End 2015 musings

Who would have thought that stability is a restless pain that is harder to endure than unpredictable change? This year has felt so heavy, so ‘draggy’ and i have had a hard time trying to describe my emotions during it. My journal entries have been terse, tinged with sadness bordering on depression. It is only during the last month of 2015 when the need to find and make sense of the themes and patterns of the year has quickened that i have finally pushed past, or rather slipped through the cracks of, the walls that have kept me from reaching my core essence all year.

This year has been the most stable year of all in the last or perhaps even the last two decades. Two decades of fairly constant change and upheaval. Anyone would think that a year or two of stability would be welcome. Unfortunately i railed against it. I constantly dug at the ground around my feet refusing to let it and myself settle and find comfort. Not a good choice – i could have used the time to integrate and heal.

I have realised that i am one of those people that do not handle stability well for with stability comes a despairing lack of progress and a decaying feeling of standing still as the world around changes and grows. Sure, those previous years of insecurity were terribly exhausting on the spirit but they also were times of constant transformation, of dragons hatching from stones and of unicorns emerging from cocoons. I cannot say that i have not yearned for peaceful times then but when they finally arrived i hated them.

What can i say – i perhaps am also one of those people who find it hard to be content and relax into the moment that is? I have a long journey to get to that space of enlightened peace which includes both shifting impermanence and solid calmness. From having experienced this space at least once in this lifetime i know too that it is merely a stop, a temporary space, which i come to after an outwardly spiralling path which both widens and deepens me but takes me away from this spot again and again.

So yes today once again, i have, as Eliot says, arrived where i started only to know the place for the first time. The year of procrastination and drifting, of finishing a book but not to my satisfaction, of feeling that i have accomplished nothing makes sudden sense. If nothing else i have learnt how not to do things - and that is huge.

The owl and the warrior have felt bereft for much of the year. Peering over the edge into 2016 all they see today is mists with vaguely formed possibilities. They know it will be a year of shedding and letting go for the other theme of 2015 has been death – both external and internal. Fortunately internal Death is an energy, an archetype they understand better than stability. Mostly because they sense they have re-birth to look forward to.

A meaningful 2016 to all.

Women in SF and a missed opportunity

Yesterday i attended and facilitated an UN Women event on Women in Speculative Fiction. It was a great discussion with three super panelists and a small audience. We talked about how SF has been a male dominated genre and how that is changing - too slow for some perhaps. The two women panelists spoke of how women tend to self-edit a lot and submit stories/manuscripts less often than men. One said that though submissions by men on online journals are higher than those by women the published stories by gender are on par. One of the panelists who is founder editor of the journal LONTAR shared statistics of the percentage of stories by women in the journal. They had dips but on average the stories by women hovered around 45% of the total. Yet published books by women writers of science fiction, epic and high fantasy lag behind books by men. 

Are men better writers? Are they more confident submitting or is something else operating here? Is what they write more commercially viable?

Next we spoke of female characters and how the roles they play are changing. One of the authors on the panel described one of her characters, a werewolf dealing with werewolf issues but also a mother of three. Why should women in SF only be young, curvaceous and leather clad, she said. Many in the audience nodded vigourously. The author also spoke of different kinds of strength not just that which is depicted by sword yielding warriors. A question was raised - women characters in SF have changed but have male characters changed? Depends on what you read, one said - but there seemed to be a consensus that male characters have not changed much. One of the panelists pointed how often readers related easily to stereotypical roles and it was easy to write within those roles and much harder to try to change the stereotypes. Someone in the audience said that it was not enough to have just the women change but men's behaviour towards the women also needed to. 

Mad Max, Fury Road - a feminist film? There was some disagreement around that. One of the panelists said that change in popular culture themes and roles need to come in slowly to be accepted. I felt a slight constriction in my chest and wondered do they really?

Then we moved on to speaking of SF worlds and how SF has been used well to comment on and challenge existing fault lines in society. The setting of a different world allows our minds to reflect on phenomena that we find too painful to face in ours or have normalised in our realities. An interesting question was asked - when writers write politically do they need to be gentle in their writing so as to not turn off readers but create opportunities to introspect? One panelist said if she wanted to write strongly about an issue she would go ahead and do it. One talked about books where the issues have come up very silently (Neil Gaiman - American Gods) or books where the characters and narratives have been so absorbing that the issue though very direct has felt natural (Left Hand of Darkness). 

It was at this point that a question began slowly forming in that constricted chest. I seem to have written this long post just to get to that question - which i still  have trouble articulating clearly. Something feels wrong here - worlds like the one George R.R. Martin has created with a very disturbing form of patriarchy - dystopic - are accepted easily. Despite having a few strong women characters he really does hit you over the head with a culture where men dominate and control and rape culture is normalised. In our current times when we are struggling towards an equal world - is he not also making a 'political' statement? Maybe i have got it wrong but it felt that if i wanted to make a counter statement in fiction about how abhorrent rape culture is i might need to tone my voice down - to be heard, to be commercial enough?  Why is it wrong to have a 'feminist agenda' but not wrong to have a misogynist voice? As i write this i see that perhaps i too am too careful in my own re-write of the hindu myths - i too am approaching the issue too gently.

Writing counter culturally is hard -  i need to push my boundaries. But i wish that this question had formed clearly within me yesterday - a missed opportunity :( for discussion from the panel and audience.

India's daughter

Feelings and thoughts still float like ribbons in a now gentle breeze. Yesterday it was a turbulent storm they fluttered wildly in. For me - the documentary, ‘India’s daughter,’ told the story of two powerful forces at odds with each other in current day India. The force created by Jyoti’s dreams and of her parents support of her dreams. The other a more ancient and terrifying force – that of the patriarchy, the punishers, the rapists, the defence lawyers. The old force threatened by the new must squash it before it claims more space. 

Yes, not a new story but one that needs to be told again and again. Yes, it certainly does not get to the roots of the problem and there is a part of me desperate to find the roots so I can fix the problem. Another part of me knows that though a thousand steps have already been taken on this journey of letting our daughters become women we still have ten thousand more unknown and uncertain steps to take. As for the much criticised title - Without realising it I think Udwin picked a name appropriate for this unfortunate story – Jyoti was brutally forced into the box of being just another daughter of India by those rapists. 

I did have issues with Udwin’s unconsciousness, about her white lens. I did question why an Oxford historian was required to explain India’s rape problem. I did feel her ignorance come through in some of her interview comments - and they hurt. But I am glad she told this story and hope many more do. I do wonder - about the icy, remorselessness of Mukesh’s voice - did he have any moments of doubt, of questioning? Udwin says she had 16 hours of tape shot in Tihar - I wonder what was edited out.