Toronto Journal
A Room of One's Own
The maple leaves are turning colour. Almost imperceptibly, they spring upon us a myriad spectacle of molten golds, auburn browns, soft yellows and brick reds. The wind blows cold now and both of these changes leave us gasping at the bewildering splendor of seasonal change.
I was talking to a friend the other day who was on his cell phone, driving along the Don Valley Parkway, when suddenly I heard a gasp and then there was complete silence on his part. When I asked him, he said, "The valley! The leaves! The trees - it is too gorgeous to describe." I knew what he meant.
I had been shopping for Halloween. Our neighborhood is transformed into a little goblin and witches haunt on the 31st of October every year. Mikhaela was going as a lady while Amer was going as a Gothic character this year. I bought some candies for the neighborhood kids who would come around for trick and treats. Around 6.30 in the evening we would be prepared to give out the goodies to the invading hordes of children, while our own kids made rounds of the neighborhood to collect their loot. After it was all over, I would check the candy (for made in China!), stash half of it away, break up the little fights and peace would descend after the gorging on sweets. It's a wonderful time for dentists in North America - they are gleefully occupied with their little charges after Halloween!
Surrounded by the beauty of the seasons and the clamor of Haloween, it is difficult to pen a few lines, let alone a couple of pages. It is at times such as this that I long for 'A Room of One's Own.'
When Virginia Woolf wrote the term "a room of one's own", she meant that for a woman to be noteworthy in the literary world, a woman must have both financial freedom and the spatial ability (a room) in order to write fiction, in order to have some measure of success. She describes the social condition of women in those days as inferior to that of men in terms of the ability to create lasting literature. In those days "the daughter who refused to marry the gentleman of her parent's choice was liable to be beaten up, flung about the room, without any shock being inflicted upon public opinion." Her lot was often the care of children and being in the good graces of her husband and father. Writers who were predominantly men created the fictional women of that time. The fictional women were infinitely beautiful and virtuous but in practicality she was completely insignificant.
South Asian Literature written in English had until very recently been dominated by writers who are men. Fictional women characters were thus seen through the eyes of men, as mothers, wives, sisters, etc. These women were like rarefied, fossilized relics of an unknown era. Only in recent fiction such as that of Jhumpa Lahiri and Shani Motoo do women characters take on a life of their own. Jhumpa Lahiri's women characters such as Ruma in 'Unaccustomed Earth' straddle dual identities as she is pulled by the desire to ask her widowed father to stay with her after the death of her mother, only to be confounded by the fact that her father does not want to stay with her due to his love for a new-found independence. Her short stories are also longer, more detailed in nuances and description that don't seem to add to the necessary tension of a short story. She tells a story more like a woman, spinning a tale with elaborate descriptions of character and space. Shani Mootoo, a Canadian writer of Trinidad origin (nominated for several awards) in the short story 'A Garden Of Her Own' writes of a protagonist who faces a life without love from her spouse. So she creates a passion (in the form of a garden) to give her life meaning and to provide a creative outlet. Vijai expresses her need for creativity and personal growth in her little garden in the balcony. This search for a better life, for a more meaningful existence in the often hostile world faced by women is often a theme with Shani Mootoo.
As a writer I am often tempted to follow path of my male predecessors. It seems safer, easier to do so. At a fiction-writing workshop that I conducted recently for members of the Desi-Lit chapter in Toronto, we read through several character sketches of South Asian women. I even read a bit about my main woman character. A member of my audience, an aspiring writer called Bruce, asked me "Why is your protagonist so goody-two shoes?" While the mostly South Asian audience identified with her, Bruce the Canadian was not convinced. So I looked at my protagonist again and made some changes that satisfied him. So as I progress with my writing, I am slowly casting off the purdah that my protagonist likes to don from time to time (so much like our women), and is finally beginning to take a life of her own.
I will certainly not confine her to the need for "a room of one's own."
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