fiona MacKeown, mother of not just the victim, but of several more children of “varying paternity”, and Scarlett herself. That the women in question happen to be from the West (that corrupter of our chaste and virtuous ways of life!) is icing on the cake.

Rape, murder, the works – apparently, under the right (or wrong) circumstances, they can all be justified.

Make no mistake. What we see in the media today is not an enquiry into a crime. It is slut-shaming, plain and simple. The nation is not in shock because a 15 year old has been so brutally treated. Those are not the sounds of protest and outrage; they are the sounds of many hands rubbing in glee, so thrilled to be vindicated of their position that women who break the rules deserve what’s coming to them, and what’s coming to them is exactly what happened to Scarlett Keeling.

But what happened to Scarlett Keeling has nothing to do with if she had sex, if she did drugs, if she drank. What happened to Scarlett Keeling has nothing to do with why her mother so frequently chose to travel to India or lived a bohemian, unconventional lifestyle. What happened to Scarlett Keeling has only one reason: some places in the world are not safe for women, not because of culture or tradition, but because of an absence of respect for them as individuals. India is one of them. India killed Scarlett Keeling – and every day, kills many less sensationalized individuals. That Fiona MacKeown has seen this is not delusion on her part.

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]]> http://ultraviolet.in/2008/03/24/the-shaming-of-scarlett-keeling/feed/ 40 http://ultraviolet.in/2008/01/30/daring-to-divorce/ http://ultraviolet.in/2008/01/30/daring-to-divorce/#comments Wed, 30 Jan 2008 04:25:55 +0000 Becky Band http://youngfeminists.wordpress.com/?p=111 A CLOSE PERSON has been toying with the idea of a divorce for over two years. She has left her husband several times. The most recent attempt seems the most likely to result in divorce—she talked to her husband seriously, met with a lawyer and got all the gory details of how the law stipulates that a one-year ‘reconciliation period’ is necessary before granting a divorce. The massive family disapproval, nay downright prohibition via obsessive calls, pleas and commands, does not seem to have dented her resolve.

Being a child of divorced parents myself, I am still processing her experience and trying to fit it into a frame of reference. I am familiar with some of the repercussions that divorce can have on a family. The ‘traditional’ camp, actually, is not all that specific to Indian culture and exists in various dimensions among all cultures. Catholics don’t believe in divorce; nor do many Christian fundamentalists. My 93-year-old Jewish grandfather never quite understood my mom’s divorce. He would ask us kids how it’s possible for people who love each other to be apart, despite the hard times. We had a tough time explaining that maybe they don’t love each other and can’t be together. Anyway, he was never one to see other points of view contradictory to his own.

In India though, the anti-divorce side has its own particularities. I am presenting the following reasons in the most generalised terms but would be pleased if readers could add their own variations. This is what I have gathered from the experience of my friend, who comes from a relatively traditional, middle class family. Marriage is held to be a sacred union and the bond should be unbreakable even despite infinite misery. This is premised on a lack of female autonomy especially financial independence. A woman’s identity is fully tied to the institution of marriage i.e. her wedding is the most important event in her life and defines her place in society. So, of course, the question of what she would do after a divorce — both financially and socially — is unthinkable. The possibility of dating or remarriage is out of bounds. Lastly, there is the issue of the children — the mother should suck it up and do ‘what’s best’ for the child, who needs the father around and would be ostracised if he/she came from a ‘broken’ home.

I wish I could convince them that the pro-divorce (or anti-suffering) approach is more humane. That there is no point of pursuing avoidable hardship. Why force it if it isn’t working? Ultimately, this is in recognition of an individual’s right to be happy. Sometimes people just don’t/can’t change — so the relationship circumstances must change. Finally, I think that the child will be happiest if his/her parents are happy. An intact family isn’t necessarily a happy one. Plenty of troubled teens today have parents who are married. While I would never say that I had it easy dividing time between divorced parents (and the situation here might be even more difficult), I think divorce is the best possible solution when people simply can’t get along anymore.

Now, with women’s increasing financial independence, divorce is on the rise for those able to afford its costs — for example, women working in the IT sector in Bangalore, and apparently 2 out of 5 couples in Mumbai. This rise is seen by many as shocking, worrisome and the death knell to Indian culture. While it is sad and disturbing in cases where couples no longer have time for each other and are too stressed to connect because of crazy working hours, I also see it as a positive sign. Maybe, arranged marriages aren’t working for some people anymore. Or people are less willing to stay in relationships that make them unhappy. One thing is clear though. Whether or not people agree with divorce, the institution of marriage is changing and people had better start accepting it.

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Seven years ago, I attended a wedding reception that I will never forget. A few months previously, I had just had a baby and this wedding was one of the first occasions when I was going out with the new arrival. It was quite traumatic for me: all I wanted to do was meet friends and enjoy a few conversations; instead I had to worry about feeds, secluded rooms and diapers.

There were three of us at a table – my (then) husband and I, and an old college friend who was independently a friend and colleague of the husband. U and G started to talk while I tried to calm a cranky child unused to so many people, or to loud music and noise. The conversation between them was animated and mostly about work. Then, in a natural pause in the conversation, G turned to me and stared blankly for a minute before gathering her scattered wits to say:

“So.”

Silence.

I raised an eyebrow, but it’s unlikely that she saw it in the ill-lit corner of the garden where we were seated.

“How are things?”

“Fine,” I said.

“Good,” she said and turned back to U to talk office gossip.

That was the sum of our interaction. I could see her struggle to find something to say to me. This despite the fact that we had many friends in common; that we were more or less in the same area of work; that we studied in the same places for nearly four years. That was when I was first struck by the attitude that some people – among them many women – have to those who have just had a child. The general attitude seems to be that if you’ve just become a mother, your brains must be leaking out with the breast milk and no conversation that does not include bodily functions, is possible.

I, on the other hand, was heartily sick of poop and washing and feeds and sleepless nights and wanted to forget for a few hours that I had ever had a child. In the years that have passed since that evening, I have often wondered why this should have been so. It is not that I have ever regretted having a child. I certainly am not a bad parent. But I also know that I need time that is mine, entirely adult and unattached. I’ve never regretted the times when I’ve left my son to go out on my own, on work or with friends, to party or to watch films, to travel or do things that have no direct relation to child-rearing.

Is my determination to have some part of my life unfettered by the demands of parenting ‘unnatural’ or ‘unfeminine’? Do I do it to seek the approval of those who are not limited to the narrow business of motherhood and all its concerns? Why do I think talking about motherhood is ‘narrow’ while talking about cinema or poetry is not?

When I was in college, studying Renaissance literature, I came across this quote while writing a paper for a conference on feminism: “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart of a king, and of a king of England, too;”

I was struck by the construction of the sentence. It was part of a speech Queen Elizabeth made to her soldiers while urging them to fight against the Spanish Armada. Notice the way in which she assigns definite qualities to genders, but brings them together in her own person while simultaneously equating herself with all England. If she is a woman in some respects, she seems to say, she is a man in other ways, ways that count; that she is willing to rise above the qualities that make her a woman and become like a man – and not just any man but the King of England and therefore the foremost male in all the known world of the time.

What is unusual is that many decades into the feminist movement, we still feel the need to make these arbitrary and entirely spurious distinctions about what constitutes the ‘feminine’; we still judge in favour of those qualities that we consider are not overtly ‘feminine’.

Is it more feminine to talk about children? Less feminine to not want to talk of them? Which is better?

I read a fair number of blogs, among them a few written by ‘mombloggers’. These women – and men – talk about their children, about parenting, schooling, and a thousand other things that they feel strongly about. Recently there has been some unpleasantness as a result. One such attack said, in its own defence, that it was all right to say what was said because the post was only pointing out how the momblog in question ‘obfuscate[d] the absence of a career with the presence of a uterus.’

It was an astonishing statement. It not only assumed that ‘career’ meant specifically, something that made you get out of the house at a certain time, dressed in a certain way, to go to an ‘office’ and return home several hours later (women working from home while also looking after children clearly do not have a ‘career’. Presumably they are amusing themselves with the jam while their husbands earn the bread and butter); it also assumed that all parenting concerns automatically abdicate the call of the brain (or the heart – another apparently masculine organ) in favour of the uterus; and finally, assumed that these conversations were taking place exclusively among women.

‘Uterus’ seems to spell ‘natural’, and therefore nothing that requires effort or the exercise of reason. One is either born with a uterus or not, so there’s no need to make a big deal of what comes out if it; worse, talking about it all seriously is an affront.

This reminded me so much of G that evening seven years ago, when she had nothing to say to a woman who had just had a child. At that time I met her discomfort with silence, vowing to never inflict my private and necessary absorption with motherhood on anyone else. I even resented the ways in which motherhood suddenly tied me to my gender.

At that time, it seems now to me, new mothers were a ghetto unto themselves, incomprehensible and separate from the regular world of working women, doomed to silence in the absence of places to talk about the gestalt shift in their lives. Now, it appears that new mothers have not only found a few rooms of their own, they have become articulate and noticeable.

In the process, if they have once again embraced all the things that were traditionally considered the province of women – absorption with children, their bodies, the looking after of hearth and home, whether to resume a career or not – it is ironic that the call to shut up about these things comes not from other women who have fought long and hard to claim other areas as their own, but from a man who is annoyed by how popular these women are but is not especially seized by any doubts about what the persistent binaries might mean to our understanding of gender.

***

Sridala Swami lives in Hyderabad and writes poetry and fiction. Her poetry has appeared in Nthposition, Kritya, Museindia, Chandrabhaga, The Little Magazine, New Quest and Wasafiri; and in the Talking Poetry anthology 50 Poets 50 Poems edited by Priya Sarukkai Chhabria. Three books for very young children, Phani’s Funny Chappals, What Shall We Do For A Cradle? and Kabadiwala have been published by Pratham. Her first collection of poems, A Reluctant Survivor, was published by The Sahitya Akademi in June 2007. She blogs at http://spaniardintheworks.blogspot.com

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