One cannot help but get absorbed in the exploration of ceaseless writing potentialities snowed by the literary world, blooming with women writers one after another.
It provides such intriguing variety of shades, themes, choice of languages, genres and styles that one eventually lands up in an ocean of wisdom, empathy, power and eventually indecisiveness regarding what to finally write upon.
What particularly puts me in high spirits though, is my recent encounter with legendary writer Nalini Jameela at the annual City Scripts event in Delhi.
Jameela, the author-activist and sex worker from Kerala spills spark with each word that she writes.
Talking about her book Romantic Encounters of a Sex Worker, she laughingly explained employing ‘kinkiness as a strategy’ of her writing ‘to lure male and other brahmanical readers’ in bringing them to read the tales they would otherwise not choose to read.
This brings to the surface the challenges jabbed upon women writers in a male-dominated literary sphere.
Jameela’s strategy is a reminder of just one of the many remarkable solutions women narrators tend to come up with in order to acquire a space of their own, letting the world know their stories, and for the world to acknowledge that these tales exist and must be shared.
In an era where women writings are jostling for space in public, an act as simple as keeping their books in our shelves becomes an act of defiance. How much risk are you willing to take?
