African shades of feminism in Pakistan

“Wajood-a-zan say hai tasveer-e-qainat main rang”

Allama Muhammad Iqbal

The world is indeed a colourful place because of women. But what if we have started to struggle with the very colour oozing out of her existence! What if she has turned into a bane and not a boon for her family? What if baby girls are always thought of as an onus? Slowly and steadily this is happening in our world. I choose to talk of my part of the world: Pakistan.  Women struggle every day for a voice, for their right to exist and be respected as humans more than anything. I am drawing similarities between African and Pakistani situations that pose a threat to female survival in her day to day existence. Tsisi Dengarembga  in her very beautifully crafted novel, Nervous Conditions, discussed the coming of age of its protagonist, Tsisi Tambu. According to critics, the writer talked about “things that needed to be told.” And those things strike a perfect cord with the situation of women in Pakistan. Where a vocal woman like Fauzia Azeem, known to the world as Qandeel Baloch, is forever stifled out of existence for her ‘licentious’ ways. She has broken the code of culture and her conventional family values. She had stretched too far beyond her capacity to be free. And she was punished by her own kith and kin. Some taboos need a redress.

Feminism, women rights and egalitarianism of genders remains our recurrent social theme. According to a feminist, just speaking out and not getting bogged down by stereotypes does not make one a feminist. It makes one a human. This discrimination is a skeleton in our closets that cuts the society to a quick if a woman comes up and talks about issues that need address. For a freedom of thought to prevail a freedom from wanton fear has to be brought in place. There are countless parallels that can be drawn between Dengarembga’s characters and Pakistani female plight.

The novel is full of ironies. Its protagonist is Tsisi Tambu. Her entire life is dotted with strife to reclaim her identity as an empowered African woman. At the end as a result of her unflinching resolve there is a final triumph over the forces of resistance, as she herself concludes the novel by saying the following:

“This is the story of how it all began.”

Tambu always wanted to educate herself, but due to the family’s preference to educate boys rather than girls, her dream could not come to fruition earlier in life. This we see play out in the downtrodden families living in villages in broad daylight; where men are preferred over women simply for their privilege of being a man. Unfortunate enough is the fact that this explicit discrimination we see also in modern educated families sometimes, stooping so low! Nevertheless, Tambu persisted in her endeavours. Her incident of going to Umtali, as a ten year old, to sell meallies (to collect money to pay her school fees) is one glaring example of her strong commitment to educate herself. Ultimately, it is only through the tragic death of her brother Nhamu that she gets a golden chance of social mobility into the house of Babamukuru, her paternal uncle. There she joins the mission and later “Sacred Heart” for high school. Her happiness at getting this opportunity surpasses all the sorrow of her brother’s death. In fact, she says the following at beginning of the novel:

“I was not sorry when my brother died.”

Through her journey of trial and travail and an eventual triumph, we have been introduced to an empowered, free, and vindicated African woman. The novel is full of iconoclastic female figures who oppose the currency of opinion about them and the limitations imposed on their roles. Lucia is another such instance. She, having committed the heinous act of adultery, remains calm and composed; in fact, she takes the consequences in her stride, evincing great dignity, when the elders of the tribe sit to negotiate her fate. She faces a hard time with resilience and feels that Takesure was just as culpable for the sin as she was—and, therefore, that censoring her alone for it was unjustified. In addition, in response to his false accusations against Lucia, she does not shy away from punishing Takesure’s hypocrisy with a slap on his face before the village elders. Lucia’s persona is a stark contrast with the accepted African norm of female subordination and submission without question. What is more striking than her not accepting social norms is her ability to redeem herself and realise that there was a “way to be good again”. Redemption and solace through personal power are significant themes of the novel.  She does not simply become drowned in the guilt of her sin, but finds a way to grow out of it. By educating herself and getting employed, she finds her salvation and redemption. This is a loud and clear comment on the degeneration of African social values. And so is this a potent application on Pakistani female conscience. One must always respect one’s self and find a way to redemption; instead of getting drowned in social rejection one must outgrow social opposition and rise.

Another strong model of feminism can be seen in Maiguru, Nyasha’a mother. Briefly, Maiguru is Babamukuru’s wife. She and her family had lived in England but returned to Africa to reclaim their roots and serve their clan through supporting them in education and finance. Yet what they bring with them is a western value system. The clash of foreign values and those of Africa is beautifully explored by the author in such a struggle and division within the Babamukuru household through Nyasha.

In an environment where education was meant to be a male prerogative, Maiguru emerges as an excellent example inconsistent with this supposition. She has an “MA in Philosophy” from England and is distinctly liberated in comparison with other females in the novel. Nevertheless, her income is used by Babamukuru for the welfare of the homestead and the Mission. She never grumbles over it, but perseveres stoically. One action of hers speaks volumes of her wilfulness to oppose the existing norms of expecting too much from females. At the homestead, she has to carry gallons of water from the Nyamarira on foot. Also, she has to cook for a great number of people staying at the homestead. As her exasperation reaches a head, she resolves to return to the Mission with Chido, her son. She takes a stand that very few could muster the courage to take.

Similarly, her daughter, Nyasha, is critical—almost to the point of mutiny—of the colonial dominance of the African mind and is a split personality. On colonial dominance, she says the following:

“It’s bad enough . . . when a country gets colonised, but when the people do as well! That’s the end, really, that’s the end.”

This is the quintessence. The colonial mindset has a definitive impact on how the citizens of the country are treated. A persistent superiority complex− which arises from an inherent guilt of past subjugation− is practiced by males to keep the womenfolk in check. The check unfortunately is too hard to shoulder sometimes. It becomes a yoke which has its roots in the colonial past. The mental subjugation does not really end with a geography gaining independence. The mental block lives on even as years pass by. Pakistan is in a similar quagmire. Power is practiced where it need not be. Control is put in place where it does more harm than good. Men and women need to be confidants in building a nation. Women have roles distinct from men. Equality does not entail identicality, but equality also cannot be misunderstood as a denial of basic rights such as education and freedom of thought. Dengarembga gives us a way out of this tussle for roles in a society. She gives women some breathe of fresh air, some hope where they are never appreciated or acknowledged.

Coming back to the novel, let us talk about the character with the most thrust, Nyasha. Having lived abroad, Nyasha could neither fully adopt the western norms, nor fully reintegrate in the African customs on her return; either way, she was a subject to intense criticism of her parents and, thus, she felt out of place and alienated from her roots. She had become a confused mishmash of identities. So much so that she once told Tambu:

“I am not one of them, but I am not one of you.”

Still, on both axes, she cannot accept slavery and prefers to live with the freedom to make choices of her own, enjoying all the extravagance that is typically reserved for the male in African society. She opposes not just the way her identity, freedom, and roots as a human being had been snatched away, but also her rights as a woman, which are trampled upon without a second thought. She defies these discrepancies that exist in social stereotyping. Nyasha gives her parents a hard time, all in an effort to achieve cohesion in her identity, which is split between Africa and the West. Also, through her character in the novel, the author reveals the most fundamental hypocrisy in African society, which is also a significant reason for its crumbling foundations: expecting too much from women in return for too little.

Ma’Shingayi, Tambu’s mother, is more of a silent sufferer due to lack of education, exposure, and ultimately purpose in her life. Nevertheless, she deftly analyses the problems around her. For instance, when she considers Babamukuru’s troubles in Africanising his children, she comments:

“It is the Englishness that will kill them.”

Although we later realise the roots of Nyasha’s nervous breakdown. A strong identity cannot be formed when a young plant is uprooted and transplanted in unfamiliar soils. A stereotypical statement of this sort coming from an uneducated woman comes as no surprise to the reader.

Nervous Conditions focuses upon the female resistance to the status quo and the struggle to attain a definite say in the way their lives should be led. What they are asking now is not just female rights but the most fundamental human right: the right to live in freedom and to determine for themselves how they want to utilise their abilities in making their societies better places to live. This is not some wanton call for a rebellion. But a slight attitudinal shift.  If we want to enjoy the true colour of female existence, then the mental and physical capabilities of this gender need to be acknowledged. Women are more than objects, it should be shown through action. They need to be given more than just a tag of an onus.