Posts filed under 'women’s rights'

Between Seeing and Listening: Dias Novita Wuri on Birth Canal

For me, it was important to talk about everyone's story and experience with the term “motherhood”.

 In Birth Canal, Dias Novita Wuri masterfully braids disparate storylines of women across various countries and time periods to track the shifting contexts of sexuality, femininity, family, and gender roles. What results is an alternative face of history, from the violence of wartime and colonialism to the contemporary dynamics of sex work and objectification. As our September Book Club selection, this subversive and unflinching text defies generalisation and presumption to consider the many ways a body can be used—and freed. In this interview, Novita Wuri speaks on how the women in her life inspired the novel, sexuality and politics in Indonesia, and the mental anguish that surrounded the writing and reading of this powerful text.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Thuy Dinh (TD): Could you explain the meaning behind the title Birth Canal?

Dias Novita Wuri (DNW): Birth Canal actually doesn’t have as much significance in English as it does in Indonesian—which you wrote about very well in your review. The term in Indonesian is jalan lahir; jalan means a road, or a way—something one has to go through, and lahir here means birth. You can see it doesn’t really translate very well to English, and my editor and I decided to go with “birth canal”. I wanted a short, impactful title because my first book’s title, Makramé, was very simple. Of course, the birth canal is part of the reproductive system, and I wanted to use a bodily word to symbolise the feminine struggle related to procreation. It’s hard not to talk about birth because it’s a woman’s “duty” to give birth, and I think this term nicely represents the stories of all the women in my story.

TD: Your book doesn’t seem to think there is a necessary connection between fertility and motherhood—as some characters in the book can’t have children but yearn to be mothers. Can you expound on this theme?

DNW: I wanted to talk about a lot of the women that I know in my life, some of which can’t have children, or struggle to have children but want to have children, and others who don’t want children at all. For me, it was important to talk about everyone’s story and experience with the term “motherhood”. I also knew people who got pregnant as teenagers outside of marriage, and that’s why I opened the book by talking about abortion, because abortion is illegal here in Indonesia. It’s very frowned upon—which doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

Actually, when I open up to the women that I talk to in Indonesia—my friends and acquaintances—sometimes they would tell me that they have had abortions. It’s a shame that it’s illegal and not talked about, because it’s something that women need. It’s a basic healthcare right. To have such shame and stigma surrounding abortion can only be detrimental to women’s lives in Indonesia. Some of them might be mothers already, but they can’t handle another child or can’t afford another child. Yet, they can’t have an abortion. READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Happening

But how does the visual operate in cinema, as opposed to literature?

Annie Ernaux’s memoir of her 1963 abortion, Happening, originally published in 2000, and Audrey Diwan’s 2021 movie adaptation of the same name are the subject of our latest edition of Asymptote at the Movies. Ernaux’s memoir tells the story of an abortion she sought before the procedure was legal in France, and the story of her reflecting on the experience decades later, well after France legalized abortion. Diwan’s movie came out in a very different world than the one Ernaux’s memoir reflects on and, indeed, the one in which Ernaux wrote her memoir. Both the book and the movie follow young Annie’s struggle to find the medical care she needs—Ernaux said that watching the film “plunged” her back into the experience she wrote about. Taking the two together underscores the urgency of her situation and raises questions about the difference between cinematic immediacy and memoiristic distance. In the following roundtable, Meghan Racklin, Xiao Yue Shan, and Georgina Fooks discuss the relationship between these two works, the translation of memoir into fiction, and experience of reading and watching the movement of time.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Halfway through the pages of Ernaux’s Happening, there’s a line that I saw as a kind of summation of her entire corpus’ ethos: “I believe that any experience, whatever its nature, has the inalienable right to be chronicled.” It seems to me that a similar sentiment across nearly all of her texts—which are, after all, in their obsessive tunnelling and metaphysical depth, a refusal of any verdict that women’s lives are mundane, and their thoughts unserious.

And there is a particular impact to that Serious Verb—chronicled. In French, Ernaux opts for the less indomitable l’écrire, but I’d like to believe that Tanya Leslie, in her translation, understood that to write would have been too pliant for what Ernaux wanted to say: that such experiences needed to be inscribed into the archives of human history, that they needed to be preserved as well as they can for future excavation, and that such texts would fill the void in the scaffolding of time.

Happening, then, is a text about writing, but also the remembering that feeds the writing, and also the rupture that must be navigated when reality and recognition are trying to find one another on the page. If there was any image that came to mind while I read Happening, it was only of the older Ernaux holding a pen, gazing out the window, closing her eyes in conjuration of an image. Because Happening does not centralise the abortion that propels its narrative, but the intellectual clarity that is required to unveil “what can be found there,” I almost expected a cinematic replication of that once-removed perspective in Audrey Diwan’s adaptation: voiceover narration, analepsis/prolepsis, superimpositions . . .

The film, however, makes no use of such manipulations, and completely isolates itself within the parameters of the Event; it is a movie about abortion, and its illegality and ramifications in 1960s France. It is so dissonant from its source text—not in content but in intention—that it jarred me when Anamaria Varolomei, who plays Ernaux, is first addressed as Annie. It was impossible for me to connect her with the woman of the book—not only because the woman is older, but because the woman is remembering, not living through. The film is an intimate, occasionally chilling, and politically effective film about the alienation and humiliation of being accidentally pregnant in that era—and as such it is rooted in the immediate, in the physical, and in the cinematic present. Ernaux’s text read to me in direct opposition, weaving and defining that tenuous space of the eternal past. How did the two of you feel about this variation in treatment? Was it as disconcerting for you?

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest news from Argentina, Japan, and Palestine!

This week our writers bring you exciting news from Argentina, Japan, and Palestine! In Argentina, the legalization of abortion has been celebrated and supported by many, including renowned feminist writer Nora Domínguez; in Japan, leading women writers and their translators will be in conversation for the Japan Foundation New York, whilst translator Yukiko Konosu shared her recommended new reads from Japan, including Rin Usami; and in Palestine, four great new works of Palestine literature are soon to be published in English. Read on to find out more! 

Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Argentina 

Two days before 2020 slid into history and memory, an anxious crowd gathered outside Argentina’s Congress in Buenos Aires. They watched the Senate debate on big screens and the summer heat dissipated as day turned into night, Tuesday turned into Wednesday. Many—though not all—of those who stood outside wore green scarves, the symbol of a yearlong movement to legalize abortion in the historically conservative country. In the small hours of Wednesday morning, after a long and suspenseful Senate session, they found out that their work had paid off: Congress legalized voluntary abortion through the fourteenth week of pregnancy.

Several of the pro-choice activists who advocated for this major legislation were writers. The day before the senators took up the bill, a collection of Argentina’s most notable writers, including Claudia Piñeiro, Florencia Abbate, Agustina Bazterrica, and Gabriela Saidon, released a statement and video expressing their support. “The green wave puts an end to hypocrisies, inequalities, injustices and replaces a long dark violence with dignity,” they wrote. “Like the deep and living heartbeat of the sea, it instills in us a pulse to continue fighting.”

Nora Domínguez was among the writers who endorsed the statement. She’s one of three directors of an ambitious project to publish the history of Argentina’s literature through a feminist lens. The first of six volumes, En la intemperie: poéticas de la fragilidad y la revuelta (In the Open: Poetics of Fragility and Revolt) was published by Eduvim late last year, but it’s chronologically the last in the series, focusing on the period between 1990 and 2019. The work features a collection of analysis and criticism from Argentina’s leading feminist thinkers—part of the project’s larger effort to give form to “certain absences, not to build a counter-canon but rather to provoke detours, scandalous stops, fissures, divisions, and contradictions” in the existing canon. In a December interview, Domínguez confirmed that Argentina has experienced a boom in recent years of new voices in the country’s literature, not just women but trans writers and young people as well. This century’s feminism is a culmination of both feminist and literary genealogies. The work to interrogate and revise a patriarchal canon and the work to advocate for laws that respect women’s autonomy go hand in hand. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

This week, news of trans literature in Argentina, an inaugural book fair in Patagonia, and awards season in India.

Our editors report on literature’s integral role in political resistance and in supporting underrepresented voices, as feminist and trans theory workshops are organized in Buenos Aires and fuegino literature is promoted in Patagonia. In India, our reporter leads us through the awards season successes, celebrating many translated titles.

Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Argentina

Last month, a primary election that predicted a decisive win for the opposition in Argentina’s upcoming presidential elections sent the economy into convulsions, and the peso’s precipitous drop in value made headlines around the world. Amid the debate around the country’s future, the candidates have been conspicuously quiet on an issue important to many Argentine women: abortion, which remains illegal in most cases. But where the politicians are silent, Argentina’s women are not. Anfibia, a digital magazine of literary journalism launched by the Universidad Nacional de San Martín, is offering a workshop to challenge dominant ways of knowing and to provide women with tools to narrate experiences of violence. Also in this year’s lineup is a four-part workshop and practicum on trans theory, which seeks to answer whether it’s possible to develop a collaborative theory of the trans experience to guide, not only personal creativity, but also policy. Trans literature has won acclaim in Argentina recently. Rising literary star and trans writer Camila Sosa Villada, for example, unites literature and performance. According to a recent profile, “Camila is poetry onstage and puts her body on paper” (my translation). Her book Las malas was showcased at this year’s Feria del Libro in Buenos Aires, the largest book fair in Latin America. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesdays: An Excerpt from Nayla by Djenar Maesa Ayu (UWRF Feature)

Nayla saw that her mother was no different than a monster.

Excerpted from the novel Nayla by award-winning Indonesian writer Djenar Maesa Ayu, this piece continues our series, A World with a Thousand Doors—a showcase of contemporary Indonesian writing. This showcase is brought to you in partnership with this year’s Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, where Djenar will be appearing as a guest. For more on the ethos behind A World with a Thousand Doors, read our preface to the series, and stay tuned for further installments.

Choosing the Perfect Safety Pin

Nayla looked closely at the safety pins neatly arranged on the table in front of her.

In the past, whenever Nayla saw these sharp objects, her body would tremble in fear. She would remain quiet for a long time until her mother eventually forced her to pick one. Her frequent hesitations led her mother to reach out and slap her hard across the face to force her to choose.

In the past, whenever Nayla saw her mother strike a match, her body would shake in terror. Her mother would take Nayla’s chosen safety pin—obviously the smallest one—and burn it long enough to rid it of bacteria. Once Mother was satisfied that the pin was sufficiently sterilized, she would plunge it into Nayla’s groin. Nayla would squirm and squeeze her thighs as tightly as she could, attempting to minimize the pain. She would cry. She would struggle against her mother’s actions, which made Mother even more furious.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

The most important literary news from the US, Australia, and the Czech Republic.

In addition to our usual roundup this week of the latest and most exciting prizes and competitions, our Editor-at-Large in the USA, Madeline Jones, shares some important news about sexual harassment in the nation’s media and publishing industry; Editor-at-Large Tiffany Tsao draws our attention to the online harassment of an Indigenous poet, just over a week before the start of Australia’s first Indigenous literature festival; Editor-at-Large Julia Sherwood fills us in on the most exciting new works being released in Czech Republic, and pens a short obituary for a legendary and fearless translator who rubbed shoulders with some of the mid-century’s greatest authors and defied the Czech Soviet authorities. We hope you find this week’s news informative, and we express our solidarity with all women around the world who are standing up to abuse.

Madeline Jones, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the USA: 

The American publishing and media industries have been rocked by an outpouring of sexual harassment and assault accusations against powerful men who have used their standing and infl-uence—and in some cases millions of dollars—to silence women’s complaints. The New York Times and The New Yorker reported the first stories implicating Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein in a number of harassment and assault charges on October 5th, which sparked a revolution. Over fifty women have since come forward with complaints about Weinstein’s behavior, he has been fired from his own company, and Hachette Book Group promptly shut down Weinstein Books. The hashtag #metoo sprung up in the wake of these first accusations, demonstrating the sweeping extent of harassment across all areas of work and life, and a list started circulating among women in journalism and media called “Shitty Media Men” where women shared specific names of male perpetrators who had made unwanted advances or offered quid pro quos and who are still employed at prominent magazines and newspapers.

READ MORE…

Zainab Hefny: A Bold Saudi Writer in a Conservative Society

Saudi women writers’ texts are revolutionary because they had no choice but the pen to disclose their suffering.

Despite the dominant conservative society of Saudi Arabia, the Saudi creative scene is considered the most daring in the Arab region. Indeed, many Saudi writers are courageous enough to confront the power of a patriarchal, religious culture; however, some have paid the price for their opinions, bold visions, and enlightened thoughts. For instance, liberal journalist and novelist Dr. Turki Al Hamad was known for his hard line against the Wahhabi order of the Minister of the Interior, following a complaint filed by religious authorities in December 2012 because of his tweets that were considered offensive to the divine, Islam, and the Prophet Muhammad. One such tweet states, “A new Nazi view of the world the Arab world calls Islamism. But this time of Nazism is over, and the sun will shine again” (1). Even more recently, the Saudi writer Raif Badawi has been sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment and floggings as punishment for using writing to express and expose the need for societal change. On January 9, 2015, Badawi was flogged 50 times before hundreds of spectators in front of a Jeddah mosque, the first in a series of one thousand lashes to be carried out over twenty weeks (2).

READ MORE…

Rape à la Polonaise, or Whose Side Are You on, Maria?

"A hundred thousand furious women wearing black, armed with symbolic umbrellas. One hundred thousand women, undeterred by pouring rain."

A year ago in 2016, thousands of Polish women went on strike from work, dressed in all black and marched on the streets waving black flags and umbrellas to protest a proposal that would make abortion completely inaccessible to them. While they succeeded, Poland still has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe. On the anniversary of the Black Protests this Tuesday, on Oct 3, 2017, Polish women marched again to demand greater reproductive freedom. Feminist writer and columnist Grażyna Plebanek recaps for Asymptote the year of struggle for Polish women’s rights and the role of literature in the protests. —Julia Sherwood

A year ago we women went out into the streets together—young and old, teenagers, mothers, grandmothers. Women from all walks of life. Women from small towns and big cities, educated and uneducated. When I first canvassed women in a Polish shop in Brussels to take part in the Black March last October, I was worried that the shop assistants and shoppers might respond in the time-honoured way: “I’m not interested in politics” or “I’ll leave it to the politicians.” Or the excuse that’s really hard to argue with: “I’ve got enough on my plate already.”

As it turned out, this is an issue that concerns us all: the issue of our freedom and dignity. In October 2016, every one of us in that shop—customers and shop assistants—poured out our grief over what “they” were planning to do to us, by introducing a near-total ban on abortion, making what is already one of the most restrictive anti-abortion laws in Europe even stricter. The following day we marched shoulder to shoulder, united by a real threat—that of being robbed of the basic right over our own bodies. We were being dragged back to the status of women during the Napoleonic times. We would no longer be equal to men and have our lives directed by others, as if we were children.

We went out into the streets in Poland, in Brussels, Berlin, London, Stockholm, New York, and many other cities across the world. In Poland one hundred thousand women joined the protest. A hundred thousand furious women wearing black, armed with symbolic umbrellas. One hundred thousand women, undeterred by pouring rain.

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Sea of umbrellas. Warsaw, 3 October 2016. Photo © Tytus Duchnowski

The protests worked but in late August, almost a year later, Polish women once again went out into the streets of Łódź. Again, we wore black. However, this was a smaller and quieter march, an expression of grief. We were grieving for a young woman held captive for ten days by two men who had tortured and raped her. She ran away but later died in hospital. Her injuries were so severe that the doctors couldn’t save her.

What has happened in Poland between the two black marches—between the protests of 2016 and the funeral procession of 2017? READ MORE…