Waking up every morning and continuing the struggle that is tied to one’s existence, thereby making resistance part of one’s raison d’être, is a powerful idea
A still from the Netflix series La Legge di Lidia Poet
I’m still processing the news coming in from Manipur. I’m still making sense of how it arrives to us delayed and deferred, thanks to internet bans. I’m still trying to process what it must mean to live in various states of emergency without the ability to access the world beyond, without the basic right to reach out for help, and for journalists to work in situations that push the limits of what challenging must mean. I try not to think about it because it is easier not to. Because, from the prism of motherhood, I am too prone to feeling the grief of other mothers. It is hard to step back and not experience it, somehow, as your own. It is painful to read that law enforcement agencies do everything but enforce the law, or when they do, do so with clear bias and prejudice. I am so tired of reading about all the failures of patriarchal forms of governance without any clear propositions about how to move forward. I am tired of raging, tired of my own helplessness, tired by how the system is structurally designed to erase the possibility of joy in our lives. All our little pleasures, all our small delights are measured against the gravity of the world-altering doom towards which we are driving, headlong, led by petty leaders whose motives are short-term, profit-driven and in the service
of capitalism.
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I don’t know how not to feel affected by what is unfolding every day. Some days ago, I read some parenting advice for children of toddlers that explained why they have difficulty with transitions, why they feel such immense grief when you tell them it is time to stop doing the thing they were doing that was so much fun. The counter, I was told, is to offer hope. Tomorrow, we can do that thing again, you must tell them, and you must try your best to honour your word. Offering them this dose of hope helps them to move on to something else. Thinking about this made me wonder about the role of hope as a survival mechanism, and not a mere luxury or privilege. Elizabeth A Povinelli, with whom I was recently in conversation, spoke less enthusiastically about hope. As an anthropologist working with aboriginal communities in Australia, she was relaying what it might mean to people who have been consistently denied agency to govern their ancestral lands. What does hope mean to people whose lives have been continuously and relentlessly upended by the violence of bureaucracy and red-tapism, a bureaucracy they did not choose but was imposed on them through processes of colonisation? To them, hope meant waking up the next morning and continuing the struggle and having that become part of their existence. It sounded bleak when she talked about it, but the more I return to it, the better I understand how this mode of living involves having resistance become part of your raison d’être. And that is a powerful idea that I have seen embodied in the lives of Tibetan refugees, or Palestinian exiles. In hope lies the possibility of futurity.
In order to improve my Italian, I began watching a Netflix series called La Legge di Lidia Poët or The Law According to Lidia Poët. It is based on the life of Italy’s first modern female lawyer, who, despite passing her law examinations and being enrolled as a lawyer, was not allowed to practise law because she was a woman. Her optimism at the beginning is quickly nipped in the bud when she is disbarred and prevented from entering the courts. She decides to work towards overturning this verdict and I thought the rest of the series would be all about how she did that. Instead, it is astonishingly about how she found ways of circumventing systemic challenges in order to continue her pursuit of justice. She found men who would deliver her arguments in court. She found unusual ways of getting around obstacles. In other words, she simply persevered. And each time we get a glimpse of her persevering, the series uses a kind of metal soundtrack that is decidedly contemporary, offering not only a contrast from the period nature of the series—it is set at a time in the 1800s when fingerprint analysis was considered novel—but serving to remind us that the past is still present and dwells among us.
Despite coming from a privileged background, Lidia’s decisions not to marry and bear children clearly sever her from the status and means she would have enjoyed had she lived a more conventional life. Watching the series also reminds me of the level of misogyny that continues to hold sway in present-day Italy. A court recently decided, for example, that because a janitor accused of harassing a minor, allegedly touched her for not long enough, it cannot be considered assault. The female minor quipped that if he had touched her long enough, would it have been considered consent?
I’m tired of female, queer, and marginalised bodies having to unfairly bear the brunt of capitalist and patriarchal oppression. It enrages me. I tell myself that nursing hope doesn’t mean de-intensifying my rage. In fact, hope and rage are simultaneous feelings within feminist emotion, I am sure. Maybe rage is another form of hope.
Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper
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