In the courtyard of my studio located in an industrial area of the city, 7 women arrived with texts of their choice – written by themselves or other women – short stories, poems, statistics even, and shared. The overall theme was women’s invisible labour, and they told stories, ones we know/hear/read and ones we write ourselves. It was a way to sit together in a space, find a way to gather and meet in current times of distancing.
The idea for Voices from the Courtyard developed out of a conversation with Rashmimala, one of the artists in the Gathering in Baroda, when we met for the first time in September 2020 at a weaving workshop. Slowly emerging out of the lockdown, this was the first meeting of a small group of women who attended the workshop over two days after a long time of what felt like being in solitary confinement. This meet with fellow artists and the conversations we could have face to face, albeit with our masks on, further stressed how essential it is for us to be able to gather and talk, sit together in one space.
Inviting Rashmimala to join Womanifesto 2020: Gatherings, our conversation led to discussing women’s invisible labour, generally and particularly in relation to responsibilities we took on during the lockdown. This led to her telling me about a short story she was translating that related very much with women’s lives controlled by roles defined and assigned to them by society, and their unrecognised labour, erasure of their voices even, within it. We soon started to discuss writing by women and how essential it was to make these voices heard, made visible. And, thus, came about the idea of involving a group of women, seven in all, to orate/perform/present a text – written by other women or themselves.
One of the books I was reading at that time is ‘Women and Power – A Manifesto’, by Mary Beard. She writes: “We find repeated stress throughout ancient literature on the authority of the deep male voice in contrast to the female. As one ancient scientific treatise explicitly put it, a low-pitched voice indicated manly courage, a high-pitched voice female cowardice. Other classical writers insisted that the tone and timbre of women’s speech always threatened to subvert not just the voice of the male orator also the social and political stability, the health, of the whole state. One second-century AD lecturer and intellectual with the revealing name of Dio Chrysostom (it means literally Dio ‘the Golden Mouth’) asked his audience to imagine a situation where ‘an entire community was struck by the following strange affliction: all the men suddenly got female voices, and no male – child or adult – could say anything in a manly way. Would not that seem terrible and harder to bear than any plague? ….’ This is not the peculiar ideology of some distant culture. Distant in time it may be. But I want to underline that this is a tradition of gendered speaking – the theorizing of gendered speaking – to which we are still directly or more often indirectly, the heirs.”
Women have been challenging this all along, its only that their voices have been and continue to be, to a large extent, made invisible by this “gendered speaking”. What better time to continue to write, speak out aloud, question, raise shrill hell even than now, given this current ‘plague’ we are all already in?
The 7 women – the voices from the courtyard – did just that, each with thought provoking texts presented in their distinct and individual nuanced voices.
In the courtyard of my studio located in an industrial area of the city, 7 women arrived with texts of their choice – written by themselves or other women – short stories, poems, statistics even, and shared. The overall theme was women’s invisible labour, and they told stories, ones we know/hear/read and ones we write ourselves. It was a way to sit together in a space, find a way to gather and meet in current times of distancing.
The idea for Voices from the Courtyard developed out of a conversation with Rashmimala, one of the artists in the Gathering in Baroda, when we met for the first time in September 2020 at a weaving workshop. Slowly emerging out of the lockdown, this was the first meeting of a small group of women who attended the workshop over two days after a long time of what felt like being in solitary confinement. This meet with fellow artists and the conversations we could have face to face, albeit with our masks on, further stressed how essential it is for us to be able to gather and talk, sit together in one space.
Inviting Rashmimala to join Womanifesto 2020: Gatherings, our conversation led to discussing women’s invisible labour, generally and particularly in relation to responsibilities we took on during the lockdown. This led to her telling me about a short story she was translating that related very much with women’s lives controlled by roles defined and assigned to them by society, and their unrecognised labour, erasure of their voices even, within it. We soon started to discuss writing by women and how essential it was to make these voices heard, made visible. And, thus, came about the idea of involving a group of women, seven in all, to orate/perform/present a text – written by other women or themselves.
One of the books I was reading at that time is ‘Women and Power – A Manifesto’, by Mary Beard. She writes: “We find repeated stress throughout ancient literature on the authority of the deep male voice in contrast to the female. As one ancient scientific treatise explicitly put it, a low-pitched voice indicated manly courage, a high-pitched voice female cowardice. Other classical writers insisted that the tone and timbre of women’s speech always threatened to subvert not just the voice of the male orator also the social and political stability, the health, of the whole state. One second-century AD lecturer and intellectual with the revealing name of Dio Chrysostom (it means literally Dio ‘the Golden Mouth’) asked his audience to imagine a situation where ‘an entire community was struck by the following strange affliction: all the men suddenly got female voices, and no male – child or adult – could say anything in a manly way. Would not that seem terrible and harder to bear than any plague? ….’ This is not the peculiar ideology of some distant culture. Distant in time it may be. But I want to underline that this is a tradition of gendered speaking – the theorizing of gendered speaking – to which we are still directly or more often indirectly, the heirs.”
Women have been challenging this all along, its only that their voices have been and continue to be, to a large extent, made invisible by this “gendered speaking”. What better time to continue to write, speak out aloud, question, raise shrill hell even than now, given this current ‘plague’ we are all already in?
The 7 women – the voices from the courtyard – did just that, each with thought provoking texts presented in their distinct and individual nuanced voices.
Varsha Nair.
Participants: Ananya Patel, Rashmimala, Urna Sinha, Anuradha Upadhyaya, Kunatharaju Mrudula, Amruta Patel and Varsha Nair.