Voice/Awaaz

on voicelessness & reclaiming the voice

Issue #033

(This post is dedicated to my aunt, who brought me a collection of Urdu poetry from Pakistan instead of the usual clothes & jewellery without batting an eyelid.)

He did not love me living; but once dead
He pitied me; and very sweet it is
To know he still is warm though I am cold.

— After Death, by Christina Rossetti

I come across Rossetti’s After Death every year when teaching it to year 9s in the spring term. You’d perhaps think that a poem written by a white woman in 1862 would be poorly received by a group of 13-14 year old Muslim girls, and yet it isn’t. Once they get past the fact that a dead woman did not, in fact, write a poem from beyond the grave, they recognise the threads that pull their lives parallel to hers.

Watching their recognition is revelatory. Their reluctance to identify with and relate to some ‘dead Victorian poet’ unravels further once we delve into the roles that women play in personal relationships. Quite aside from the fact that the patriarchy of the Victorian age was an overt one—and the voicelessness of women of that time was also overt—peering past the hue and cry of contemporary female empowerment brings modern-day patriarchy into sharp relief in the face of one particular thing: sexual and domestic violence.

When SA and DV are considered, female voicelessness becomes an apparent, skulking thing that stalks women’s lives and conversations, yet has a wholly shadowy, whispered and formless presence in the public sphere. Ultimately, this means that most men won’t know that they know multiple women who have suffered or survived from instances of both SA and DV, and often for a long stretch of time. To men, therefore, a whole spectrum of women’s experiences, heard only by other women, does not exist. To men, therefore, an endemic problem is nothing.

This is just one example of voicelessness. To be mute whilst still talking is a terrible thing. For this reason, this poem strikes me with the same force every time I teach it.

What Rossetti posits in the final verses, particularly in the couplet at the end, of her poem, is that only death will allow a woman the freedom of expression she needs. Women, when they talk with emotion, are deemed hysterical, thus rendering the contents and contexts of their words null. It might as well be that she’s not talking, because the weight of what she’s speaking is nothing to her male interlocutor. Her intellect, also, may only be regarded posthumously; as if ‘cold’ reason belongs only to a dead woman. There is a sense of unease that greets the final statement, as we can recognise its existence today, What woman hasn’t felt that exasperation at her words being discarded or received with scorn? What woman hasn’t wanted release when she isn’t regarded, isn’t heard?

I often leave it to my students to interpret whether the poem is empowering or defeatist. As with anything, the responses are usually a mixed bag.

My own thoughts are inclined towards hope. It is as if the speaker has almost sacrificed herself in order to send a message to the women of the world: that their voices are theirs for the taking.

I found this idea of autonomy over one’s own voice to be mirrored in another poem. This poem, Bol (Speak), penned by Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, is a rallying cry to anyone being imprisoned (whether literally or figuratively). Whilst he wrote it in the face of political imprisonment in 1951, there is a timelessness and universal accessibility to it that immediately reminded me of Rossetti’s After Death.

Bol, ye thora waqt bohot hai
Jism-o-zabaan ki maut se pehle

Bol, ke sach zindaa hai ab tak
Bol, jo kuch kehna hai keh le

Speak, this finite time suffices
Before body and tongue surely die.

Speak, as truth is still living;
Speak: say what you mean to say!

— extract from Bol, by Faiz Ahmed Faiz (trans. Habiba Rana)

Whereas Rossetti’s poem removes the body from the voice, Faiz’s poem reclaims the body and weaves its transient state into one with the voice. For him, it is rather that the slipping of time and the finite nature of life that actually lends an urgency as well as power to the speaker and those who he implores to speak.

I found this interesting and it made me reconsider my thoughts on voicelessness and the power that is held over minority groups, especially disenfranchised speakers. As a formally educated man, Faiz arguably held more power than Rossetti did in her own time, although Rossetti was one of two celebrated female poets in Victorian England.

So, what of women, then? There is a sense in Bol, that no matter what is being done to you, it is ultimately in your own power to speak for yourself. I didn’t necessarily take this to mean that it is a physical voice, a verbal one, that Faiz was speaking about. After all, he was a writer locked up in prison, and so his voice was the pen. When I translate what this could mean to women, I see it as perseverance and doggedness. Even in engaging with only one another, we are able to keep alive our voices.

In fact, in speaking to each other, this centres our conversations around each other and brings to the fore things that we want to highlight ourselves, away from a masculine lens. As Faiz entreated, ‘Speak: say what you mean to say!’.

When women’s voices are demonised, and their conversations with one another are labelled as idle gossip, it’s important to reclaim that space. Remember that stories are a domain where women are—and have forever been—comfortable. They thrive in the story, and the connection of words and actions that pass on from one woman to the next are a testament to the often strong bonds that they form with each other. It is also a space where legacies are passed down; in these spaces, my great grandmother, (late) aunt and grandmother came alive through the stories of other women who had witnessed them.

In an imperfect, unfinished Urdu couplet I scribbled, the imagery that formed in my head was between the voice and springtime. ‘Awaaz’ I wrote ‘bahar jese barasti hai’. I pictured a field of wildflowers in a meadow and rain drizzling from a sunlit sky; the two met and life blossomed, boundless.

_آواز بہار جیسے برستی ہے

The voice bursting in rain like springtime

—by Habiba Rana