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In Meatless Days, Sara Suleri writes about her childhood growing up in India: behind the foregrounded tales of daily life lurks her father, always writing books and articles: Whither Pakistan? "Whither Basic Democracy?" As an adult, teaching in the United States, Suleri tells her students that the third world is "locatable only as a discourse of convenience." Thus, when they ask her why she hasn't given equal space to post-colonial female writers in her own course, images flood her mind of her mother and grandmothers and sisters, but "Against all my own odds I know what I must say. Because, I'll answer slowly, there are no women in the third world."(20) Why such spaces, intellectual or physical, exist, I cannot answer today. My concern is what we can do to redress the beloved absence: to take the father's question, and direct it to a feminist agenda. Our feminisms will be what we make of them, rather than what we are made of: hence the importance of asking whither feminism? And since answers grow bes t in a real agar, I turn to literature to elucidate the question for myself.
Until very recently, the British literary tradition also said of its writers, "there are no women." Yet when revisited, this issue disclosed aesthetic standards that privileged male writers' conditions and excluded women. In the neoclassical era, for example, literary success rested on a supposedly gender-neutral writer's ability to manipulate classical allusions. By this criterion, however, women, who had limited acccess to education, were at a disadvantage. Ironically, that very lack now works to their credit, as students struggle through the strangling deserts of Dryden and Pope to rest in the oases of female writers such as Aphra Behn and Sarah Fyge Egerton, who use their limited stock of analogies to illuminate rather than overwhelm the real, material concerns and human interest of their writing. A less pleasant irony lurks in postcolonial literature, which, despite being heralded as a tool to dismantle the canon and with it Western Civilization--which some of us hailed not a threat but a promise--is falling prey to familiar criteria that produce not the promised choas, indeed, but another canon just as inflexible and elitist as the British tradition: critics again hail masculinist writing, this time judged by the lamp of European forms, most accessible to non-Europeans through European education--again with limited access for women. Once again, women's writing is disparaged either by claims that it doesn't exist--an amusingly ostrich-like response--or by devaluations of its acknowledged existence as tedious, repetitive, "kitchen stuff." Thus, the problems faced by female writers, identified so clearly by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own, persist, and are compounded by the conditions of the post-colonial world: lack of access to equal pay for equal work; the additional burden of performing the majority of household and child rearing tasks with no financial compensation at all; the growing number of single-parent, woman-headed households all make the practical, material concerns of finding a room and an income of one's own, that is, the independence of an artist in isolation that Woolf claims, at least as difficult as in Woolf's day. We include people Woolf ignored: women marginalised from what a contemporary angry black woman calls "the college-educated, upper-middle-class white women who are the inventors and leaders of the feminist movement" (Scott). We also live in countries outside the west, and within the west in "internal colonisation"--the poor and disempowered in the midst of inordinate consumption. For those of us, leisure and and imaginative freedom to explore aesthetic issues through literature would seem impossible, even if desirable.
Miraculously, though, some--indeed, much--writing does come from these supposedly silenced women. Indeed, it is the "upper-middle-class white woman," the woman Sandra Coney described earlier today as having the time and money to devote to social causes, who has in many ways been silenced. Woolf writes in Three Guineas that her voice was the most powerless--unlike female workers, who could unite and through group action acquire a power to be listened to, the upper-crust women were listened to only out of politeness at social gatherings. Accordingly, a language not steeped in patriarchy is sought in supranatural languages: cows moo, tree leaves flutter, an inchoate, inarticulable language permeates much of Woolf's work. Such yearnings are common to much Western women's writing, from Adrienne Rich's The Dream of A Common Language to the French Feminist school of writing the body, as exemplified by Helene Cixous' "The Laugh of the Medusa". Such efforts, valuable as they are in lightening the patriarchal ba ggage foisted onto language, reinforce the idea of women's writing as impotent, an attitude lovingly expounded by Susan Gubar: the "model of the pen-penis writing on the virgin page participates in a long tradition identifying the author as a male who is primary and the female as his passive creation--a secondary object lacking autonomy.... Clearly this tradition excludes woman from the creation of culture, just as it reifies her as an artifact within culture." (77)
Interestingly, however, in the work of many marginalised women, there is no such falling back onto another kind of language as a source of solace: the literary voices of post-colonial women are strong and loud--some say strident; I say vibrant. Whatever one's valuing of them, they are powerful; clearly, some of us do not feel the intellectual tremors that paralyze others of us, have founds alternative ways of empowering themselves. To understand this freedom, we could begin by looking away from European cultures; to Africa, for example. Christopher Miller points out that the Western privileging of written texts as epitomized by Derridean readings of the hierarchy of writing over speech and the resultant angst over the silencing of women is almost an irrelevancy in some African contexts (247-8): not only is there no privileging of written over spoken in an oral culture, but women's voices have joined with men's in the narrative tradtion in a way foreign to Western high culture. In fact, in the Mande tradition, Miller claims, speech is seen to be so vital and powerful that its wielding is reserved for the special caste of griots, and women.(264, 266). Carole Boyce Davies concurs, saying that "There was equal billing for male and female in the oral literary tradition" in some African communities (2); many African women talk about the power of this tradition in their backgrounds (Ngcobo 49). These strong oral traditions, of course, have not always translated easily into writing; (Ncogbo 50) along with the education that encourages Africans to write in European languages comes an ideology that privileges both written and masculist voices. Nonetheless, some of the most exciting writing being done anywhere in the world comes from African women. With South Africa gripped for decades by apartheid, and the black majority impoverished both materially and educationally; with the serious pressures of living that African women have faced in countries gripped with drought or political turmoil or famine; with the absence of time or rooms of their own, with unimaginable material obstacles to overcome--Buchi Emecheta was raising five children as a single mother, putting herself through school, and living in London when she began her writing career, continuing even after her husband burned her first novel--African women nonetheless speak out in written form. Certainly many are middle class, with access to education. But that they do not all fall under the spell of self-censorship that plagues many western middleclass women can in part be traced to the dynamic traditions such as "sitting on a man," or lampoons, when groups of women exact social justice by chanting obscene songs (Finnegan 278).
So, while some oral traditions include story-telling, passing on cultural values, and traditional forms, they also include revolutionary acts. Certainly, African female writers have galvanized the European forms with which they experiment. And the most admirable of these women do not hesitate to redefine that which does not please them. For example, Buchi Emecheta rejects the term feminism while admitting, "if you look at everything I do, it is what the feminists do, too; but it is just that it comes from Europe, or European women, and I don't like being defined by them.... I do believe in the African kind of feminism. They call it womanism" (AV 19). Western women--even feminists--have, of course, also spoken, and in important ways--many a mother in Europe or America sings her child to sleep with lullabies or tells admonishing stories to convey cultural assumptions; there are folk tale traditions and old wives' tales in France and Ireland, as well as in Ghana and Nigeria. That such habits are not seen as alive in Western societies reflects more about who is looking, and at what, since any group of adults can get together and trade stories of typical admonishments passed on by mothers. Such personal testimony speaks to the importance of such oral work, but the West explicitly trivializes it. A female oral tradition is not acknowledged as part of the Western artistic oeuvre; rather than privileged, its practitioners tend to be denigrated as gossips, or hens. No wonder men have shunned child rearing; it takes imaginative skill to convey complex ideas to young minds through story-telling--but the effort is opposed by our criteria of literary value. Thos e of us who have accepted its devaluation as gossip or excess need to learn from those cultures which have valued it how to redefine our oral practices so we can acknowledge their value, and begin to privilege the personal, the anecdotal, the oral.
We must, in other words, forge just what Woolf identified as working-class women's strengths, the same force that led to the velvet revolution in Poland: solidarity. As Annette Kolodny notes in her "A Map for Rereading," Western "women too easily become isolated islands of symbolic significance," their work dropping out of the cumulative record that could constitute a tradition for women (54). The strong sense of community in many African cultures counteracts the isolation felt to consittute self-identity in the West. And although an extended group brings increased responsibility, communal living can counteract adverse material living conditions somewhat: for example, there can be "work-bundling", with childcare and household work shared out amongst several people. Instead of this awareness of interconnection, many western cultures privilege and even legislate the nuclear family. Along with the nuclear family comes not only a patriachal structure, but a capitalist one: a belief in self-reliance, that it is weakness to depend on others; a sense of competion that leads one to look out for "number one" even if that results in worse outcomes for oneself and one's family. Certainly an extended family is not idyllic; like any other group, it contains vivid hatreds, as well as closenesses; but those alliances can shift over time. The extended family has a resilience, allows for venting of conflicts, without splintering. To take the most extreme case: if you hate your family so much you want to mow everyone down with a shotgun, we know from tragic experience it will be possible to wipe out a family of seven or so people. But an extended family of thirty or so? The mind boggles: and, in fact, the very numbers and range of possible audiences would allow such murderous tension to escape in less horrific ways. A wider range of experiences, attitudes, and strategies might even divert the f rustration into less brutally oppositional "solutions". Keri Hulme's The bone people offers a good example of how even loving and good intentions can go hideously awry without the buffers offered when responsibilities are shared across a larger group.
Unfortunately, despite its many branches and extensions, its shifting feuds and alliances, Western feminism has been marked rather by the sharp fractures of an inelastic nuclear family, rather than the resilience of an extended kinship group. We do not tend to value each other's speech; we have tried to imitate elitist, jargon-ridden writing in the interests of coopting some power from the academy; and we attack and discredit others who did not agree with our particular approaches. Indeed, one such serious schism has occurred over the terrain of postcolonial literature, in works such as "All the men are black, all the women white, but some of us are brave"--which acknowledge that white women have allied themselves with black men as the more powerful of the oppressed groups--becoming honorary minority men in a way, while excluding women of colour. Such exclusive tactics have widened into chasms, as in the clamour against white middle class western women appropriating if not exploiting black women's writin g (Henderson 258).
We must resist such typically imperial divide and rule strategies; individual definitions of feminism, or other labels used to define ourselves, cannot erase the ever-shifting commonalities we share. Resisting such simplification is not an easy task; many black woman have written of the painful negotiation they must engage in to not be excluded from their ethnic identity because of their belief in women, and from feminism because of their committment to ethnic issues (Carroll 126). The severity of the rift can be seen when an editorial written by as uncompromisng a writer as bell hooks, arguing "that it is crucial for black females to be active in producing and analyzing feminst theory and feminist politics," can be denounced in a letter as a "condemnation of Negro women," (hooks, Scott). Recognizing that it is important to read and engage with others' points of views, as hooks does, is seen as treachery to blackness. Like the Inkatha freedom party's split from the African National Congress (ANC) and co nsequent appallingly comic alliance with white supremacists in South Africa, which threatened to implode the movement towards a multirace government, such infighting serves not to strengthen either party, but only to undercut the plurality of our voices.
These debates have exploded into arguments over absolutist positions, which casts women into competition over who has the right to speak, get jobs, receive grants, rather tha challenging the overarching rationing of women's powere. As Sara Suleri states, the "claim to authenticity--only a black can speak for a black; only a postcolonial subcontinental feminist can adequately represent the lived experience of that culture--points to the great difficulty posited by the 'authenticity' of female racial voices in the great game that claims to be the first narrative..." (Woman 247); we are caught up again in a typically western academic oneupsmanship. Clearly, one of the best authorities on oneself is oneself. But lacking that, if I am required to talk about my interpretations of a seventeenth-century male Puritan like John Milton, I ought to be at least equally able to speak to my reactions to Nadine Gordimer or Flora Nwapa--or indeed to make claims about what "we" should do when addressing an Aotearoa-New Ze aland Women's studies conference! Others are free to object, or to say I am exploiting post-colonial writing for my career; and I am free to ask if that recognition necessarily changes the usefulness or other value of my argument. Just as discussions that try to prioritize dimensions--gender is most important; no, it's race; no, it's class--miss the point that none of these can be situated in a matrix innocent of the others, so do other ways of stripping feminisms from their contexts fall into an essentialist trap.
One example of such a trap: a friend of mine in graduate school once described a visiting professor to me, and when I asked if he was cute, she said, "Well, if I were a woman I would find him attractive." My gales of laughter seriously offended her, as she tried to argue that I knew what she meant. And of course I do know what she meant; she meant that were she "thinking as a woman," she would find him attractive, but when assessing his intellectual skill she wasn't thinking as a woman. That is what academic women often require of ourselves: that we not think, or speak, or look, or act as women. However, if one strips of one's identity its constituent parts in this way, one is left with nothing other than a deeply neurotically defined womanhood. Surely our actions, the actions of all women, define the boundaries of what womanly action is, rather than our actions having to conform to some pre-established set of parameters? Why should we so conform, to prove ourselves women according to a definition tha t limits and devlaues itself? We must broaden the terms to force womanhood to accord with living our lives fully. We cannot fall back on biological essentialism--not all women are able to bear children, just as not all men can inseminate. The biological sphere is essential to our species, but varyingly less so to every person; certainly biological difference does not explain the very root of society, as some would insist, with every woman linked to monthly rituals and as one with the earth. Some of us are earth-bound, but undoubtedly more often in our roles as farmers than as moongoddeses.
So: for its answers to current stumbling blocks, feminism in this broad definition needs to look to the postcolonial world, to find the rich substratum of life Suleri sees as erased by her role as teacher of postcolonial literature. We cannot allow ourselves to be written out of speaking, out of existence. We cannot participate in the construction of spaces which exclude ourselves, and we must retheorize those spaces that do so exist--as Gayatri Charavorty Spivak states, "redo the terms of our understanding" (81). When Z. A. Suleri writes about the direction of Pakistan, we cannot allow him to continue to do so from a position that excludes the awareness of women. We need to undercut essentialist positions that scissor and slice apart our worlds, and weave together a fabric that can support without constraining those worlds. One possible method was suggested by Christine Sylvester this morning, under the term "world-travelling," which provoked lively discussion. Certainly I have discovered broader horizons by physically recentring myself: when I came to Aotearoa-New Zealand, I was warned (by a sincerely well-intentioned male student) that although it might be beautiful and the natives friendly, it was much more sexist than the U. S., so I was simply leaving the frying pan for the fire. While there are some differences--being called Mrs or Miss, rather than Ms; causing a major logjam when I open a door for a male colleague rather than vice versa--the cultural values here are more humane. Thus, "even" as a woman, I command more respect than I did as a "person" in the U. S. And there are other differences: a hundred years of suffrage and a women's movement as rich as Sandra Coney outlined this morning; a multicultural environment that has, as I begin to educate myself about Maori beliefs, introduced me to a broader frame of r eference for the way people and the environment interact. The range of cultures represented by women around the world is our strength, not our weakness.
That range allows us to reconsider ourselves. For example, Emecheta recognizes her actions participate in the same goals as a feminist's would, so rather than opposing or excluding, her redefinition as a womanist nurtures alternate meanings. Alice Walker defines womanism, in part, as "Loves music. Loves dance. .... Loves love and food and roundness. ...loves herself. Regardless" (xii). This is not an exclusivist definition; it affirms life, gives me new goals to aspire to, and offers a way to encourage my students to focus on developing who they are, rather than what they look like; most importantly, it contains qualities I did not associate with feminism before Emecheta's invitation to reconsider. Alternate definitions can increase our power rather than diffusing it. Rather than being like women living under polygamy who fight each other for the few orts of rights and privileges doled out by a despotic husband, we need to find our commonalities with each other that will keep us linked in a never static or permanent but always interwoven web. Our variety is not given us to jostle each other for a spot in the limelight, as patriachal structures encourage, but to allow us to fight and make up; then keep working towards a women's movement that does not help 51% of the human race, but 100%--that develops revolutionary spiritual, environmental, intellectual ways to reconceive ourselves at home on this much-abused and put-upon earth.
A variety of sources have inspired the writing of this paper: some of the examples were suggested by John Muirhead's and Doreen D'Cruz's course materials in, respectively, Augustan and Women's Literature; and my own students in Post-colonial Literature have raised points that helped my thinking.
Carroll, Constance M. "Three's a Crowd: The Dilemma of the Black Woman in Higher Education." All the Women are White, all the Blacks are Men, But Some Of Us Are Brave. Gloria T Hull, et al, eds. NY: The Feminist Press, 1982. 115-28. Cixous, H,lSne. "The Laugh of the Medusa." Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. New French Feminisms. NY: Harvester, 1981. 245-64. Davies, Carole Boyce. Introduction. Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature. Eds Davies and Anne Adams Graves. Trenton, NJ: Africa World P, 1986. Emecheta, Buchi. "The Dilemma of Being in Between Two Cultures." African Voices: Interviews with Thirteen African Writers. 16-20. Finnegan, Ruth. Oral Literature in Africa. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970. Gubar, Susan "The 'Blank Page' and Female Creativity" in Writing and Sexual Difference. Ed. Elizabeth Abel. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1982. 73-93. Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn. "Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman's Literary Tradition." Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. Eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, NY: Harvester, 1993, 257-67. hooks, bell. "Black Students Who Reject Feminism." Chronicle of Higher Education 13 July 1994. A44. Kolodny, Annette."A Map for Rereading: Gender and the interpretation of Literary Texts" in The New Feminist Criticism, Ed. Elaine Showalter. London: Virago P, 1986. 46-62. Miller, Christopher. Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa. Chicago: U Chicao P, 1990. Ngcobo, Lauretta. "Women Under Pressure." African Voices: Interviews with Thirteen African Writers. 49-53. Scott, Glynn. Letter to the editor. Chronicle of Higher Education 17 Aug 1994. B-4. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. NY: Routledge, 1988. Suleri, Sara. Meatless Days. London: Collins, 1990. -----. "Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition." Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. Eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. London: Harvester, 1993. 244-256. Rich, Adrienne. The Dream of A Common Language. NY: Norton, 1978. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. London: The Women's P, 1984.
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