Of Books Unwritten

(The South Asian Women Writers' Colloquium was held in New Delhi in February this year under the aegis of Womens' World India. It is a part of the New York-based Womens' WORLD, formed decades back by a group of feminist writers in order to address deep-seated issues of gender-based censorship. In one session called 'The Guarded Tongue' about the invisible, insidious censorship women and writers live with, Bangladeshi representative Neeman Sobhan spoke about her own guardedness as a woman writer. Below is reproduced her words.)
The Mexican poet Octavio Paz once wrote: "Words became my dwelling place." For more than three decades I have led an expatriate existence, because at the age of nineteen I was married off to a wonderful man and sent away to paradise---so I can't even complain, but since then, I have lived away from my country, my culture, my desired literary milieu, and, due to the exigencies of family roles and responsibilities, in exile from my true self. So, for years now, Ocatvio Paz's line has been mine: I have lived physically in that illusory place called 'home' carefully created as a sub-culture within a foreign environment, and also in that other home at the heart of my creativity, imagination and writing: my dwelling place of words.
But I discovered that no dwelling place has doors strong enough to shut out the outside world with its demands and judgments, its tyranny of social and political correctness. The act of writing is intrinsically an act of exposure, even if it gestates within a safe nook away from the eye of the public and the publishing world. Women writers like myself, who use writing essentially as a tool of self-exploration, self knowledge, self definition, with no thoughts of being published, and who live entrenched in social and family networks, have to keep on the right side of the world, however liberal their environment seems to be.
I speak various languages but my mother tongue is poetry. As a longstanding writer of columns and short stories, prose has been my professional language - a father tongue if you will, but poetry has been the short hand of my heart. For as far back as I can remember I have always written poems. I love poetry not only for its special language; I love poetry for its special ability to conceal as much as it reveals. I learnt about concealing very early on, and around the same time that I first encountered the invisible nets of censorship as a thirteen year old budding writer. I recall myself as the good daughter eternally struggling with the social rebel hidden deep inside me, fighting with my mother on some forgotten issue and turning to my 'Dear Diary' journal to write: "Oh! I hate her!" And my mother had come across that page. The exaggerated emotional repercussion of that discovery, my mother's grief, and my horror at the betrayal of that sacred space called a private page gave me the first lesson of the vulnerability of self revelation in words; of the transparent nature of writing; and the weight of social and emotional responsibility to others. It was my first encounter with the insidious laws of self-censorship.
It produced in me a lifelong suspicion of prose. For me prose was too accessible, and only good for communicating with the world. It was about speaking aloud to an audience. Poetry was intimate, written for oneself. It was about silent, inner monologue. I trusted it and turned to poetry as the coded, secret language of the heart, to which only special people had access, mostly those who were themselves members of the club, and knew the rules and the password.
Over the years I wrote poetry as my 'Dear Diary' journal. I have masses of poems, all in cages, all with their wings clipped. Just recently I considered allowing them to be released into the open sky. My son offered his service to sort out my electronic files and organize my poems into a volume for possible publication. Although he didn't actually read my poems, suddenly I saw my writing through his eyes, and other alien eyes. My birds shied away, giving me an uncomfortable pause. In that pause I heard the muted voices of others, and their bewilderment, disapproval, misunderstanding or, worse, total comprehension! It is not a coincidence that this book of poems which I plan to call, 'Songs and Silences' has its 'Songs' side, consisting of universal, existential and spiritual themes that are close to my heart, quite ready for publication; whereas, the group called 'The Inner Cry' consisting of poems of deeply personal and emotional issues, where I laid myself bare, remains resoundingly on the side of 'Silences.' I am not sure I trust the world or myself enough to publish these. Such is the innate, controlling power of inner censorship
As you see, I have to my credit only one published book, a collection of my columns, and that too, came out only when many of my readers wished to have my writings anthologized. It makes me smile to think of the poetic irony that an intensely private person like myself, mainly a scribbler of poems, should have been jettisoned, due to circumstances, into that most public form of writing--the weekly stage performance of the newspaper personal column! At the urging of friend and editor of the Bangladeshi English national daily, the Daily Star, I turned into a public chronicler of the minutiae of my world, my life and times. Extending over almost a decade, my experience as a columnist was valuable to my writer's identity, making me aware of the world and of how to negotiate my personal space within it. More importantly, I learnt not only about the symbiotic relationship of reader and writer, but also about the power of the reader over the writer, rapping her on the knuckles if she went outside his expectations of the acceptable. But I took it all as a challenge and kept trying to strain against my tethers to slip in an original, individualistic, oblique, even a subversive view within a cozy world picture of familiar and familial concerns.
Sometimes feathers got ruffled on both sides, but my column remained popular, and public approval and popularity is heady and can induce conformity. I started to become careful about choosing my topics to allow me to cruise along smoothly. And that is when I sniffed the leakage of danger: I caught myself often preemptively censoring myself even before the reader was given the chance to react. It made me self-conscious, intellectually unadventurous and perhaps superficial in my writing. So, I took a temporary break from column-writing and my public dialogue with the world, to instead explore what other literary forms might mean to my inner writer's journey towards the truth. What I want to write is neither fact nor fiction but perhaps, a narrative form that straddles both factual and internal truths. I love the English language because in it 'WORLD' and 'WORD' are so close in sound, and almost self-reflective, mirror images. To me the world IS the word; I see the world through words; writing spells out my reality, creates the dwelling place of MY truths, not other people's truths.
But the thing about this reality is that its personal truths are complex, shifting, sometimes ambivalent, and may differ from the fixed facts of political history, religious injunctions, received family, cultural and national myths, and the worldly experiences of others. I want to create not a fictional world which attempts to imitate reality but to recreate the real world as I have lived it, with the truths about people and events as I saw them. I'd like to reclaim my past to arrive at my present. I would like among other things to, perhaps revisit in words the vanished worlds of East and West Pakistan, both of which were my homes, and the shattering events of 1971, in which my generation lost so much even as we gained a country---and all seen not from the grand historical perspective of national politics and big questions, but from my personal, myopic, snail's-eye-view of the world where people are people not friends and enemies. I want to write my history my way, a mythic and subjective way of apprehending the truth.
In my fiction I would like to hear the tale of the voice that has lived within me for years, that original, all-seeing presence that has thoughts and perceptions for which there are no words. And I want to create the words and the worlds for this persona, who is not hemmed in by the conventions of right and wrong, does not carry worldly labels branding her wife, mother, woman, Bangladeshi, Italian or Muslim but someone who speaks from the heart and whose mother tongue is Poetry.
I once saw a cartoon, of a doctor scrutinizing a patient's chest x-ray and exclaiming, "By God! You DO have a book inside you!" I never needed an x-ray to tell me that I have not just one book but perhaps volumes inside me waiting to escape. But an X-ray might also reveal the dark areas as well as the bright desire for truth, and not far away, the fear of the invisible watchman at the door.
After all, my life is not my own, and I wonder if I can delve into my own life and that of others without repercussions. Can I utter the unmentionables that we learn to conceal behind polite masks? I ask myself, what if people get angry, offended or, like my mother, hurt by my writing? Is it worth it? And even as I explore these questions, here I stand, guilty as charged: a scribbler of poems with folded wings; a writer of silences and of books unwritten.
Neeman Sobhan is a writer and columnist who divides her time between Rome and Dhaka.