Book review: 'Granta 115: The F Word'

Granta 115: The F Word
Granta Publications
272 pages
Rs762

The women’s movement constantly struggles under the weight of acrimonious debate, prejudice, recrimination, and factionalism. The stereotypical feminist, in the collective imagination, is a bra-burning, man-hating, ugly-shoe-wearing termagant who hasn’t a hope in hell of getting laid — an image so virulent that even women who identify with feminism’s struggles and ideals hesitate to call themselves feminists for fear of social leprosy. As far back as the late 1990s, Time magazine theorised that feminism was dead, and had possibly hanged itself. People talk today of living in a post-feminist age that has
largely transcended the struggle for equal rights.

The title of this issue of Granta therefore has the black humour of a scary movie, in which the just-killed monster turns out not to be dead at all, and leaps out again to frighten the wits out of you. The F Word is a powerful refutation of the notion that feminism is somehow irrelevant and wearisome. Introspective and nuanced, this collection of non-fiction, memoir, fiction and poetry skips the sermonising in favour of examining reality, warts and all. The pieces are largely personal; and, as they say, the personal is political.

Rachel Cusk’s scorching reflection on a marital breakup, ‘Aftermath’, suggests that the principle of love in family life underestimates the “human need for war”, with devastating consequences. Clashing with her husband over custody of the kids, she writes: “The children belong to me: once I would have criticised such a sentiment severely. Where had this heresy gestated? If it was part of me, where had it lived for all those years, in our egalitarian household?” It’s an unexpected discovery of dark terrain beyond the beacon of equal rights.

Inflections of race and class complicate gender inequities in Julie Otsuka’s ‘The Children’, and Taiye Selasi’s ‘The Sex Lives Of African Girls’, both richly visual, beautifully written stories. Otsuka’s immigrant Japanese mothers chronicle the heartbreak of bearing and raising children who slip from their physical and cultural orbit into a country where dreams don’t always come true. Selasi’s narrator is a young Ghanian girl who stumbles upon the dark side of power dynamics in the family. The story’s first brief line carries all the menace to come: “Begin, inevitably, with Uncle.”

Older writers like Eudora Welty, AS Byatt and Francine Prose reflect on the women’s movement of their age — Welty’s wicked little letter to the editors of The New Yorker, Byatt’s “moment of pure feminist rage” in a brief piece called ‘NO GRLS ALOD. INSEPT MOM.’ about the boys’ club mentality in academic life, and Prose’s discovery of the faultlines in the sisterhood, in this case in the form of sex between her husband and members of her feminist consciousness-raising group.

“Actually,” she writes, “I was surprised by how little it upset me…sex trumps politics, common sense and better judgement.” The experience “cured me of the notion that women are no more or less likely than men to treat people well or badly.”

An interesting thought experiment by Helen Simpson called ‘Night Thoughts’ flips the traditional power balance — a man spends a sleepless night worrying about his body image, his spouse’s porn habit and her disinterest in how he copes. It springs no surprises beyond the central flip, but it does evoke a smile of recognition.

A couple of pieces paint vivid portraits: ‘A Train In Winter’ relates the experience of a number of Frenchwomen imprisoned at Birkenau during World War II. Caroline Moorehead’s matter-of-fact style throws the horrors of the time into sharper relief than any number of adjectives could. Urvashi Butalia’s ‘Mona’s Story’ is an account of her friendship with a hijra, which pays as much honest attention to their common concerns as to the chasms of age and class and gender between them.

Love is a central concern of the volume. In Jeanette Winterson’s ‘All I Know About Gertrude Stein’, a woman thinks of the legendary love story of Stein and Alice B Toklas in contrast to her own unhappy relationship and wonders what happened to love:

“You say we will fail, get frustrated, fall out, fight. All the F-words. But there is another one: forgive.”

The F Word is forceful without being strident, and resistant without being querulous. It covers a range of geographies, ethnicities, races, sexualities, and socio-economic classes, and showcases the quality of writing one expects from Granta. In India, where the vast majority of women deal with life and death issues — female foeticide and infanticide, dowry deaths and clean drinking water — it is easy to dismiss this as a collection of distant frivolities relevant only to urban upper-class women. But that would be to miss the fact that at the heart of all feminist issues, everywhere, is a lopsided power equation. The consequences are merely a matter of type and degree.

Is feminism dead, then? The F Word is an excellent answer to that question. Get ready to scream.

Mitali Saran is a freelance writer