Poornima Manco

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The Politics of Pain

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Are you someone who wears their heart on their sleeve? Or are you someone who retreats to a quiet corner to lick your wounds? Do you put a brave face on when your world is falling apart? Or do you weep openly, displaying your anguish for all to see?

What is the politics of pain?

Does displaying a stiff upper lip make you into an unfeeling monster? Does being the opposite make you into a drama queen?

Honestly, I don’t know. All I know is that the way I’ve handled pain has swung both ways. In some instances, I’ve wanted, even needed, the acknowledgement of my tragedy, the sympathy that comes along with that acknowledgement, the understanding that something earth-shattering has occurred and life will never be the same hereafter. At other times, my pain has felt so private that exposing it to the world has felt like a betrayal of my soul. This is pain that I need to process alone, in my own time, allowing the healing to occur without the prying eyes and the whispered platitudes of all and sundry. Which is the correct way? Maybe neither, maybe both.

I read an article recently in which the writer skewered all those who tried to offer her platitudes after the death of her partner and brother in quick succession. She was sick of being “othered”, of her tragedies being reduced to a litany of “atleasts”. We’ve all been there. On both sides of the equation. If you’ve ever suffered a loss, you know how difficult it is to squeeze comfort out of the quotidian banalities that are proffered by the people surrounding you. If you are the one offering the banal and overused words of comfort, you know how difficult it is to say something truly profound, something that can ease the pain, even if only for a short while. As humans, we are ill-equipped to deal with emotional pain. The irony is that this pain is something we will encounter several times over in our lifetimes.

Our responses to our suffering are born out of conditioning. If you come from a culture where mourning is done vocally and proudly, then it can seem perplexing when your efforts to condole are dismissed summarily by a person whose cultural conditioning primes them to mourn alone. If you derive succour from a public outpouring of sympathy, then a closed door response may seem odd to you. Conversely, if you cannot bear for the world and its wife to know your business, you may not be able to wrap your head around someone who actively seeks attention for their state.

There is a lady I follow on Instagram. She is an influencer. Last year, the most awful tragedy befell her when her child committed suicide. For weeks afterwards there was no sign of her on the social media platform, but when she returned, she seemed to be back on form doing what she had always done. I wondered how she could carry on after something so cataclysmic had occurred? How could she smile, try on new outfits and twirl in front of the camera? How?

Then I checked myself. What did I know of her pain, of how many tears she shed daily, of how she mourned her child? How much courage it must have taken her to just get out of bed! She was coping in the only way she knew how, by carrying on with life. Had this life changed forever? Yes, it had. She just refused to show how much to the world. And who was I to judge?

Ultimately, loss and pain, tragedy and grief, spare no one. How we deal with and react to, how we reach out and sympathise, are deeply personal responses with no right or wrong. If kindness and understanding form the basis of all our interactions, the politics of pain becomes moot.

“We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”

– Percy Bysshe Shelley.

The Male Gaze

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Some time ago, a reviewer upbraided me for describing a woman in my book with a very ‘male gaze’. The criticism wasn’t entirely unwarranted, as the person describing the woman was a man, and for reasons of authenticity, I had to inhabit his skin and describe her through his eyes. However, her remark got me wondering. How often do we view ourselves and other women through the prism of a man’s expectations?

Many, many years ago, when I was in my early twenties, I came to England on a holiday with a female friend. For a short while, we intended to stay with her male cousin in his house in Kent. I had never met him before, and had zero expectations. But as soon as we met, I could see him sizing me up, and finding that I wasn’t as attractive as he’d been led to believe. How do I know this? I overheard a conversation he had with his friend over the phone where he described me as “disappointing”. As a twenty-something year old, I took his evaluation to heart, judging myself as harshly as he had judged me.

Now when I look back, the only “disappointing” thing I find about myself is that I couldn’t recognise an idiot when I saw one. He was a spoiled, entitled brat, used to women falling at his feet, and the many incidents that followed with him at the centre would make for a very interesting tale. However, I will save that for a future retelling.

Over the years, I’ve come to understand that no one can live up to the ideal standards that men enforce upon women. And I see women everywhere trying. No matter what we tell ourselves, we have internalised these incredibly harsh beauty standards within us and convinced ourselves that we primp and preen for no one else but our own selves. Really?

Don’t get me wrong – for the better part of my own life, I did the same. More the fool me!

There is nothing wrong with wanting to look attractive, to wanting to look your best at any age, whatever your best may be. But it is important to ask whose yardstick are you living by?

Recently I stumbled upon an article describing Kim Kardashian’s revenge body. What on earth is a revenge body I wondered? Well, the article enlightened me. After her divorce from Kanye West, Kim Kardashian had embarked upon a self-improvement endeavour which involved eating a plant-based diet, overhauling her exercise regime and removing her famous bum-implants. Naturally, this sent the netizens into a frenzy, each one proclaiming how “fabulous” Kim was looking post-breakup. A million or more young girls, fans of the canny businesswoman, most likely internalised the message that heartbreak didn’t mean diving into the nearest tub of Haagen-Dazs. Instead, it meant a punishing regimen of readying oneself for the next potential partner.

One can be the most shiny, beautiful self on the outside, but if it does not match up to the inside, it is a doomed undertaking.

Ageism, sexism, misogyny are the favoured sons of patriarchy. I see examples of women bending over backwards trying to adhere to the impossible criteria of youth, beauty and attractiveness imposed upon them by male-led institutions and thought processes. Actresses that starve their bodies and plump their faces, erasing every facial expression while erasing their wrinkles. Pre-teens who wear overtly sexualised clothing because they want to appear seductive. Young girls who pout and pirouette in their smalls in front of the camera, feeding the lusts of perverts, in the belief that they are ‘free’ to explore their sexuality as they will.

The ‘Male Gaze’ has us pinned against a wall, squirming like insects, performing haplessly and fighting a losing battle in the mistaken belief that we hold the cards. We don’t. We never have. But that’s not to say we never will.

Let us reclaim the narrative of our bodies and our minds. Our journey is ours alone, and let it be one that is empathetic to the process of ageing, understanding to the process of growing up, inclusive of every shape, size and colour, and above all, divorced from the ill effects of the male gaze.

 

 

 

The Flip Side

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A very long time ago, when my mother was still alive and too unwell to venture out of the house, she would regale me with stories of the movies she had seen over the week, or television shows that had captured her attention. As she would break it down scene by scene, sometimes I’d suppress my yawns, wondering why she spoke of little else. Over twenty years later, I’ve come to realise that at that moment, those movies and those television shows were her window to the world. Restricted as she was, because of her health, her only contact with the outside was through the people who visited her sporadically or through these programmes that allowed her to escape the misery of her ill-health.

In the last ten days, this has once again come home to me. On the 1st of January I tested positive for Covid, and was told to isolate until the 10th of the month. For the first four or five days, I was too tired and unwell for it to bother me much. Once I had recovered, however, I felt a bit like a caged animal. Albeit in a very nice cage, surrounded by a loving family. Guess what I’ve done in the past ten days? Yes, you guessed right! Binge watched multiple shows and movies that were on my list, chewed through a few books and newspaper articles, and worked on my own book, of course.

Maybe it’s the fact that I watched these programmes back to back, or that I read a short story that aligned perfectly with what I was thinking, but I felt compelled to write a blog post. I hope you don’t need to suppress any yawns as I detail what I found fascinating and what completely disheartened me, but here goes.

The first show I watched was the excellent BBC miniseries: A Very British Scandal. This was a retelling of the messy, scandalous, and extremely expensive divorce between the Duke of Argyll and his third wife, played by the fabulous Claire Foy. Neither character was sympathetic. They were both vainglorious, petty, cruel, adulterous and thoroughly spoilt. Yet, the difference lay in the way they were treated by society and by the courts. While the Duke’s reprehensible behaviour was condoned, forgiven or lauded, the Duchess was shamed publicly for having the same sexual appetites as her husband. What was good for the gander was most definitely not good for the goose here. ‘Slut-shaming’, a modern phrase, has been used in many other guises over the ages to vilify women if, Heaven forbid, they strayed from the morally upright path designated by men for them.

Yet, it’s not just men who practice these double standards. In the brilliant ‘Mrs America’, also showing on the BBC, it was women who brought down other women. Why? Because in the second wave of Feminism, when America was ripe for the Equal Rights Amendment to pass, a group of mid-western housewives, led by the indomitable Phyliss Schlafly, opposed, created obstacles, campaigned against ERA, and publicly defended their right to be stay-at-home wives and mothers, happy to play second fiddle to the men in their lives. Fighting against the very thing that would put men and women on an equal footing, creating deep political divisions between the Democrats and Republicans based on ‘liberal’ and ‘home-grown’ values, these women were happy to lop off the branch they were sitting on, never once cognisant of the great harm they were doing to their own sex.

In India, patriarchy is thriving, thank you very much. In the subtle, nuanced and careful examination of what’s happening to the forests in India, Vidya Balan’s Chief Forest Officer in the movie ‘Sherni’, is tasked with finding a man-eating tigress. There’s politics and corruption at work here, there’s ambition and a complete disregard of the environment, but there’s also misogyny, blind-siding and a patronising “she’s a little woman” attitude that permeates all her interactions with her male superiors. The end is bittersweet because it shows that the more things change, the more they remain the same.

I am an avowed feminist, and watching women carve out their place in the world, demanding to be seen as equals, gives me great joy. However, when the establishment turns against them, when their own sex drags them down, and when centuries of patriarchy override the little progress that has been achieved, it also fills me with great despair.

What if things were different? So different that they were upside down?

Read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s speculative ‘The Visit’ to examine a world where women are the ones making the rules. The men are stay-at-home dads or working menial jobs. They are fined and imprisoned for masturbation, as that’s seen as a waste of life-giving sperm. They have to turn a blind eye to their wives’ affairs, submit to the indignity of being questioned over their household finances, and harangued for daring to venture out after a certain hour. Their lives, their minds, their bodies are not their own. Can you picture it?

I can bet you a million pounds that a world like that could never come to pass. Men would shout “inequality” until their voices were hoarse. Then, why can’t we, as women living in the 21st century, ask for the same consideration?

Rant over.

The battle carries on.

Ghost Touch

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Last month, something very odd happened. My husband’s phone started doing the strangest things, like declaring McDonald’s as his favourite restaurant, calling random people in his phone directory, opening and closing apps arbitrarily, moving through screens at some absurdly ridiculous speed. He was completely flummoxed, while I wondered if someone had hacked his phone somehow. We tried many fixes, from restarting the phone several times to doing a hard reset on it. Nothing worked.

Then we contacted Apple Support and were told that his phone was suffering from ‘ghost touch’. Simply put, ‘ghost touch’ is what happens when the iPhone screen moves or starts doing things on its own. It seems to react to non-existent touches and starts doing stuff without the user having touched anything. It took several calls and a visit to the Apple Store to fix the phone finally.

But why am I still thinking about it? Furthermore, why am I talking to you about it?

Well, the last couple of years have felt like some kind of giant glitch, a ghost-touched world, where a virus and its many incarnations have upended our lives in so many little and large ways. Just when you think you’ve got to grips with it, another mutation rears its head, and we’re off again, looking for solutions, for ways to protect ourselves, our loved ones and our livelihoods. The worst bit is the sense of helplessness, of not knowing how to rectify whatever is going wrong, and hoping that whatever fixes we are applying will be the right ones, and that they will hold.

I wish there was an Apple Store one could go to and get the world repaired. Alas, there isn’t.

Luckily for me, as a writer, I can escape into another world, an alternate reality where even if things aren’t perfect, at least there isn’t a mutant virus on the loose. A pre-pandemic world where the only concerns my characters have are the normal, everyday worries that most people harbour.

As 2021 comes to a close, all I wish for is a hard reset. A world that can go back to being its usual chaotic, frenetic, beautiful, messy, wonderful self; where we don’t live in daily fear of an invisible enemy that has ghost-touched our lives.

Is that too much to hope for? I sure hope not.

 

 

Death

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Ah, Death

my old friend,

here you are again

 

I thought I’d slipped past you,

the last time we met

like we were strangers

not intimately acquainted

by our last go-around

 

I was embarrassed

and scared

I’ll admit

because we nearly went the distance

and then, we didn’t

 

You met someone else,

they were more interesting

and you let go of my hand

but only for a moment

 

Now here you are

smiling down at me

like you’d never left

like I’d never wilfully

forgotten you

 

And here I am

 

Gasping out my last breath,

saying goodbye to all I know and love

putting my faith in you once again

 

This time, you whisper,

it’s for keeps

and I believe you

 

The threshold is only a million miles

and a slim vapour away

 

My hand is cold in yours

but you lead me strongly

confidently

towards

that which has always awaited me.

 

(written for a friend who passed recently after battling cancer)

 

 

 

 

 

What’s love got to do with it?

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Last week I was watching an episode of ‘Kim’s Convenience’, a wonderful, heartwarming sitcom from Canada, when something about the storyline struck me. In it, a co-worker signed a card to his boss with ‘Love, xyz’. Later, the boss (female, single, attractive) questioned why he’d signed love, if he didn’t mean it. Which got me thinking how cavalierly we use the word love to define all sorts of emotions, how the essence of this emotion has been diluted through the overuse, and sometimes, misuse of it.

As a child, an aunt would always send me birthday cards signed ‘Affectionately, xyz’. I didn’t think to question it. There was, after all, a lot of affection there. In an attempt to emulate her, I also started signing my cards the same way in my teens. I remember being accused of being uptight because ‘Love, xyz’ was the commonplace inscription used by all and sundry, and my ‘Affectionately’ signalled a reluctance to be loving towards my peers. Maybe, even back then, at some level I baulked at the oversimplification of a complex emotion like love.

Today, I hear so many ‘love you’s’ being thrown about it makes my head spin. It also makes me wonder, what does love mean to these people? Would they throw themselves in front of a bus for me? Would they care for me if I was bedridden? Would they forgive me anything? Because, inherently, that’s what true love is about.

That’s not to say that love should be difficult or conditional, but it’s not a word that should be bandied about in so careless a fashion. And the sad fact is, it is fashionable to use ‘love’ to describe any emotion that you are too lazy to define.

“I love that painting!”

“I love chips!”

“Love you!”

Yes, I get it. It conveys a depth of emotion, but really, if there is that much love being spread around, why is there still so much strife in the world?

By all means, love and love deeply. But caring, fondness, affection, attraction, desire, excitement, passion are all valid emotions that don’t need to be clustered under the large beach umbrella called love. There are so many nuances to life and to our feelings, and love is the purest emotion of them all. Let’s not dumb it down to mean everything. Because then it will mean nothing at all.