By Nabgha Shahid
I am not a malleable woman. I thought I could be one shrouded by veneers of modesty and humility but when I was 13 and had newly spouted breasts, I became unashamed, fearless, and boundless like the ocean waves that are confluent and endlessly bounce back over the shore repeatedly. I construed myself as “The Woman”. The Woman was my alter-ego, my pretense in Pakistan where I had to force myself to submerge deep within the homogenous mix I lived in. I became The Woman when I was alone. I dreamed of becoming hostile and vicious after having been battered repeatedly by men. I thought I was safe if I could just be The Woman. If I could reach inside me and gouge out every inch of my femininity, regurgitating every essence of what makes me a woman, I would be satiated. I thought my femininity, my sensuality crippled me. I thought wrong.
It begins gently, like a soft knock on the door of your consciousness. A slight tap. Tap. Tap. An infiltration of sorts where they begin to gradually spoon-feed you arsenic. Billions of imaginary hands clasp onto you tightly, wringing you dry like freshly washed laundry on a hot July and settling you atop a barbed rope. As you writhe and contort and convulse, the hands begin to ascend upwards reaching for your tongue. They yank and twist and squeeze. The convulsions halter. Once the tongue is decimated, what good does it do for the rest of the body to strive? When I was 13, on the cusp of femininity, these hands rushed to grasp me all over. So I did what I had to. I held onto my agony and pretended I was speechless, I had no tongue left to give them. In return, they let me slip through the cracks.
I soon became The Hostile Woman instead of The Woman. With my tongue intact, I lashed out at the barbarity of men who view us like monkeys at a circus; for ridicule, entertainment, and a couple of laughs or like bound cows they saddled to their farms; for breeding, sacrificing them to satiate their own hunger. I often thought of Sylvia Plath in moments like these, how she oscillated between bursts of femininity and wanted to purge herself of it simultaneously:
“Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable femininity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars — to be part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording — all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night…”
I don’t think there could’ve been a greater cry for help than the desire to exist and if it makes me the difficult woman then so be it. I can no longer be docile when women are violated within my community, my territory, and the place I call home. From the day a woman is born in Pakistan, her body is not hers, neither is her voice nor is her uterus. It is laid out for men to trample upon and claim as their own while the rest of the world watches in deafening silence as we excavate sexually abused, tortured and mutilated corpses of women from alleyways and washed-up shores because what else are women in Pakistan, if not disposable? I slipped through the cracks once, perhaps the next time, I too might not be able to make it.
About the Writer:
Nabgha Shahid is currently a student of English Literature at Kinnaird College for Women Lahore and an In-House Writer at Erato Magazine. She is a strong advocate for feminism and is an ardent lover of Gothic Literature. Through her writings, she wishes to impart awareness about the plight of women in Pakistan.
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