Harsimran Kaur ON July 29, 2023, IN BOOK REVIEW, PERIOD MATTERS: MENSTRUATION IN SOUTH ASIA-EDITED BY FARAH AHAMED-NON FICTION
Rating: 5/5
I steer at my nakedness
Unforgiving and unceremonious
The pile of the skin grows obnoxiously
Lathered by insolence and drudgery
The moles whisper to each other
The blackened dream of my reclusiveness!
Tethered by invisible strokes
Ushering a long-pierced scrutiny
The masculine defies
What ordains the coloratura of feminity?
The heebie-jeebies surrounding a female body has become a warfare—an intrinsic battle of a woman with her woes, whinge and whiffs. She seems baffled, every now and then purging her inner conscious to fight the unsavory but the impenitent voices harangue. Flagellated by intemperate cultural and religious lour and the parsimonious patriarchy, she often questions, ‘why bludgeon the perpetuity of incomprehensible over the austere gravity of the conceivable.’ Squalling in the inertia of puritanical rigidity, the female fabrication, tired and turbulent, limps to invective extrapolations.
The Paleolithic brigade warned her; the insinuation still grapples her, ‘cease the flow of your desires and clanger.’ She capitulates to thecontemptuous clangour but who can stop the incessant flow of the ‘privileged blood’ that leaves the body every month felicitating the precept of ‘womanhood’.
Many sit callously to examine the prolificacy of the delinquent flow charring it as repugnant and thus placating women as a persona non grata. But the blood listens to none.
Menstruation is a simple analogy made complex by the society. A natural trepidation caused by an invasive harmony of hormones has become a pottage of poppycock vagaries and proscriptive cul-de-sac.
Many books have been written on its biological manifestation and its concurrence with well-defined habits and hygiene but few are discursive on the contretemps around menstruation. There are women especially the downtrodden and indigent who are required to indulge in corporeal slugfest.
‘Period Matters: Menstruation in South Asia’ edited by Farah Ahamed fans the emotional perplexity of a woman arising due to a physical process castigated as a cesspool of disease and scourge. I call it fanaticism sitting on the ledge of solipsism; clarions call by the patriarchy to control women, and the invidious cultural predispositions to denounce ‘sisterhood affinity’ to mask ‘menstruation’ as a self-indulgent imprecation.
‘Self-loathe’ becomes indelible when people around you defunct ‘menstruation’ as an incarcerated breathe flowing in the emphysema of intolerance. You are made to look like a pariah! Act like one too! A plausible ‘stigmatized stench’, isn’t it? True for many…‘Period Matters: Menstruation in South Asia’ edited by Farah Ahamedhas in store ineluctable experiences of the vulnerability of the women who live in delusion of their perfections bolstered as factitious.
Menstruation in large part of South Asia with its bête noir precepts of the monthly flow is a fait accompli. The Christian sweepers in Pakistan wail a cry for the inequities of the system alienating women to get proper resources like sanitary pads, clean toilets and running water. Farah Ahamed awakened to this reality accompanied by her impulse to explore and understand the incapacities of disparaged women which led her to travel other countries like Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan. There too the blemished horizon has dense clouds, dark and gloomy, faltering in its directions thus succumbing to the cataclysm of the inevitable thunderstorms.
So, what is finally presented is the cornucopia of infallible research and assessment by the cognoscentis through poetry, interviews, an invasive throught process and experiential traveling. Amna Mawaz Khan is articulate to define menstruation and the significance of the celestial flow through a dance called ‘Raqs-e-Mahvaari’. Readers will get acquainted to a pragmatic comic book guide, ‘Menstrupedia’to impart education about periods through a comic strip; Isn’t it an ingenious way to collaborate a viable functionality of the human body many are oblivious to. Not to forget the many religious nodules that pushes a corrigendum. For instance, Bhutan in the carapsse of ‘Vajrayana Buddhism’ transfixes menstruation to be holy and divine; I am pleased at the assiduous attempt of the former to sanctify the ‘crimson malady’.
A ‘hush-hush’ on the transgender community is not bereft of the ’period imbroglio’. It is not just the ‘fault in the stars’ to bewilder the transgenders as the culprits of their own destiny. Menstruation crenellations also fall heavily on their physical perpetuity to feel the concomitant impulses. Interviews by Farah Ahamed in this regard asses their paradoxical purloin.
What more a reader can ask for when Shashi Tharoor with his magnanimous profundity explains his own viable reasons to accept menstruation a way of life. His relentless effort to put the conscientious Menstrual Rights Bill on the table in the Lok Sabha still needs to pass the black hole. Many more eminent personalities have expatiated their thoughts on menstruation. The one that most catches your attention is Ganaz Baloch’s initiative to conduct a menstrual health workshop in Balochistan. Another slush of green grass can be found around the articulate story-telling of the coping mechanism during Covid-19 by Indrias Patras Chatterjee of the impoverished women in Pakistan. Sifting shaft from the grain, Lisa Ray provides a saccharine ordeal that pummeled her hormones to scatter like the frightened pigeons. The face-off was a menopause sotto voce.
TAKE AWAY
The spirit of the dandelion flowers in the twilight, falling off the mahogany structure are crushed by the bare feet. The disheveled euphoria of the smooth yellow wings lies mercilessly afraid to bargain for life. The clangour of wind disrupts their rhythm; a bereaved rustle of leaves now slaps their emaciated silhouette. It says to the petals fallen nearby,
‘Crushing us has prophesized the incongruity of a mind to be in propensity of poweress. Though the rhythm of thoughts is cruel; who said that tyranny holds any rules? The mind progresses in panjandrum of creating actions that deems to do well to its self-approving ego. The svelte need to repeat what has now become a norm comes from the agility it gradually awakens to’.
True paint strokes of human trajectory of abominable pursuits.