SheWrite

Infochange India News & Features Documentary Film Forum SheWrite: "Four women poets in Tamil Nadu claim the inner and outer spaces of their bodies for themselves. The self-celebrating author of The Vagina Monologues would find her material completely up-staged here

This is a film that speaks richly and in many layers -- both in its words and in its images -- about poetry, about space and about freedom of expression. Following a 2003 story in Tehelka that talked about women poets in Tamil Nadu being vilified by males because they wrote “obscenely”, the filmmakers track down the group called Anangu (woman) and speak to its members, some of whom have been criticised with such violence by fellow writers and critics. The violence of the critique must be mentioned: Palani Bharati and Snehan, themselves writers of lyrics for film and television, asked that these women be burned, and a certain Abdul Rehman asked readers to slap them if they met them. Their crime: writing about their bodies, about their emotions and about sex and sexuality without shame and without euphemism.

The four poets that the film focuses on are all young women: Salma, Kuttirevathi, Malathy Maitri and Sukirtharani. One is married, with children; one has a daughter; the other two are apparently single. All of them speak about the space that writing affords them as women. Each of them also speaks of the freedoms of girlhood that are snatched away as we get to be teenagers. Salma says that while we can accept these restrictions in our lives, we cannot in our writing, for “writing has many more spaces”.

The poetry these women write is not comfortable or easy to digest. There is anger and bitterness, even as they claim the inner and outer spaces of their bodies for themselves. But what is far more astounding than the strength and ease of their poetry is what they say to the camera. Clearly, and without a flicker of hesitation, they speak of their experience and expression as having been dominated by patriarchy and male-centred language. They are also sure that what they articulate in their poems, even though it arises from their own lives, speaks not simply to, but for other women. As Kuttirevathi says: “I write the voices of other women…(the poetry) belongs to all women who have not written.”

These are not women who grew up in urban centres, exposed to various politicised and articulated feminisms and self-conscious women’s writing. Or to growing feminist (or simply female) solidarity. Their words speak with absolute integrity and one cannot doubt the universality of women’s experience and the way it colours our expressions of how and where we are located in the world around us. Eve Ensler, the self-celebrating author of The Vagina Monologues, would find her material completely up-staged here.

The writers that form Anangu go well beyond the specificity of their body parts to mirror and reflect upon a woman’s experience more holistically and with far greater depth than the borrowed voices that Ensler showcases.

As much as SheWrite focuses on the poetry of the four women, we also see them in the wholeness of their lives: arguing with their mothers about marriage, cooking for their families, playing with their children and chatting with friends. And, in Salma’s case, running the local panchayat. The film reminds us that as much as they are poets, they are women with multiple social relationships that create multiple, simultaneous identities.

Monteiro and Jayasankar have extended themselves in this film, working away from an obvious correspondence between word and image and then breaking down the materiality of the image itself. These are new and exciting areas in “documentary”, where filmmakers attempt to resolve issues of form and content in increasingly defiant and interesting ways. SheWrite is an excellent contribution to the growing documentation of women’s experiences and also to expanding the boundaries of non-fiction film.

For more information, contact: Unit for Media and Communication, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai 400 088. Phone: 022 25563290. Email:umctiss@vsnl.com Website: www.tiss.edu. "