Speaking for the voiceless
Shelley Walia
Rebecca Solnit is by now a recognised radical feminist voice in the West. Not many in India have heard of this angry antagonist of masculinities who complains against arrogant men who ‘wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don’t.’Through her innumerable encounters with men, Solnit is provoked to enter the gender wars that underscore the silencing of women. Apart from the iconic essay Men Explain Things to Me, which first appeared in TomDispatch, the collection comprises some of her important writings on domestic violence, motherhood, sexual exploitation, French sex scandals, colonialism and Virginia Woolf.
Socially aware of the inequality between women and men and the prevalent gender-based brutality, Solnit’s concept of ‘mansplanning’ unflinchingly explains how men assume the powerful know-all personality when dealing with women. Explaining the significance of the word ‘mansplaining’, Solnit writes, ‘I’m really interested in naming experience …. Words are power. So if this word allowed us to talk about something that goes on all the time, then I’m really glad it exists.’
The role of gender and power in contemporary society is indeed disturbing and needs debate that she so compellingly incites through a sharp-witted and clear narrative, skillfully used to arouse anger and hope for establishing the rights to life, liberty, and participation in cultural and political arenas.
The collection is indeed a substantially riveting contribution to cultural-feminist theory. As Solnit writes, ‘Young women needed to know that being belittled wasn’t the result of their own secret failings; it was the boring old gender wars.’ You cannot be harassed just because you choose to remain silent.
‘Mansplanning’ therefore, is all about patronising women. She cites an encounter with a wealthy man who condescendingly asks her about her profession in a manner one uses with a seven-year-old, who is asked to describe her flute lessons. As she begins to speak of her latest book on Muybridge, he silences her, ‘And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?’ She tries her utmost to drive home that she is the author of the book but he carries on relentlessly, ‘With that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.’ She emphasises in the essay, ‘I hasten to add that the essay makes it clear, mansplaining is not a universal flaw of the gender, just the intersection between overconfidence and cluelessness where some portion of that gender gets stuck.’
The incident, no doubt, would suggest parallel stories to many women who have been down-graded to mere listeners of a presumptuous male harangue on a subject women know better. Solnit catalogues the various voices of women that have been ignored, especially that of Coleen Rowley’s, the FBI officer who ‘issued those early warnings about al-Qaeda to the Bush administration to which you couldn’t tell anything, including that Iraq had no links to Al-Qaeda and no WMDs, or that the war was not going to be a cakewalk.’
Take the case of women in Muslim countries, who ridiculously require the testimony of male onlookers to corroborate their rape. Another reference in the book is to Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s ruthless handling of the hotel housekeeper and its pertinent analogy with IMF’s approach towards developing countries. Interestingly, at summits on war, the issue of rape is sidelined to discuss about sophisticated weaponry when it cannot be denied that the Bosnian war saw 50,000 rapes whereas in Eastern Congo, 22 per cent of men and 30 per cent of women were victims of sexual violence. In her essay, The Longest War, the Delhi gang rape becomes a case study for the global epidemic of violence against women.
Solnit’s politics underpins ‘a struggle that takes place (not only) in war-torn nations, but also in the bedroom, the dining room, the classroom, the workplace, and the streets.’ “Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion or nationality, but it does have a gender,” she says.
Examples are everywhere — from the practice of women being erased from family trees, or made faceless through the adoption of the husband’s second name — it is clear that a ‘woman both exists and is obliterated.’ It is an obliteration of the extreme kind that more than 66,000 women are killed annually by Femicide, ‘the killing of females by males because they are female.’
As Solnit emphatically put it in an interview some years ago, “Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty. I’m grateful that, after an early life of being silenced, sometimes violently, I grew up to have a voice, circumstances that will always bind me to the rights of the voiceless.”
This is the impetus behind her stories that are replete with passionate use of language and radical politics, which has inspired women’s struggle for freedom. Solnit is delighted to see them at the present juncture ‘talking the way we are right now, and that many men have joined in the conversation or support from the sidelines.’
