Anita Nair
This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. |
Mistress / 2008
March 9, 2020: The Times of India
It’s that time of the year when various segments of the reading and writing world get their literary knickers into a twist. The prestigious Women’s Prize once known as the Orange Prize has announced its long list and while the list of possible contenders for the prize comprise eminent names and debut writers, the emphasis is on the literary. Make no mistake this is a list that pole-vaults the ‘wasteland of the middlebrow’ (to paraphrase Leo Robson of the Nation) and seeks to locate women’s writing in the hallowed portals of high artistic fiction that is generally regarded a male bastion. Thus the literary wedgies. One set of women regard this prize as derogatory and the other set think it’s the only way to ensure women writers get their due. Even as the arguments rage as they do year after year, the male lit-fic writers maintain a mostly studious silence.
A long time ago, in 2008, my novel Mistress was part of the Orange Prize long list. I remember waking up in the middle of the night to a call from my ecstatic publisher in UK. I remember how amidst all the exultation from the publishers, I only was struck by mixed feelings. I am not a naturally competitive person; in fact, competitions of any sort make me walk the other way. So to be part of a prize list was unsettling. Look at the other names in the list, a voice in my head (that sounded very much like my Indian publisher) said: Anne Enright, Rose Tremain, Linda Grant…These were writers I admired. Nevertheless, I felt conflicted about being included in a list that wasn’t complete to begin with. Unlike sport of any sort where biology determines stamina and power, I was of the belief that the artistic arena ought to be free of gender segregation. Fiction ought not to be evaluated [if it had to be] by who wrote it but how it was written and what were the themes it dealt with.
Lionel Shriver who won the Orange Prize in 2005 said: "…This whole thing of treating women specially, as if they need special help and special rules, is problematic and obviously backfires. It is the big downside to the Orange Prize. Having won it, I never want to seem ungrateful, and I don't bad mouth the Orange Prize…But I would still feel perfectly comfortable saying it is not as meaningful to me to have won the Orange Prize as say it would have been to win the Booker. Most people who win that prize surely say the same thing: you have eliminated half the human race from applying. ...I took the money! But there is this problem of suggesting that we need help, that men have to leave the room and then we're prize worthy…." Mistress was my third novel and I had written two novels before with a male and female protagonist respectively. My second novel Ladies Coupe had found readers all over the world and in my wide-eyed naiveté, I had imagined that having found my readers, I could rise above obligations of gender and make the theme my protagonist. In this case, it was art as a metaphor for life.
Still smarting from how the literary establishment had pigeon-holed Ladies Coupe [destined to be feminist cult classic etc], and because I am a contrary sort, I chose to delve into the well-guarded male preserve of Kathakali to explore both art and the human condition. In my reckoning, I had worked my way around inflections and nuances of gender. So I wrote a novel that had drained me of blood, sweat, tears and most of my soul. To me, both male and female writers had to do this to create a work of any literary merit. I had thought that was enough. Mistress was my tribute to the artists who had kept their integrity -- as Chaim Potok’s My name is Asher Lev or Pierre La Mure’s Clair De Lune about Debussy had been. With the feistiness of youth, I had imagined that my being a woman was incidental but not essential to what Mistress was about.
Literary juries to some extent thought as much. Mistress was on several international shortlists for prizes that included men. However, when it was chosen as a finalist for a PEN/Beyond Margins prize in the US, I knew that books like people would be evaluated based on gender, skin colour, nationality and perhaps even sexual orientation. And that books are often disregarded if they make the reader uncomfortable and raise questions about the ‘quiet desperate lives we lead’. There was no escaping this ugly truth. For each reader, be it a jury member, a critic or the nameless faceless person who stayed up all night devouring your story bring into their reading of a novel their own belief system and their personal baggage. In a strange way, this liberated me from being any particular sort of a writer except an honest one.
And now, after nine novels, I know that I write the books I am compelled to write. I tackle themes that may not be what international publishers or juries want. I tell stories that will shred complacency and question the fundamentals of how we live. There are days when I wonder if I am being pig-headed or even arrogant by choosing to be so oblivious on how to work the system. Of not cashing in on fads or giving readers what they would like to read.
I tackle themes that may not be what international publishers or juries want. I tell stories that will shred complacency and question fundamentals of how we live
Then I tell myself that despite all the years that have gone by, my books are still in print in most parts of the world they were published in. That somewhere in Ecuador is a restaurant that has a set meal drawn from one of my books. That a man tattooed his bicep to commemorate one of my characters. That a couple named their child after another of my characters. That readers read me not for who I am but how I write and what I write about. And they give a rat’s arse about whether I won this prize or was published in that territory. So, I suck in my gut, strengthen my core and keep at it.
In the words of Bojack Horseman whose soul sister I am minus the pool and the millions: It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day. That’s the hard part. But it does get easier.
