Amal Zaman takes us on a search for narratives of feminist resistance from the Global South.
What guided my search for narratives of feminist resistance as a young Pakistani woman? Why do I go looking with a flashlight? Becoming a feminist writer – someone invested in literature as a record of feminist thinking – meant that I had to reckon with gaps in knowledge, both my knowledge and the knowledge that was available for me to write about. I counteracted such gaps by searching for narratives of resistance from Global South and postcolonial feminist writers.
First, I will address the formation of my own knowledge. The erasure begins with language and education. Feminist literature from Urdu, Sindhi, or Punjabi traditions did not make their way to me through school, as my literary tastes were inculcated in Pakistani English-medium schools. I wasn’t taught Amrita Pritam or Attia Dawood, instead, I was taught Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”. This story tells a tale of one woman’s constricted role in society and relegation to domestic space, leading to madness as both a result of these confinements and as a kind of escape. For me, the story was a helpful portrayal of the connections between one’s social reality – how patriarchal societies limit the kinds of life and experiences women have access to – and one’s psychological state. The story held some parallels to the experience of being confined within domestic spaces as a Pakistani girl. Yet, there were limits to what this text and others by liberal feminists could offer me by way of making sense of my own realities. And by liberal feminism here, I mean a feminism that sees its goal as political equality between men and women. The limits of such a feminism are that neither man nor woman are just one thing. Some groups of women may have political power over and above other groups of women and men.
It took me a little while to understand that a story like “The Yellow Wallpaper,” written by a white American woman in 1892, or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, or Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse were making their way to me not because I was reaching out for them, but because ideals of white womanhood was what colonized women were made to aspire to. Understanding this colonial racism in education and fiction helped me see how I, and other Pakistani women with class and caste privileges, could replay this dynamic in the way we related to women outside our caste and class.
I became increasingly interested in how women across different postcolonial contexts had written back against this dynamic and authored their own versions of what feminist resistance looked like from their realities rather than the realities of canonized white women. One of the most striking early encounters I had with such a text was I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem by the Guadeloupian author Maryse Conde. Tituba was a Black enslaved woman who was killed under witchcraft accusations in Salem and is almost undocumented as a historical figure besides this fact. Conde takes this figure and gives her an entire fictional life. While I had learned already that narratives authored by white women and women with class privileges were plentiful and readily available, this book showed me how an author can take that problem as a starting point and push against it: that imagining lives that otherwise go unrecorded could be a mode of feminist resistance through fiction.
Maryse Conde wrote in the French colonial language, demonstrating that language itself is not a barrier to writing anticolonial texts or reckoning with histories of colonialism in writing, it is a medium that must be reworked to such ends. Another writer I encountered who struggled against being educated in a colonial language was the Algerian novelist Assia Djebar. Djebar reckoned with the losses of a colonial education by looking for ways to record the lives of subaltern women whose self-authored narratives did not exist in writing. One method she employed was looking for feminist narratives in the stories of women who joined or supported guerilla resistance movements in French-occupied Algeria. She found these women and interviewed them, recording their testimonies in her novel Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade.
Djebar writes about one such woman, Cherifa. When Cherifa receives a message to join her older brothers in the Maquis, she says, “I nearly danced for joy, I clenched my teeth to hold back my ululations.” (Assia Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, 1985, 118)
Once Cherifa goes to join her brothers, one of them is killed in an ambush. She does not get to see her remaining brother frequently and lives as a health worker amongst the Maquis:
“They took me to the Mimoun hospital where Si Omar was in charge. It took me some time to get used to the change. Then suddenly they said to me, ‘You’ll have to get married!’
‘No, I won’t,’ I replied. ‘You can kill me if you like, but I won’t get married!”
No matter what they said, they couldn’t persuade me. The doctor who had taught me everything sided with me and Omar.
‘They’re really only children! Leave them alone!’
Eventually, it seems, this doctor left the maquis because of this incident. He didn’t do anything, he didn’t turn traitor, but he preferred to give himself up!…
In this marriage business, they thought of giving me to a ‘chief’! A chief from Mouzaïa. I stuck to my guns. Then they said, ‘If you don’t want to marry this one, marry someone else, anyone you like! Choose!’
I replied, ‘Did I join you just to get married? No, I won’t marry anyone! These men are all my brothers!'” (Djebar, Fantasia, 131.)
Cherifa’s ringing refusal reveals the chasm between how she views her own worth and how those around her measure her value. She asserts her vision of herself as open to more possibilities than being a bride in the clearest of terms: life and death. Cherifa’s stories are interspersed with those of other women who joined or sheltered the Maquis, Djebar’s own memoirs, accounts of Algerian battles and how bridal processions fared under ambushes. She recognizes that these stories are but mere traces, that they cannot be captured because of Djebar’s own education in French, and the time and space between them. In this recognition of our limitations as feminist thinkers and writers, we must also try to defy them and look beyond.
Another author I came across who pushed the limits of knowledge and colonial histories by imagining the lives of historical figures through fiction is Marie Vieux-Chauvet. Her novel, Dance on the Volcano tells the story of Minette, who was the first Black Opera singer in Haiti in the years leading up to the Haitian Revolution. On the stage, Minette finds both her singing and political voice as she faces the intense racial hierarchy of her social world manifested all around her despite the barriers she has broken by ascending to the comedy. Looking down from the stage at her audience, Minette is a witness to inequality from an angle no one else from her racial group shares:
“She had been chosen by destiny to represent them in the world of the Whites, and to prove through her talent that their so-despised race had produced exceptional beings. A white public had put her on a pedestal, and from that pedestal she looked down and saw everything unmasked. And what she saw was horrific. It was a shame. How lovely it would be to be rich, celebrated, adored, without regret. She sighed without lowering her eyes from Beauvais’ gaze. He smiled. Decidedly, she had a gift for pulling smiles from the most strained lips.
“What a strange little woman!” said Beauvais.
And then, planting himself right in front of her:
“Have you ever lowered your eyes before anyone?” he asked her.
“Never, Monsieur, not even before a white man.”
“Not even, huh!'”(Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Dance on the Volcano, 1957, 15.)
Minette responds to what she sees when she is on the stage by looking insistently into the eyes of others. She refuses the indignity of lowering her eyes before others–both white men, and men of her own race. This gesture of refusal makes the indignity tangible and brings it to the surface. The characters of Vieux-Chauvet’s novel bring new images of what dissent can look like and challenges patriarchal notions of who gets to be a revolutionary actor. Purveyors of culture and erotics have a revolutionary role to play, just as those at the frontlines do.
CLR James’ brilliant and much lauded history on the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, is written about two decades before Dance on the Volcano and focuses on revolutionary leaders. The Black Jacobins is organized around the notion that “Great men make history, but only such history as it is possible for them to make.” The job of the historian, as James sees it, is to paint a picture of the limitations of the hero’s environment and the scope of possible achievement given those limitations. Vieux-Chauvet’s novel extends this idea by focusing on a great woman who exceeds what is possible for her racial category in her society and yet still faces a whole host of limitations and pain. Minette with her excessive talent is awakened not just by the trials she faces in the theater, but by her mother’s stories, her tutor, the free colored people who meet to organize and free more black slaves, and the righteousness of the resistance of the enslaved and oppressed.
All these authors look beyond the limitations of their colonial education and recorded history to try and imagine feminist resistance:
“For Arabic women I see only one single way to unblock everything: talk, talk without stopping, about yesterday and today, talk among ourselves, in all the women’s quarters, the traditional ones as well as those in the housing projects, talk among ourselves and look. Look outside, look outside the walls and the prisons!”
(Assia Djebar, Women of Algiers, 1992, 50)
Forced to spend time in prison and anguished at the restricted life her mother was forced to live, Sara resolves to live a free life in Assia Djebar’s Women of Algiers. “Look” and “talk” are Sara’s instructions for those who wish to resist their daily oppressions. When I think of Sara’s words, I imagine feminist resistance as always looking beyond the limits of what falls in front of one’s eyes or ears. The information that comes to us easily shapes our imaginations and what we believe to be possible. We must break past it to expand our possibilities.
In keeping with this idea, I’d like to suggest some texts for young feminists looking to expand their knowledge and look beyond. For narratives about women and gender minorities who participated in resistance movements, there is Heiny Srour’s recordings of the feminist guerilla resistance in the Dhofar war of the 70’s Saat El Tahrir Dakkat (The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived, 1974), Leila Khaled’s autobiography of a revolutionary, My People Shall Live, Anuradha Ghandy’s writing about the revolutionary adivasi women of Dandakaranya, Nimmi Gowrinathan’s analysis of female fighters across Sri Lanka, Eritrea, Pakistan, and Colombia and Karen Kampwirth’s book on women in guerrilla movements across Latin America. For women’s prison memoirs, there is Nawal El Saadawi’s Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, Angela Davis’ Are Prisons Obsolete? and Sakine Cansiz’s Sara: Prison Memoir of a Kurdish Revolutionary. Representations of the rebellions and revolts of enslaved women include Marlon James’ the Book of Night Women, Maryse Conde’s I, Tituba, The Black Witch of Salem, and Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s novel, Dance on the Volcano. A graphic novel-memoir on the same topic is Wake by Rebecca Hall.
Amal Zaman is a writer, educator, and PhD candidate from Karachi. Her research focuses on representations of South Asian women in global fiction and culture. Her work has recently appeared in the journal South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, and in an Asian American Studies special cluster of the Joyce Studies Annual.
