Imtiaz Dhrakar as a Poetess of Feminine Sensibility

Seminar

 By - Saiyed Farheen

 

 

Female Sensibility:

 

Sensibility reflects the sense of ability to feel or perceive. It also depicts the refined awareness and appreciation in matters of feeling. The sensibility or sensitiveness illustrates the quality or condition of being emotionally and intuitively sensitive. Females are well known for their sentiments, sensations, emotions, sensitiveness or sensitivity. Sensibility, an important 18th-century term assigning a kind of emotional response or receptiveness, is both aesthetic and moral, viewing a capability to feel both for others’ sorrows and beauty. In literature, the feature of sensibility was discovered and exhibited in the sentimental novel, sentimental comedy, graveyard poetry, and in the poems of William Cowper. The term is also used in a different sense in modern criticism, being a characteristic method of a given writer's depiction of deep feelings while responding mentally and sensitively to experience.

Sensibility refers to a sensitive consciousness or attentiveness towards something, such as the emotions of another. It is closely connected with studies of sense perception as the means through which knowledge or information is gathered. It is also related to sentimental moral philosophy.

Therefore, sensibility is all about the method of feeling. The word ‘sensibility’ points out the receptiveness of the senses and refers to the psycho-perceptual system. It indicates the function of the nervous system and the material basis for consciousness. Women and their male friends elevated sensibility as a standard, demanding that insensitive men of old or new, challenging cultures, reform themselves and their dealing with women. Feminine sensibility means the sentiments of a woman, as it is concerned with a woman’s feeling and emotions to her own miseries and circumstances. Through her sensibility, we can recognize her psychology or longing. On the whole, it is a kind of reaction towards action. Thus, feminine sensibility is the matter of soft and pure emotions of a woman’s heart. The feelings which she stores in her heart and had the capacity to overwhelm her surroundings. The sensibility has the depths of sea and heights of sky.

Sensibility became an English-language literary movement, chiefly in the new type of the novel writing. Such works named sentimental novels featured those who were horizontal to sensibility, often fainting, feeling weak, weeping or having fits in feedback to an emotionally moving experience. Samuel Johnson, in his portrait of Miss Gentle, articulated this criticism.

Women write in a different way from men; while men write about issues of war, spying, state, business, and sexual encounters, though women write about themselves. The chief argument is that there is such a thing as a characteristic woman’s sensibility and that it imitates itself in the literature of our times. Women in most of the early novels are basically Indian by their nature, gifted with the traditional feminine merits of genuineness, love, and acceptance. The autobiographical aspect in the novels is a shift from an anxiety with objective social reality to an exploration of the feminine sensibility. The figure of women in fiction has undergone a transform after all through the last four decades. Women writers have shifted away from customary portrayals of lasting, self-sacrificing women to divergent female characters searching for their identity, no longer characterized and defined in terms of their victim position. They are trying to expose the condition of the women in society. Through their characters, they picture the real emotions and sensibility of a woman.

For centuries, the Hindu woman put on a pedestal the mythic of models from the ancient epics like the Ramayana, Mahabharata, Puranas and other epics. Indian women were asked to get encouraged by the prototype women like Sita, Kunti, Gandhari, Panchaali and so on. Often the Indian woman is inactive and agrees to the role given to her in determining her destiny. At every phase of her life, she is dependent on different relations for the status and continued existence upon man i.e. her father, her husband, and her son. The task of a woman has been full of challenges so far as Indian customs and traditions are anxious by nature. Though this dark picture was not on the scene, there was no gender-bias and women were not even measured as separate units. Women had a pride of place in the Vedic time also, when they were sacred and glorified.

In this context, however, Kamala Markandaya’s novels, in contrast with those of her contemporaries among women, seems to be more fully meditative of the awakened feminine sensibility in modern India, as she tried to project the picture of the altering traditional society. As such, Markandaya virtues a special observe both by virtue of the variety and complexity of her achievements and as representative of an honored position in the history of the Indo-Anglian novels. In her novels, she shows a style or technique for the genius that orders and patterns her feelings and ideas, resulting in the creation of a truly enjoyable work of art. But more important is that she develops the national image on many levels of aesthetic awareness. Indeed, her novels give the impression to be exclusively reflective of the national awareness in its various forms with the feature sensibility of the modern educated and sophisticated Indian woman.

Markandaya’s five novels Some Inner Fury, Nectar in a Sieve, A Silence of Desire, Possession and A Handful of Rice represent a very fine example of feminine sensibility. The purposive way of her creative sensibility awards her novels with a genuine representative quality that grades them out as a significant entity. The reality that none of the protagonists in her novels runs away from the harsh realities of life, by choosing death as the ultimate resolution. It is a justification of the traditional values of Indian culture, acceptance, namely, tolerance, and patience.

Thus, not even Markandaya but few other woman writers are also there who deals with the concept of feminine sensibility; like Arundhati Roy, Anita Nair, Kamla Das, Rama Mehta, and Anita Desai. Anita Desai is one of those few Indian writers in English who have warmly strived to understand the quandary of their female characters. Desai represents the greeting “creative release of the feminine sensibility”, which began to come out after the World War II 6. She is an author of significant virtues and has enriched the Indian novels in English. The author shows her low esteem for the novelists who obtain attention in the external rather than the internal world. (Feminine sensibility of an immigrant woman, Web)

 “Indian women writers emerged after independence and they have made a significant contribution. Kamala markandaya, Anita Desai, Nayantara Sehghal, Shashi  Deshpande, Namita Gokhale, Gita Mehta and Arundhati Roy are but a few names of women who have distinguished themselves with their innovative style, the depiction of social realities, and advocacy of the emancipation of women and portrayal of feminine sensibilities.” (Singh, 9)

“Feminine sensibility is clearly visible in works by women.” (Singh, 17)

In some ways, the debates about “sensibility” are analogous to the controversies centering on “culture” among women’s liberation activists who came out of the New Left. However, for artists, debate revolved not about the role of culture in the movement to liberate women, but about what forms that culture would take. Therefore ongoing discussion occurred at conferences and in the pages of early women’s art periodicals about how culture functioned politically.

On one side, some women artists advocated for the idea that feminist art had to explicitly express, usually figuratively, a “message” tied to a fairly narrow definition of feminism. These women rejected any notion of a female aesthetic as too similar to the limiting stereotypes of women’s art that existed in patriarchal art history and criticism.

However, their notion of feminist art smacked of propaganda to other women artists. Instead, they argued that any woman who made art out of her “experience” as a woman was making a feminist statement revealed through a “feminine sensibility.” These women argued that thanks to the existence of women’s liberation, women artists could now freely explore this sensibility without fear of it becoming a stereotype.  However, the entanglement of feminine sensibility with definitions of a female aesthetic had dire consequences for the women’s culture war.

Patricia Mainardi, an editor of Women and Art,  declared 1971-1972 “The Year of the Feminine Sensibility” Mainardi along with Marjorie Kramer and Irene Peslikis founded the group, Redstocking Artists, an offshoot out of the early women’s liberation group Redstockings.From its inception, Women and Art regarded sensibility as a pejorative term. 

The first appearance of the phrase in that periodical occurred in a piece by Cindy Nemser on sexism in art criticism, quoting a review by the venerable Clement Greenberg that implied a woman artist should “disassemble her feminine sensibility.” An expanded version of this piece, with the same quotation,   appeared in the first issue of the Feminist Art Journal under the headline “Women Artists and Stereotypes.”

The notion of sensibility tied to the emancipation of women reached as far back as Mary Wollstonecraft. As Mary Jacobus notes, Wollstonecraft attempted to “appropriate male “sense”-centered discourse patterns (read sense as a reason) free of excessive (female) sensibility in the Rights of Women, but Wollstonecraft reversed her approach in the Wrongs of Woman to craft a “self-consciously feminine” sensibility.

In U.S. by late 18^th century, chief female virtues included “sensibility” according to Ruth Bloch tied to notion of women’s moral superiority, a “superior sensibility of their souls” because they “felt” not only more but more exquisitely and refined The difficulty lay in rescuing sensibility from sentimentality, which bespoke Victorianism.This understanding of sensibility came with a strong essentialist strain, as arguments often linked women’s “sensibility” to her role as a mother.

This tension is evident as well in the writing of Virginia Woolf.  Woolf’s notion of sensibility proved the most influential for feminist artists who wanted to both challenge the oppression of women, while simultaneously rejecting much of what they saw as “masculinity.”   Miriam Williams has argued that Woolf understood  sensibility as political “closely tied to late eighteenth-century  British political radicalism, marked by sympathies fro the French Revolution, emerging abolitionist and anti-imperialist sentiment, and not incidentally, the emergence of early feminism”

In 1972, Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago created a slide show of women’s art that they presented on both the West and East Coasts.  At the West Coast Conference of Women Artists, the first national gathering of women artists to come out of the women’s liberation movement, Betsy Damon reported in Women and Art that Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro “put forth their ideas about a feminine sensibility. After much research they have concluded that women repeatedly work with certain forms and attitudes, orifices, central images, a vantage point from inside out.”

However, Alexis Krasilovsky’s report in the Feminist Art Journal doesn’t use the word “sensibility” but rather describes the aesthetic identified by Schapiro and Chicago:  “Miriam Shapiro and Judy Chicago gave a talk on ‘Central Core Imagery.’ They proposed the idea that abstract images can be powerful images for women’s feelings and anatomy. Even landscapes can be reconstructed in certain works in terms of femaleness. In addition, much of women’s art discloses a covering and uncovering motif.” (History in The city. Word Press, Web)

Female sensibilities in Imtiaz Dharker and Kamala Das:

The subject of this article is to capture the voice of feminine sensibilities and confessionality in women poets and their poetry; while the article aims to select two female writers Kamala Das (1934 - 2009) and Imtiaz Dharker (1954 - ) for the abridgment of this research. Kamala Das and Imtiaz Dharker represent that part of the feminine sensibility, through their poetry, which are peculiar kind of curiosity and self-identification among the readers. The mystical flavors of feminine issues, that they lay bare, as well as the identities they portray, bring out the complexities of being a woman. Although their works depict the predicament of the self, they also problematize the world of men and their polarized narratives. The poetic expression offantasia by men and women are radically different; which is stylistically and them atically dissimilar because of their biological and sociological difference in the society. The malefantasia in poetry indulges in various stylistic features and shared thematic domains concerningthe world of men, while female fantasia in poetry revolves around the myriad thematicarticulations concerning the domestic life, societal interactions and the self of a woman. But whatneeds mention as a footnote, is with a very few number of published poetries by women poets, which are positively reviewed and filtered by editors (mostly male critics) coupled with theindividual oeuvre of every women poet; research in this dimension becomes increasinglycomplex.

The self of  Das is an admixture of her private yearnings and her public overtures through her writings.While a passionate and repetitive exhibition of the self throughout her poetries is seen; her feminine desires are tantalizing, as she fantasizes her carnal desires with a man,

Her opinions about her cravings for physical love and that of a man are explicitly spoken in a confessional and un-opinionated relation with the reader of her works. These desires admitted in a frank andoutspoken manner may seem unpalatable to male critics who hypocritically enjoys such pleasures in their very closets.Das and her unfulfilled married life are known to the literary world, but still she carried on hersearch for love unapologetically. Das is candid in admitting about her personal desires andfantasies to the reader rather than disguise and prevaricate it at a modest level which is expected of every female writer. Das comes from the family of litterateur’s, her mother and uncle were established poets in Malayalam literature in Kerala, therefore translating emotions and feelings, be they of the self, was very natural to her. It’s after marriage and the resulting inheritance of aturbulent and un-realized domestic space that Das started seeking love outsid ethemarital bounds. 

For her marriage became an entrapment in a society which is rigidly patriarchal as in‘The Old Playhouse’and which posed a barrier for her right to marital, emotional and physical pleasures. Her unrealized life also bringsher closer to the tendencies of Electra complex which she describes without any inhibitions as in‘Glass’, “I do not bother to tell I’ve misplaced a father somewhere, and I look for him noweverywhere”. Imtiaz Dharker being an itinerant diasporic writer has multiple confluences in the form of her identification with three countries: India, Pakistan and Scotland. Hence a natural craving would be to identify with the collective for a shared inheritance of culture and identity. Imtiaz Dharkershows her spirit of identification with other women in a collective spirit; through her poetrycollection Purdah. Dharker through her poetry peels layers of unidentified female self’s behindthe veil, which shows sporadic outbursts of anger, passion, love, revenge and acquiescence. On such an identification which is collective, Alison Easton puts it, 

“What is subjective is alsocollective and shared; it is part of the world of social and economic institutions, language andother cultural practices, and is a continuous process by which we come to have a sense ofourselves and our place in the social order ”.

The purdah, as Eunice de Souza, puts it, in its wider sense means

“not just the burqua ofwhatever design worn by some Muslim women, or the face covered by the pallav, but the elaborate codes of seclusion and feminine modesty used to protect and control the lives ofwomen’’.

Hence purdah not only prevents the self to completely merge with thesociety but also filters the outside to reach the self, and therefore the self becomes layered and repressed as in ‘Purdah I’, “while doors keep opening inward and again inward” .The purdah also stands as a metaphor for the way women seek refuge and retreat into theshells to be safe from harm and disapproval. Dharker expresses herself by collectively identifying with women, quite unlike Das, where theself is mostly the protagonist in her poems.

The attempt that Dharker sets out to achieve is to un-layer different facets of veiled female identities, while Das makes an effort to un-layer the desires and identity of the self. Dharker’s poems have nameless and faceless female veil, appearing advertently to play roles assigned to themdomestically. They resist and succumb within the four walls of domestic life as is given in‘Making List’, “The woman’s blouse is torn. It is held together with a safety pin”. Dharker points to the domestic spaces which show the real condition of women, while ‘a safety pin’ is the only privilege that she affords to pin-up her torn life. Her ‘woman’ is the subject of domestic relegation post marriage under the chauvinism of a male superior obliterating her full potential.As Edmund Leach puts it, ‘the family is the source of all our discontents’, which is advertentlyexplored by both these poets. Mostly women’s issues are aggravated because of their domestic relegation, due to the importance and preference given to men (mostly husbands) in such familialspaces. The self other Man woman equation in the poetries of both the poets seem to beconflictual, resistive and eventually leading to revulsion. The man in Das’ and Dharker’s poetry is an alpha lover, dominant, brute and chauvinist; one who reduces the woman to an object ofsexual pleasure, therefore the only catharsis afforded in their works is subtle escapist tendenciesof fantasy and imagination. With such tendencies there is an aversion towards the livedexperiences of family life and they continually become sites of oppression, contestation and lateracquiescence.

The sites of expression in both Das’ and Dharker’s poetries problematizes and blurs personal                                                                                                                                                                                                          and political in such a way that the ‘personal becomes political’. Dharker’ characters are predominantly Muslim women who are miserably suppressed within the purdah. The female‘self’ in Dharker’s poetry is a rebellious victim in an Islamic world which is highly patriarchal in nature. The living habitation of Dharker’s characters is a culturally coded world of strong diktats on how should a woman live. Here religion plays a role in the silences and sufferings of thefemale self. Hence religion is used to make the voice of women muffled through patriarchal flagellation as in ‘Honour Killing’,

“This black veil of a fai

Ththat made me faithlessto myself.

That tied my mouth

Gave my god a devil’s face,

  And muffled my own voice”.

(I Speak for the Devil)

Dharker’s pronouns ‘I’, ‘She’ and ‘Me’ are carefully constructed female identities that seldom Find a leeway to move out of the societal purdah. The real intention of purdah, as it wasintroduces then and now, has assumed a totally different metaphor. A lot of equivalent ideas of purdah exists like “religious injunction, notions of female behavior, group solidarity anddefensiveness about identity, the control of sexual impulses in men and women, status, family, honour and respectability, and where women have property rights, the fear that misallianceswould lead to depletion of property”.

It is also synonymous with control, restraint, shame, prevention, submission, confinement and obedience to elders and the maledominated society. For a girl, who comes of age, purdah further proliferates with meanings, as in Purdah I, “One day they said she was old enough to learn some shame. She found it came quite naturally”.

Dharker minces no words when she searches for ‘The right word’, ‘Outside my door his hand too steady, his eyes too hard is a boy who looks like your son, too”. Dharker’s description seem very similar to poetries by Wilfred Owen, as she describes the harsh realities of conflict and belligerent identities mistakenly led to fight on behalf of some highlevel indoctrination and grander narratives of courage and nationalism, mostly which happenswith young men and boys. Identity therefore becomes a play of narratives and what is decisive in such narratives and privileging of a kind of narrative, is which side of the fence is the person’s presence (here, nationality and religion). 

Dharker here problematizes the complex interplay ofinterpretation and the privileging of narratives. Quite like many post modern poets, whovehemently opposed the belligerent and polemical post 9/11 narrative of Us vs.Them, she also further problematized the identity of a terrorist.

Dharker’s conscious effort it seems is to reverse the damage of narratives through her poetry so that such identities can escape the labyrinths of polemical narratives and become areas of serious introspection, contestation and thought.In the post modern world, that which is political is also personal, but narratives are a personaland conscious effort to explain or utter something meaningful in the form of words or sentences, and which at times can become polarized and polemical.

Dharker does not sympathize with heridentities but depicts them with a balanced objective - subjective manner. She only problematizesessentialist narratives by calling there volutionary terrorist by different names but ultimately settles for the ‘child’ from the lines "The child steps in and carefully, at my door, takes off his shoes." (The right word), which explains the ‘child’s’ upbringing and also the cultural aspect of Asia. (Female sensibilities in Imtiaz Dharker and Kamala das, Web)

Works Cited

Feminine sensibility of an immigrant woman English literature Essay, Ukessays, Web, 5 October, 2014

Singh, Jyoti. Indian Women Novelists, New Delhi: Rawat Publiation, 2007, Print.

Female Sensibility, History in Thecity.Wordpress, Web, 3 October, 2014

Female sensibilities in Imtiaz Dharker and Kamala das, Academia, Web 5 October 2014