Voicing women’s silences ---------Book

K.R. Meera’s Sooryane Aninja Oru Sthree turns around the story of Jezebel and narrates a woman’s struggle against பற்றிஅர்ச்சி

K.R. Meera’s latest novel, Sooryane Aninja Oru Sthree, brings alive Jezebel, the much maligned woman from the Old Testament, and writes her into the experiential registers of a modern Malayali woman. Resonating with Biblical allusions, myth and martyrdom, it probes the idea of what crucifixion and redemption mean to women. In the process, Meera imaginatively redeems ordinary women from the maladies of their mundane existence and shows them new paths of resistance. In a world written over with masculine languages and desires, even religions and pantheon of gods have patriarchal designs, is what the novel’s female protagonist discovers the hard way.

The Biblical Jezebel, the female protagonist’s namesake, dared to be a strong woman who held on to her pagan beliefs and refused to be beaten into conformity. She was vilified and pilloried across millennia and cast into the dust and bones of literary caskets that recorded only her shame.

Meera attempts to demystify this reading and resurrects a new Jezebel, whose body is her cross, as it has been for many women across time. Thus, she looks into the heart of a great silence in history, the silence of women who believe, who supplicate, whose bodies and minds are beaten and broken into obedience, but who are neither heard nor redeemed by religions. The novel has a melee of undercurrents as far as Jezebel’s life narrative is concerned.

Spanning four generations of women, Meera unravels a poignant tale in which male palettes seek to paint women in muted colours, while the masculine itself is constituted by the numerous acts of chastening and mastering women.

What is most subversive about the novel is the manner in which women — simple, ordinary women, themselves blaze a trail of emancipation and paint luminous shades of red and green and blue into their lives. The modern day Jezebel, a doctor, refuses to mute her songs in tune to the dictum of an overbearing patriarchal family into which she has been married. Instead, she learns to shape her destiny, however slowly and laboriously.

The subversive streak of the novel is in the clue to reading it that is offered in the very opening lines. Jezebel imagines herself as Christ and her body as the cross. There is an evocative insistence on the ritualistic nature of women’s sacrifices, both at the micro and macro levels of societal life. The universal and timeless myths and stories, parables and morals that shape and constrict women’s lives, form Meera’s creative backdrop. Against this she tells her tale which, in spite of its modern manifestations, smacks of oppressions that date back to antiquity, at times pegging down and sometimes dislodging her tale from its mythical moorings. The effect is that of rediscovering Biblical landmarks in the contemporary milieu while musing on the archetypes of ancient desires that come to haunt our perpetual present.

Flesh to the characters

The virtues of Meera’s women pale in comparison to their iridescent transgressions, acts which bring them alive even as the author fleshes out their yearnings and desires.

This is a story that gives voice to different inflections of women’s marginality, both in the inner and outer domains of life, thus offering a literary redressal for their silences in myth and history. The author takes a hammer to everything that colonises a woman’s world. The working of repression in a supremely male engineered religious world order where women like Jezebel’s mother are more patriarchal in moral policing women than the men in the family, receives an almost apocalyptic intensity in Meera’s hands.

As the micro-politics of power and desire in contemporary Kerala unfold through the pages, the perversions of both men and women, their deeply entrenched sense of sexual hypocrisy and the wholesale policing of the intimate and the sensual terrains of women’s lives are all revealed in their layers and layers of congealed oppression.

As male gods, male rationalities, male languages and myths come under scrutiny, Meera resurrects a new Biblical woman, a woman, clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and stars woven in her hair. Her virtue is in questioning the male-imposed virtues that immured her in a dungeon from time immemorial. If myth is the sum total of all versions, then here is a version of Jezebel that history cannot choose to ignore.

Deeply political and committed to a feminist cause Meera’s writing shakes the bastions of orthodoxy. Succinct and stark, her language scales the heights of poetic analogy and then takes a deliberative plunge to plummet the depths of the everyday sordidness of women’s worlds.

A brilliantly evocative work on a female Christ like figure, who resurrects to her own possibilities, and in understanding the redeeming powers of her body, meant to be her cross, offers a new promise of redemption to the womankind of the world.

Sooryane Aninja Oru Sthree

DC Books

Price: ₹380

Meena T. Pillai