Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

ENGAGING MODERNITY: RELIGION, GENDER, AND ART 109
“THE WOMEN ACTUALLY WANTED TO DIE”: ART AS TRANSPORT-
STATION OF TRAUMA, MEMORY AND MOURNING IN WORKS BY
MALAYSIAN AND JAPANESE WOMEN ARTISTS
Flaudette May V. Datuin
In her extremely nuanced reflection on the subaltern’s
inability to speak, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Nelson
and Grossberg, 1988) cited as an example, the
circumstances surrounding widow burning—sati or
suttee—in India. Abolished by the British at a time when
the colonial project shifted from a mercantile and
commercial to a territorial and administrative presence,
it has been generally understood as a case of “white
men saving brown women from brown men”. The
woman (today the “third world woman”) becomes an
object of protection from her own kind, and a signifier for
the establishment of a good society in a context
perceived to be backward, primitive and superstitious.
Against the phrase ‘white men saving brown women
from brown men’ however, is another competing justification:
“The Women Actually Wanted to Die”—a nativist
attempt to appropriate the woman as a signifier for a
return to ritual purity and allegiance to traditional culture
and older norms, at a time of domestic confusion and
instability brought about by the transition from
feudalism to capitalism and the exposure to Western
impact. That the “women actually wanted to die” is cited
as proof of women’s individual agency and capacity for
supreme self-sacrifice.
Spivak observes that in this clash of seemingly opposite
discourses, the woman’s body becomes a mute
ideological battleground between patriarchy and
imperialism. As the sati evolves into different forms—
from ritual (under Hindu doctrine) to crime (under
British, then later on Hindu law); from heavenly reward
(release from the cycle of rebirth) to object of the colonial
civilizing mission—the woman’s figure disappears
“not into pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling
which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third world
woman’ caught between tradition and modernization.”
(Spivak: 1988, 102)
Thus, after a labyrinthine argument, Spivak concluded
with a declaration that “the subaltern”—or those who have
been written out of domestic and global capitalism—
“cannot speak”. And if that subaltern happens to be a
woman, she is several times marginalized and effaced,
muted and “consigned more deeply in shadow”.
The declaration “the subaltern cannot speak” does not
however mean that women do not speak—they do cry
out in various ways. It is just that subaltern talk rarely
achieves its “dialogic level of utterance” especially if
incautious “readers” of “texts” of resistance continue to
miss the point. To illustrate, Spivak cites the case of a
young pro-Independence Bengali woman in the 1920s,
Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, who unable to bear the shame
of failing to carry out a political assassination entrusted
to her, hanged herself in her father’s modest apartment.
She deliberately and carefully timed her death at the onset
of her menstruation so as to remove suspicions that her
suicide was the outcome of an illegitimate pregnancy.
Spivak interprets this inexplicable act of self-murder
as a subaltern rewriting of the sati-suicide, as seen in
the way Bhuvaneswari violated the code forbidding
menstruating widows to immolate themselves, and in
her status as single woman, who refused to be tied to
a single male—whether legitimately or illegitimately.
This woman “actually wanted to die”, but her dying is
an act of resistance and of speaking outside normal
patriarchal channels.
However, if we examine the version of her descendants,
including her own grandnieces— the emancipated
women of today—she killed herself out of shame (illicit
love or failed political assignment), melancholia (possibly
brought on by her brother-in-law’s repeated taunts that
she was too old to be a not-yet-wife) and delirium. Her
own relatives, who should know better, did not understand
her text of resistance, thus effectively silencing her.
THE POST-COLONIAL FEMINIST DILEMMA:
THE ‘OTHER’ THAT IS NOT OTHER ENOUGH
I start with these Indian cases of failed self-representation
and willingness to die through sati-suicide to set the stage
for my discussion of a peculiarly post-colonial feminist
dilemma: the otherness-that-is-not-other enough, of
which Japanese woman artists provide a paradigmatic,
perhaps even idiosyncratic example. (Kelsky, 2001)
Idemitsu Mako, Tomiyama Taeko and Shimada Yoshiko 1
bear and articulate in their works the shame and trauma
of being part of a system that victimized and continue to
marginalize their “Others” or those from that part of Asia,
which suffered from the brunt of Japan’s imperialist
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows