Bodies That Remember: Women's Indigenous Knowledge and Cosmopolitanism in South Asian Poetry

2. “Pink in the Black Border”: Feminism, Nationalism, and Islamic Revitalization

98 “Pink in the Black Border” Feminism, Nationalism, and Islamic Revitalization Even if my eyes become the soles of your feet Even so, the fear will not leave you That though I cannot see I can feel bodies and sentences Like a fragrance Even if, for my own safety, I rub my nose in the dirt till it becomes invisible Even so, this fear will not leave you That though I cannot smell I can still say something. Even if my lips, singing praises of your godliness Become dry and soulless Even so, this fear will not leave you That though I cannot speak I can still walk. Even after you have tied the chains of domesticity, Shame and modesty around my feet Even after you have paralyzed me This fear will not leave you An abridged version of this chapter was previously published in the Journal of International Women’s Studies 11(1) (Nov. 2009): 208–24. “PI N K I N T H E BL AC K BOR DE R” | 99 That even though I cannot walk I can still think. Your fear Of my being free, being alive And able to think Might lead you, who knows, into what travails. Naheed and Farrukhi (2001, 58) In this poem, titled “Anticlockwise,” Kishwar Naheed challenges the capacity of society, God, and Islam to restrict her movement. In the original Urdu there is a palpable rhythm to how the poet reflects on the many ways she has been confined and controlled by her relationship with her beloved and proceeds to rebuke them openly. Even the title of the poem speaks to the kinds of reversals the poet seeks to trace, playing with the rhythmic movements of ticking time but in a counterclockwise direction. Though the opening lines of the poem invoke the image of a woman bent at her lover’s feet, an image that at once invokes a namazi (a person in the act of prayer), the next line dismisses any simple reading of power between the lover and beloved. Even if the woman’s eyes were to merge into her lover’s feet, the poet suggests, the lover would continue to fear his beloved. The lover fears his beloved’s power because it cannot be shackled by familial expectations and social norms. Every fetter he puts on her, she subverts into an act of power; even if she may not be able to see, smell, or walk, he cannot control her mind and her thoughts. Despite his repeated attempts to control her senses, ultimately Kishwar suggests, he has no control over who she is—he can control her body but not her mind. When I spoke to Kishwar Naheed in Berkeley, California,1 she reflected on her life as a woman coming into her own; her shotgun wedding at the tender age of twenty to her fellow classmate and poet, Yusuf Kamran; her family’s disapproval of the relationship and the consequences of giving up 1. My interviews with Kishwar Naheed took place at the Durant Hotel in Berkeley, California, on March 17–22, 2003, when she visited the campus as a part of the AIPS Pakistan Lecture Series. 100 | BODI E S T H AT R E M E M BE R the relationship. Many of the sentiments expressed in her poems, like the one just cited, have come out of a direct engagement with the seclusion (pardah) imposed on her as a result of married life within a conservative family in Pakistan . The lines “even after you have tied the chains of domesticity / shame and modesty around my feet / even then this fear would not leave you / for though I cannot walk / I can still think” raise the issue of an embodied resistance from within—both conceptually and literally. For women like Kishwar who are committed to life within Pakistani society, resistance cannot be measured with the yardstick of Western feminism, but must be understood as complicating any simplistic reading of how third-world feminists negotiate and mediate such constructions of center and periphery, insider and outsider, writer and activist. Poetry facilitates intimate self-expression, as it allows an author to explore sensitive issues of identity, kinship, marriage, and sexuality (to name a few issues) under the protective blankets of metaphor, symbolism, and literary convention.2 Moreover, Urdu poetry, as it has throughout its history in the South Asian subcontinent, thrives in the social...