Obedience and Its Myriad Possibilities:
Graphic Works are of great interest to me. In fact I try and
get hold of graphic novels (not the superhero comic or manga, but of a
fictional narrative form presented in graphics). Had read about Ayesha Tariq’s
Sarah- the Suppressed Anger of the Pakistani Obedient Daughter. Found the
premise interesting and hence had to order it.
However the waiting time was long. Finally the book arrived.
For me it was a really long day at work and reached home at
around 10.45 p.m. with already a To Do list in my mind- packing for travel
commencing the next day, finishing some routine emails and follow-ups and
planning for the week starting 28th March.
The click of the latch turning to open the main door had
hardly died down, when on the table I found the parcel and the thin size told
me clearly that finally Sarah has arrived from Pakistan (pun intended) to
suburban Mumbai. And pushed the To DO list away for a few hours and sat down
with the book.
The illustration style is excellent- sharing the url for
anyone who wants to have a look online-https://www.behance.net/gallery/4614361/The-Suppressed-Anger-of-the-Pakistani-Obedient-Daughter
And minimal text. The illustration can give way to imagination and interpretation
and thereby can be taken to people who may find text heavy pieces boring. And I
knew whom to take the book next day morning.
The story is extremely interesting and to me Pakistani
daughter could have been avoided- this can be the story of any daughter in
South Asia (there can be variance in the degree of expected obedience). Sarah
is the daughter of a middle class retired army officer. Sarah has dreams and
she considers the impediment towards fulfilling them is one and only thing- FAMILY (a conservative Pakistani family
according to her where affections and freedom are often skewed to the male
progeny-Sarah’s Bhaiya). Sarah has to follow rules, be it coming back home
before Maghreeb, or helping Ammi in house-hold chores and above all, if going
out with friends, adhering to the “rule of odds” (explained below) through the
pic.
And Sarah is angry, with the bottled up anger within her
increasing by the day and almost coming to the point of explosion. Of course
she hates this discrimination. She hates being subjected to “ oppression differing standards of obedience between her and her brother“… and
she decides to confront… until she hears this…
“Sarah is amazing today, the perfect daughter, the most
obedient”… and suddenly family beckons, tugs at the string of her heart… and…
This reminded me of a recent discussion I had in a cohort
about Family- is family a safety net or a coercive system. How does it look at
gender? And above all why was the family formed? Is it about safety or
patriarchy? And what Sarah felt, have I not
gone through the same, struggling hard to be the perfect daughter, aiming to
please parents and also subtly gaining my freedom in exchange of chores/1st
class marks/being the best in everything?
Next morning had a workshop with the mobilization team of a
partner organization of ours. The team is large –around 20 people (including my
own team) coming from all across India. This was the last day of the 3 day
process and all were discussing that mobilization in the community if tough,
since girls donot want to work post training, the parents are not ready and
above all (in sheer frustration), they donot understand the fruits of
empowerment. The gender ratio was 50:50, mostly the cluster managers being
males and the mobilizers being women. And
many of these girls had for the first time come to Mumbai or come out of their
hometowns. Morning while having
breakfast, I just put the book and many started gliding through the pages. Few
started smiling shyly, few got engrossed within the pictures, few started
certain questions? And soon we started
asking what is obedience? Is it important? They all smiled and said, yes, one
should listen to their parents. I asked again. And now they started laughing
and said- “ But if we had been obedient, we wouldn’t have been sitting here
today, none of us… “…..It was a very interesting discussion- all shared their
experiences, at what point and time, they all said, “ enough is enough and that
was when they really, strongly felt the need of pursuing something”… and then
one of them smiled and said- maybe we are unable to mobilize since the girls in
the community are not strongly clinging onto something for which they would
come to us. We go to them with our readymade offering. We have to fill in
batches. But do we know the melting point of their tolerance, when they will
negotiate against these impediments to fulfill what they want. That’s a longer,
painful process. Madhuri, one of them was in tears and said- “You know, for the
last 2 days, we had been speaking “them”and
“us”, whereas its always us… we are no different from our girls, but we
forget that often.. we donot connect.. we donot understand how intoxicating the
heady feeling of being an “obedient daughter” is.. how can I come out of that?
Its not a 10 minutes canvassing that can help, its only through connecting with
them, keeping things aside that may help?” The next half an hour were debates and
discussions, about family, freedom and often questioning- “why is it Pakistani daughter,
she should have left it Daughter only, why don’t you tell her that?”
I had to obey the demand. I wrote to Ayesha locating her on
Facebook- telling her what my team feels about the name and the overall story…
and thanking her for bringing the narrative out.
Our reading in the meantime continues…
No comments:
Post a Comment