Homes and worlds: Women, violence and domestic space.

November 25, International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, marks the beginning of 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, which will last until Human Rights Day on December 10. At DS Books, we’ve thought long and hard about the types of books that would help us process, understand and reflect on a complex topic like gender-based violence. Gender-Based Violence is a complex and layered issue, and when done right, fictional narratives often reveal the horrors and intricacies of the issue with nuance and care. For a country still reeling from the public violence inflicted on its citizens in July and the renewed vigor with which its female citizens have been subjected to harassment and violence in recent months, it seemed urgent, at least to us, to turn inward. dedicated gender-based violence website. Every day our newspapers carry chilling stories of domestic violence, of homes being unsafe places for women and girls, of girls being forced to leave home, of a woman constantly searching for a home of her own. Over the course of these 16 days, there is a slate of novels and one short story that consider the complex interplay of violence and empowerment in the domestic sphere and how women navigate the limiting and often liberating potential of this sphere.

Subarnalata

Ashapurna Devi

Mitra and Ghosh Pvt Ltd., 1967

This novel tells the story of Subarnalata, born into a middle-class Bengali family of the 20th century. As a girl, Subarna is expected to be confined to the domestic sphere with limited freedom and autonomy. At first, she is a naive and idealistic girl who dreams of a more independent life, but as she grows up, she finds herself in the middle of the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood, while also struggling with her personal desires and aspirations. The novel traces Subarna’s life as it develops in her domestic environment, first in her mother’s house and then in her mother-in-law’s house.

While Subarna’s home life represents limitations, it also becomes a space for her personal growth. Here, Subarna displays a rare show of agency by questioning the restrictions imposed on herself and on middle-class women as a whole, who are expected to be docile and domesticated. She describes how the women in her mother-in-law’s house are happily imprisoned within the four walls of the kitchen: “They don’t know the taste of the open air, they don’t know how to read books, they don’t know how to remember prose,” she thinks to herself. Later, we see that she also devotes her life to raising her daughter Bakul and taking care of the family. However, she never loses her voice against the oppressive forces of patriarchy and elevates women’s place in society by fighting to gain equal rights for her daughter, herself, and the women in her household.

Subarnalata is a fascinating tale of equality as Ashapurna Devi shows an intellectual and emotional evolution that takes place in the context of domestic life through Subarna, while the character gradually seeks to carve out her own space within the family unit. This space is not always physical in the novel, but rather has to do with him claiming emotional and intellectual space for himself within the constraints of his environment.

The Bluest Eye

Tony Morrison

Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970

Early in this classic tale of black girlhood, racial self-loathing, and racial resistance, the novelist makes a distinction between “being left out” and “being outside.” “Put It Out,” because Morrison has one saving grace; Well, people go somewhere else. But if a person is “out there” he has nowhere to go back. The child hero at the center of the novel has been left out in the open by his father, who has done the unthinkable and indescribable thing twice: He raped his own child and left the family outside after burning the house. For a black family, home is what stands between having and not having a life in Depression-era Ohio. Morrison’s depiction of Breedlove’s family home as a house reeking of neglect and joylessness, broken furniture and memorylessness, physical and psychological violence, further testifies to the connection she makes between poverty, gender-based violence and the domestic sphere. The meticulous, loving care of Pecola’s mother for the white family, where she works as a domestic servant and neglects her own home and children, shows that the “home” in the novel is both a fantasy and a place of terror. The domestic landscape thus forces us to rethink socially sanctioned ideals of domesticity, especially for black girls and indeed their mothers.

Nervous Conditions

Tsitsi Dangarembga,

Women’s Press, 1988

In his preface to Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (François Maspero, 1961), Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: “The status of ‘native’ is a nervous condition among colonized peoples that the settler brings about and maintains with his own consent.” An excellent study of the sexual division of labor, race, colonialism and the transition to adolescence, Dangerembga’s novel is set in 1960s post-colonial Rhodesia and features the heroine Tambu, whose name she is not at all unhappy to hear at the novel’s opening. My brother is passing by. Tambu, a girl hitherto deprived of education and limited to household chores, is pleased when her influential uncle decides that she should succeed her brother, who died at the missionary school where she used to study. Thus begins Tambu’s entry into areas that have been historically made inaccessible to her. The domestic space, a product of the colonial encounter and bounded by old notions of patriarchy as well as changing socio-cultural norms of post-colonial ideals, is a highly contested space in the novel. On the one hand, the central female characters face extreme exclusion in decision-making processes and are subjected to sexual and gender-based violence in the home. On the other hand, women like Lucia and Maiguru challenge notions of sexual autonomy and women’s dignity.

Sultana’s Dream

Rokeya Sahawat Hossain

Indian Ladies’ Magazine, 1905

Set in 20th-century Bengal, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s seminal text “The Sultana’s Dream” constructs an imagined community in which women are not necessarily given things, but instead demand and receive access to power and education from the men who ruled before them . As a result of this reversal of the scenario, where men are subjugated and isolated from the zenana to which women were previously exiled, while women are instead engaged in the intellectual, administrative and legal affairs of the country, “Sultana’s Dream” is applauded by the public. as a feminist techno-utopia. However, Hossain’s Ladyland is perhaps less amenable to this utopian conceptualization in that it is a new world order constructed primarily along gendered lines; their destructiveness can turn into gender essentialism, ultimately reproducing many of the oppressive structures it seeks to resist. Instead, through its satirical meditation on the occupation of domestic space and the world beyond, “The Sultana’s Dream” serves as a stark reminder of the absurdity of a society governed and rationalized on the basis of gender; points out and deconstructs commonly used misogynist arguments against it. Women’s empowerment and participation in society.

Nazia Manzoor He teaches English at North South University. He is also the Editor of Star Books and Literature. Contact him at (email protected).

Maisha Syeda He is a writer, painter and lecturer at North South University.

Amreeta Lethe He is a writer, translator and sub-editor at Star Books and Literature.