Resisting Motherhood

One of the first few things that anyone tells me is that I don't look 'old' enough to be a mother.

I usually do not respond but the remark always reminds me of family photographs and the old albums I loved burying my nose in as a child. I always think of those young frail looking women- women in the family, my mother, her friends, sisters- with babies in tow that cautiously appear on the blurred edges, distant background or the fuzzy middles of those black and white, and occasionally color, photographs.  As a child, inhaling the dust of those disintegrating photographs, I would imagine their stories, the everyday-ness of their lives, on what lay behind those half smiles, transfixed solemn stares or toothy laughter. I would look at their babies, making connections, figuring out resemblances between the child and man/woman, but also noting the look of exhaustion, bone thin weariness that the women wore like lipstick.

No matter how prepared, every woman is unprepared for motherhood. I could not imagine the state of perpetual wakefulness and broken sleep that has come to characterize my 'sleeping' hours ever since Sophie, my daughter.

Sophie, my daughter. It seems so strange to even say it. Sometimes I wonder at how God thought me fit to be a mother when I can barely make sense of my own life. Sometimes I wonder if all women thought the same thought but continued with growing children up, come what may. Perhaps others too, like me, have struggled with the definition of motherhood. We don't seem to experience the emotions we are supposed to. Worry, the urge to care, the desire to protect are natural to every parent. But this glorious paean to the Tiger-Warrior-Nurturer that resounds in every word spoken written read heard about the 'mother' is not me. 

Should I be worried about it? 

I have certainly struggled with my transition to motherhood. I have resented my changed status, become angry at what I am 'expected' to do, felt adamant when I did not perform 'motherly' things. These were feelings that did not occur only 'post-partum' as doctors fancifully put it. These are feelings that rise to the surface like the 'occasional' Hurricane Katrina.  I have certainly not been a role model mother. For the sake of my mental sanity, I left my baby behind at home with a woman I do not entirely trust, to go to work that is not entirely satisfactory.For the sake of my desire to get back to where I started from, I left my baby behind. I have felt terribly guilty, torn between wanting to stay at home with her and going mad when I did  so. 

I understood why those women in the photographs wore those barely clenched smiles. 

Today, as on other days, when I left for work, climbing into my car, and my baby wailed after me saying 'Amma , Amma', my heart tightened and a half suppressed thought lingered in my throat.

Perhaps it is not motherhood that is glorious.  It is a child's utter utter dependence on you, the mother, that makes motherhood. The knowledge that I am irreplaceable, so needed is a tremendous ego boost but it is also, I think, what compels women like me to figure out 'motherhood' as constructed by others down the ages.

Learning the Alphabet.

Two things that happened in the last week prompted this post.

One, a link to a blog that defiantly raises an "angry" fist  to the issues of the world from the all too sure perspective of literature and theory. Second, a seminar where a highly intelligent presentation collapsed into theoretical noise.

I remember my teacher at College, the nutty and cranky Dr Roy, sagely telling us what Adorno said to his students during a confrontation- theory is praxis. That was on one of those Royesque hot Delhi afternoon tutorial sessions spent in his dusty office up on the roof of St. Stephens. I still remember that moment. The creaky fan swirled hot air and dispersed Dr Roy's words into fragments of charged particles that settled around my soul, and opened up and justified to me, my world.

I loved, still love, the abstract words, weighed down by intended and interpreted meaning, that colonize the pages of texts tagged philosophy and theory. I dismissed my love for the more simple and direct. Charles Dickens, Lev Tolstoy, Steinbeck. But what nagged me, surrounded as I was, with friends who would sit  on candle light vigils, participate in marches, take trips to riot ridden Ahmedabad, raise their voices for the cause of those displaced by the Narmada project, my  boredom and disinterest in participating in a social cause. I felt guilty, terribly useless as a thinking individual, but I found the 'committed to a cause' bandwagon slightly neurotic with the penchant for speaking in the same and old language of 'activism'. 

Theory is praxis. It delighted me, it gave me conviction; it set my sense of wrong to right. I eased into myself. It was okay. I could read, think, write and yet feel I am somehow contributing. The blog I stumbled upon recently would have warmed the cockles of  my heart some years ago. It is full of subjectivities and issues of identities and representations and ideologies. The humanities departments in India, particularly the English Departments, constantly stumble into the fallacy of applying theory. They take historical, theoretical, philosophical responses to political , economic and social upheavals, and despite their own cautionary warning against universalization, promptly turn their meanings into categories, analysis into fixed concepts and critical language into jargon.

They reproduce without basis the historical consciousness of another age and era without scrutinizing the complexity and new realities of the present. Look at the way, for instance, Said's analysis of the Orientalist discourse is irresponsibly reproduced, cited, 'applied' to whatever might seem like a relationship of domination and colonization. Derrida is not understood, yet his trace, erasure and differance ceaselessly multiply across dissertations in India. Marx is sightlessly grasped and quoted to establish a reputation of sorts. It is 'fashionable' to use theory. The danger is when it is used as fixed unchanging thought.

In the pages and conversations of a persuasive old man, I found truth. Some years ago, I would have called truth debatable. Now I know that I can simply and confidently say truth according to me. It does not deny anyone else's version. It  identifies my authorship.

What did I find? I found that if I do not give my reader, my listener, the key to enter my world, if they cannot comprehend or fail to identify with what I am saying, theory can not ever be praxis. It is not for your audience to step up. It is up to you to step down. When I stepped down, I  realized I had to unlearn everything I thought I had learnt. When I stepped down, my learning was of no use. But I have started re-learning the alphabet.

On the Wall

How do we choose what to put up on our walls?

I visited a neighbor who has spent most of his adult life in Africa. Contrary to expectations (true to the cliche, I thought his walls would be roaring with leonine artifacts), there were no memorabilia of his long stint in that very colorful country. There was just one detail that was subject to much private mirth. An entire wall covered with a poster (perhaps) of abundant flora and fauna.

I would never put up such a ghastly piece but I know there might be several who would be awestruck by the enormity and magnitude of the poster, the striking green of its aura. A Wordsworthian 'spots of time' moment.

What would  I put up?

On a recent trip to Delhi, I went to my favorite place, the National Gallery of Modern Art. I bought off a number of prints of the work of painters I particularly like. But even as I put across the 500 rupee note to the woman across the counter, I had this sinking feeling that this is a great waste of money because Bijou would probably vehemently disagree about what I call beautiful.

Most things concerning decor Bijou and I agree on. But sometimes he has a streak of Gujarati mixed with middle class Mallu love for the kitschy beautiful. The love that stirs our fellow folk to build ostentatious wedding cake houses that stick out like sore thumbs in pristine geography. Like the time he brought home two huuge portraits of Christ on the Cross and the scene at Gethsemene in vibrant motion picture colors reminiscent of filmstar images pinned to the inside of an auto rickshaw. I recoiled in horror. Bijou sensed that something had gone wrong but his bad angel the male ego refused to stash those things away. So there they are, up on the walls of my beautiful house, sternly reminding me of God's presence (or the lack of it ) in our lives.

I'll admit, I'm not one for godly pictures on walls. But people do put up images of their gods on their walls as a reminder of their faith to the outside world. And to their erring conscience of their gods' presence. Some put things that they think they should put up, as an icon of "artistic" taste and sensibility. For instance, Da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Little did Da Vinci know that his experiment with the nature of paint, with using chemical formulations that might affect the longevity of his work, his study of human form, of the representations of the lightness and the darkness of being would be so 'ably' and effortlessly reproduced by the mechanics of modern technology. That it would also be preserved into everyday commonness with reproductions circulating around the globe, across time.

So what would I put up?

Would I put up Amrita Shergill's Three Sisters? If one was to imagine a context for the painting, I would imagine that they are being looked at by a prospective groom. They are also being looked at by us, intruders but gazers nevertheless. Perhaps the girl in light green is the intended bride but the sisters are not spared scrutiny either. Tense and in anticipation of moving out of the onlooker's frame, the irritable defiance of the sister in red sets the mood of the painting. Conscious of being looked at, the figures subtly question your authority to look at them. The sister in pink is resigned, looking away, not defeated, but resigned to the inevitability of scrutiny.

Or would I put up this up? Shergill's Woman Resting on Charpoy.

Women in India never lounge about. Only in the privacy of solitude do we allow ourselves leisure, make ourselves a cup of tea. Never do I see women relaxing in their balconies or leaning against the wall on the steps of their houses. To do so would perhaps be an inadvertent signal of availability. Frightened by our own sexuality, we do not relax in our bodies. We cover up in public. We wear the sari but primly.We refuse to enjoy the sun on our skin. We might open up in the darkness of clubs and other such spaces of artficial freedom but we teach our babies to wear a slip or a banyan (or an undershirt). Bijou and some friends were made uneasy by this picture. Perhaps because the woman in red with one leg slightly raised challenges us to keep looking. The painter's access to her privacy brings the langour of her physical ease to public representation. We may see it but find ourelves doing so surreptitiously.

Things that are not exactly easy on the eye, disturbing but beautiful, is a work of art. But to call something beautiful is the choice we make. Bijou's preference for kitsch over academic art is also perhaps an "artistic" choice. 

After all, academic art was made to embrace kitsch not too long ago. 

(Anjolie Ela Menon is representative- see http://www.india-today.com/itoday/20000918/mscape2.shtml and http://www.indiahabitat.org/vag/vag_mar2k1_artist5.htm)