Shameless Women: Repression and Resistance in We Sinful Women: Contemporary Urdu Feminist Poetry

NELUKA SILVA Shameless Women Repression and Resistance in We Sinful Women: Contemporary Urdu Feminist Poetry Maulana Naqshbandi, one ofPakistan's religious leaders, accounted for Pakistan's defeat byIndia at the World Cup Cricket quarter-finals in March 1996 by saying "Any nation which made a woman its ruler has never prospered" (cited in The Times ofPakistan, 11 March 1996, 27). This comment encodes the dominant attitude towards women in a rigorously Islamic society, and is germane to the central argument ofthis essay, which situates gender oppression and devices offemale resistance in a specific temporal and spatial context. Taking the case ofa literary text, We Sinful Women: Contemporary Urdu Feminist Poetry (1991) I will explore the ways in which cultural production becomes a tool ofresistance in a climate ofsocial repression. In this anthology a group ofwomen poets from Pakistan, who refuse to conform to both sociocultural and literary traditions, react to oppression by calling attention to the way in which female experiences are policed and controlled by the state. I aim to demonstrate that though poetry is often regarded as a private, "emotional" genre it can, and does, become an enablingvehicle during political and social upheaval. One ofthe problems ofcritically examining Urdu women's poetry is the dearth ofscholarship on the subject. Although this anthology was published over ten years ago, there has been little material in English to aid in developing a critical perspective on We Sinful Women. Thus I have had to rely on secondary sources that are [Meridians:feminism, race, transnationalism 2003, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 28-51]©2003 by Wesleyan University Press. All rights reserved. 28 not directly related to the anthology or to Urdu women's poetry in general . Nonetheless, this text cannot be ignored since it probes and contests issues ofdiscrimination that transcend its sociopolitical and temporal context, and points to the empowering possibilities thatwomen (and other marginalized groups) can formulate for themselves. Although the poets grapple with the politics ofthe 1980s, as the editor notes "The fear offurther oppression still looms large for women in Pakistan in the nineties," and I would add, in the twenty-first century (Ahmad 1991). In combatting legal ordinances like the Hudood Ordinance (which affected women ofall social classes; see below) through their poetry, these women (albeit mostly drawn from the middle and upper echelons ofthe Pakistani urban milieu) reveal that feminist praxis can be a unifying force when the social fabric ofa nation is under siege. Since the women poets were also members ofthe waf (Women's Action Front) the poems are a part ofa multi-pronged attack against the socio-religious and political hegemony ofthe State.1 Despite the middle-class, Westerneducated roots ofwaf's founders (albeit mosdy from the urban centers), its representative base widened over theyears.2 Initiatives such as the waf are crucial on another level: they undercut the charges ofelitism that are leveled (most often by patriarchal groups) against feminists in South Asia.3 I begin this essay with a discussion ofthe existing Urdu poetic conventions , the popularghazal and rekhti, in order to foreground the points of departure or convergence in the poetry examined here. I will argue that when the poets analyzed here choose the traditional poetic convention or form it is reinvented for a political and/or feminist purpose, while those who reject the conventions strive to forge a new poetic form, symbolically enacting their entry into the hitherto debarred public/political space. My engagementwith the text is divided into two sections. The first section focuses on experiences pertaining to the female body: menstruation, childbirth, and veiling. The poets speak ofhow personal choice is denied and political and national significations are assigned to them and appropriated and controlled by the state. The second section is devoted to an analysis ofoppression couched in the traditional, interlocking "public" discourses oflaw, tradition, and religion. These two sections—ofthe private and public spheres—aim to highlight the totalizing control imposed upon women. SHAMELESS WOMEN 29 The Impact ofthe Hudood Ordinance When General Zia Ul Haq seized power in 1977 and imposed martial law, his mission was to convert Pakistan into a Muslim state. Following the secession ofEast Pakistan (Bangladesh) from the center, the nation...