Written piece
“The sense of monotony of confinement…”
Maheenul Haque Mozumder
Bangladesh
About this piece
The sense of monotony of confinement, of repetitive tasks that women possibly all around the world have faced, and how that translates into a woven unity, of reclaiming those dull hours into a creative headspace for themselves.
It had by then become impossible for us to imagine that there was a time she could walk. Painted, planted, on that same position—four soggy pillows stacked atop each other, and nanu, sat half-reclined on them, even in sleep, for her back would not allow her to lie flat. Who would have known that lying down could be so strenuous! From there we would watch her, murmuring god's name repeatedly, her zikrs, or with a round knitting-frame in hand, moving a needle up and down in metronome.
The zikrs, the knittings—these repetitive tasks had become, it seemed to us, a way for her to let time revolve around its own axis, while she herself slipped out slyly from its linear direction. She would leave her mouth, or her hand in autopilot, and disengage, pull herself back into a little vestibule where she would rummage the pouches of memory, regurgitate those same episodes of life, lay them all out forward and resolve them in her own way. We could tell, she was not really there in those moments. The tongue may well be reciting those holy names, the hand may well be piercing and weaving a thin line across the cloth, but she herself, truly, was elsewhere. Perhaps there was an inside, somewhere deep, where she would be having conversations with herself, or with other people who can no longer speak for themselves, and she would have to be a sort of ventriloquist of their memory, making them speak—saying things that would have changed everything. This was the only way she knew how to honour the integrity of memories—all other vicarious, outsourced ways of revisiting, rejuvenating lived moments seemed to her despicable.
we could never get her to click a photo
a ghost is whatever remains of you after you are gone, nanu used to say,
they are the leftovers life
a photo is a ghost, in that it keeps you stuck as an image where
some part of your soul is fixed forever
but it is just a memory, we'd say, something to remember you by.
memories are ghosts as well, because in remembrance
you keep them alive, she'd reply,
when things are dead, it's better you let them die
even memories?
yes, yes, even memories
even the echoes of their swallowed screams
the hollow necks of forlorn sweaters
the soggy pillows damp with dreams
Sometimes, very rarely, her trance would break, and she would become like someone whose eyes have opened while asleep, and the things of reality have begun to seep into the realm of dreams through their eyes, and the things of dreams have begun to jump over the lower eyelids into reality. Inadvertently, she would then include us in those internal monologues, without really letting us in on the strain of thoughts they have followed. One evening, I remember, it was raining and the evening prematurely converged into night, when she looked up from the half-made flower on her white fabric, and told us, out of the blue, that the eye of the needle is very much akin to the womb of a woman, the thread being the umbilical cord—passing through, piercing a hole in the fabric of the world to move forward. A man, she told us, has only a preceding thread, the umbilical cord from which he is detached at birth. A woman, however, may produce one of her own at some point in time. Hence, she is connected two ways. Tracing down this thread to the past, you could go back to the origin of the thread: the primordial mother, ma hawwa herself. All women, from beginning to end, form a root-like spread out thread across the cloth of time. All women, no matter where or when they are, are connected at the root. Man, connected only at the dangling end of the cord, is excluded from this garret of existence. He does not know what it is to be paralyzed from habit, out of being forced into interiority. What does he know of invisibility? Of being seen only when you make a mistake? And the hours, stretched out to infinity, the sunless, meaningless yellow hours of reclusivity? Woman knows, no matter where, no matter when. Each time she sinks down beneath the plain surface, she must bring herself up, by piercing, by needling through the dull hours.
She did not spell it out, but we knew what she was complaining of. Not of her thousand thankless efforts, or even of the gradual self-effacement through the decades, but rather, of being condemned to boredom. The word bore, I read somewhere, has two possible origins. One is the Old English borian, which means to drill a hole, to puncture. The other, from Aryan roots, the Latin forāre, which means to pierce in order to create something new. Both the origins contain the figurative meaning of repetitive perforating. Similarly, in Bangla, we say phor (ফোঁড়) or bor (বোর) to mean piercing a needle through a fabric. I do not know how this sensibility came to be stitched together across two different languages, or whether it is just a coincidence, but I know it makes sense. That the texture of boredom was forged by women who had nothing to do, but to sit and knit. Piercing hole after hole in order to create. Like my nanu, who of course was connected two-ways to a constellation of an entire woven womanhood.
Experiencing life vicariously, like a media—seeing, hearing, sensing from the outside, never really getting to participate, to dip her own ankles. Outside there was an entire world, but going out to see it would also risk being seen, like the trenches. It was not for her to dive deep and swim across, but to keep afloat. And so, she sat back. Sat until her back became undetachable from the shy wall of pillows, until walking became an unwonted activity, until her skin grew pale from lack of sunlight. And of course, there is not much to do while sitting. She found a way, amidst her zikrs and her knitting, to recede into an inner world where there was infinite space, where time itself moved in a serpentine motion, and she would roam there aimlessly, and she would take her time. Subtly she sank back to that place, while her lips still uttered her god's name, again and again, in a melodious whimpering manner. The holy names melted into silence and back into sound, like little fish making quick strokes to the surface of a pond before diving back in, like the continuous raindrops on the windowpanes, like a needle going down beneath a quilt, and piercing its way back up.
the rain is falling
on the window
and some lonely
sleeping station,
there's a murmur
in her heart
and there can
be no consolation
from the thinner
threads of silence
there's a music
that she weaves—
and the rain is falling
on her window
on this night
of muffled griefs