I have lost count of all the women I carry within me. We women, none of us, are ever alone. Even if we want to be. Even if we work hard to be. At times I feel that being a woman means carrying all women in some form within oneself – some live rent-free in our heads; some take up residence in our skin and settle in the parts of our bodies that we have been taught to loathe; others flit in and out of our consciousness as fragments to aspire to, avoid, or appease. Yet we are never without each other, our pain and our perseverance are a bond that is framed across generations and continents and perhaps this is why we are perpetually trying to be regarded as the people we are, rather than a population that takes up half a planet and holds it firmly within its fragile grasp.
Yet of all the women I carry within me, the strangers who smile in my direction and the ones from whom I have received nothing but scorn, it is always my many mothers who mark me most. They say all women eventually turn into their mothers, either by rebelling against them or by invoking them consciously along the way. For me, it has been difficult to really define what a “mother” is. I was parted from my own very young, following my parents’ acrimonious divorce, and we both spent the next decade trying to steal moments through precious, regulated visits after year-long waits that left us somewhat strangers in each other’s presence. I have had a stepmother, whose turbulent mood swings from gracious and loving to resentful and enraged became the arbiters of my tween years. I have had aunts, both nurturers and nightmares, who took it upon themselves to ‘mother’ me in the absence of my own. I have had grandmothers, both of whose influence on their daughters has rippled through generations and remains the hook holding their daughters to them like a tenuous fishing line in turbulent waters. I am the product of two families that have been shaped primarily by women and run by matriarchs, as much as that possibility exists in a country like Pakistan. Both my mother and father have four sisters and no brothers. Both my grandfathers have been men who preferred to exist in their study and avoid the day-to-day family dramas of raising and educating children in Pakistan. So, I can say without reservation that I have been shaped largely, for better and worse, by women.
What does this mean, though? To be shaped by women? In literal and literary terms, women are frequently framed as containers and reservoirs for many things – shame, honour, pain, judgment, love, mercy, and all the many inconvenient facets of human existence that men prefer to discard and move on from. All these things are left for women to carry and contain, and I am not sure what shape this leaves us in. All this emotion, some ours, most of it belonging to someone else. Some from the present, most of it belonging to the past. All this baggage, carried in our ever-troublesome bodies. What shape does that leave behind? In my case, I only know some of the many women who live within me. I know some fragment of their pain and their silence. I know some of their shame and their triumphs. Mostly, however, I recognise the overwhelming fire of rage. It is often a rage that has been suppressed, sidelined, and swallowed, but a rage that simmers in me and my many cousins nonetheless, so clearly it has survived. Does fire have a shape? Does rage?
Sometimes this rage is silent and bitter, crafted around the missed chances, opportunities and lives these women could have lived had they not been married off young and clueless to appease a social lust for seeing girls ‘settled’ – the word ‘happily’ tacked on awkwardly as an afterthought. It is interesting that synonyms for the word ‘settled’ generally include ‘resolved’ or ‘finished,’ as if young women are incomplete enrolment forms that need to be filled out and signed off on in time lest they expire and exceed their usefulness. These women’s silence and smiles in the face of petty insults and outright violence is another shape we live with today – how to laugh in the face of belittlement and casual sexist jokes that are so ingrained as humour in our culture that no one really cares if their bent is to reduce a woman’s existence to a trite snippet or a forgotten object. The worst shape, perhaps, is strength. Always packaged as a superpower and relied upon by family, society, culture, and religion alike. Always framed as patience, perseverance, and above all, silence, in the face of pain and injustice. The entire world is built and rests upon women’s strength because a woman’s strength is perpetually defined in opposition to that of a man’s. The shape of male strength is muscle, bluster, and power – ours must always be a response to all those things. Because we are told time and time again that there isn’t enough space in the world to contain our strength, unless it is mitigating the destructive properties of theirs. All these shapes of survival are carved large and laborious in women’s own selves and then passed down to us, daughters and granddaughters. How could we possibly ever resolve how our many mothers have shaped us?
If I had to give these women a shape it would probably be in the form of a duality – as circles and squares. Circles repeat themselves and squares are self-contained. I have been shaped by two kinds of women. Those who believe inherently that what they have survived must be repeated for other women because for them that is how survival happens. Survival is a rite of passage, where pain is central and must be repeated and reframed for each generation because that’s the way ‘it has always been’. A woman escaping this loop would cause resentment. Perhaps it would even be constituted in such a retroactive application of logic as “unfair”. Why should this woman escape the binds of her mothers and grandmothers? These women to me are circles that keep repeating their patterns for their daughters and other women to follow. For the women of the circle, pain is legacy, and legacy must always be passed down.
Excerpted with permission from ‘All the Women in Me are on Fire’ by Maria Amir in The Feminisms of Our Mothers, edited by Daanika Kamal, Zubaan Books.
