(because a five star rating in Goodreads alone, never suffice)
i think, in reading Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, one begins to appreciate how fortunate we, as a woman to live in the world at this age where more privileges are given, more opportunities, more freedom, more everything.
of course, i haven’t been reading any ‘feminist’ literature, so to speak, to comment enough about them. seeing Jane Eyre or Pride and Prejudice on your mother’s bookshelf membuat kau, aaaah noooooo, such a long windy volume, what can a woman write about anyway. of course, there is, Anne Frank, which you never finish (or did, rather hazily), because she wrote bady (and the cries of war seem to you so foreign an idea). and then Sylvia Plath, but you have been speaking about her plenty of times already. malas dah.
of course, reading the essay, one could not help but marvel how Woolf ever rose out of all those beadles and begin to write, rather porously into pages and pages, where libraries are locked for woman, and money denied and all that.
(ha, mula lah tu.)
of course, you have read in all those Dostoevsky novels, where sisters are educated by their fathers in all the arts, married off to men of standing. you think, good, now that isn’t so bad after all. Natasya forever remains perfect to you. but then you read of the flogging of the milking of the bearing children and all those grushenkas and harlots and prudes then reality dawns upon you.
you have seen Hamka’s Di Bawah Lindungan Kaabah, where the girl is forced to stay at the island while the guy easily goes to Mekah studying whatever it is that he desires, while she has to be content riding bicycles doing accounts of his father and be feverish at every thought of her damned future.
Schopenhauer was a misogynist.
Khomeimi pun sama je.
and you yourself, weren’t you, at the age of twelve felt jealous because your brothers got into boarding school where you didn’t because girls are simply much smarter (or better at academics at such an early age),
and thus harder to get in. one doesn’t have to strive that much as a boy – all they need is that stamp of the son of and he is employed.
but all that doesn’t concern you. as you visit the women studies section in the library, you see so many subjects written of women; women here, women that, women this, unearthing woman, so much that the idea repels you – you didn’t manage to find Beauvoir’s the second sex anyway – but you know the old bookshop at the city sells them – her image persists in each visit.
but enough about women. i am to comment about the essay. there is a type of fiction that we must aim for (in fact, that is all i want to write about… i think), something that elevates the woman without ever identifying her as one, that nameless goddess.
on the other hand, Ayn Rand removes herself completely.
but Woolf was writing from a very western, patriarchal, christian culture, where women are thought to be owned by men, to be, merely an object (haih, this is you, teleng); as such their father’s names are erased and replaced with the husband’s, unable to proclaim for herself eternally. it’s a tradition passed where women are never allowed to enter the church – they must shave their head off first – things like that – no wonder you see all these feminists running rampant around america. haih.
you don’t really see that in Islam, do you? not in it’s purest form, at least. (malas nak comment pasal all those things happening in Afghanistan/Middle East because i don’t really know much about it – probably it’s an arab thing). or maybe things are bound to be corrupted and people forget and adopt all sorts of errant stuff from the old days. or maybe because men simply feel (and need to feel) superior, and when they cannot conquer land, power, wealth, they turn to women…..
i’m tired of the wor(l)d already.
perkaraperkara 