Aheli Moitra
In her short story, ‘The Last Song’ (2006), Prof. Temsula Ao leaves us with feelings of distant, inexplicable, sadness. Apenyo sings through her brutal rape in an old church; the village grapples with the ‘unnatural’ violence and how tradition should play out thus. A compromise is reached. The dead, Apenyo and her mother, are buried outside the boundary of the village graveyard without a tombstone.
Albeit invisibalised, Apenyo’s act of resistance is recalled and retold through the years by grandmothers, their ears plugged to the soil, their hair tousled by the winds of the invisible struggles of Naga women.
Much of the acts of resistance posed in the face of violence remain in pages of memory that we hardly ever visit, or are unable to access. When we are able to access them, we valorize some memories, while others are swept under the private rug. This false polarity of the public and private is constantly imposed by structures of dominance. In the latter half fall the stories of, and by, women.
In this regard, Prof. Ao’s stories go a long way in retelling how intertwined the struggles of Naga women and men were, though they curiously maintain the unique strands of gendered experience.
Her stories push us to take the invisibility cloak off the feminist character of Naga sovereignty. They push us to think about the womb, the jungles, the hearth, love, a broken leg, old age, death, reconciliation—collected bits that give shape to the Naga body politic. They never belittle or dismiss struggles as polarized stories of woman or man.
Today, Naga people struggle as a whole to find economic, social and political footing in a deeply segregated world. Within this, Naga women’s struggles perceptively aggregate issues of class, commons and the environment. Naga women are at the helm of preserving indigenous seeds and crops, stories and methods. Without attacking men’s struggles (and grave losses) against militarization and capitalism, women continue to support and further—with or without the state—the Naga aspiration to self determination. Yet we hear little of these daily struggles; we rarely consider the women’s contribution to sovereignty, peace and reconciliation; we hear little of how they toil at the farm and the home.
This International Women’s Day, March 8, was commemorated under the theme of #BeBoldforChange. This is pertinent for women all over the Indian sub-continent who are facing threats of sexual and physical violence for raising their voice in lieu of justice. The hash tag implies that the message for gender justice should be spread as far and wide as possible in a world where gender relations have become severely strained following consistent violent conflict. Today it is time for both women and men to be bold enough in the face of, and for, change—to wage non violent struggles together, and for each other.
Elders, like Prof. Temsula Ao, have opened our eyes to this. Let us not turn our backs on them.
An empowering year to all; moitramail@yahoo.com
