{Ongoing Thoughts About Femininity, Motherhood and Women's Poetry}

The poems about daughterhood I have written in the recent past, and which I have begun to send out recently, are generally more appreciated by men than by women. I didn't think about this part of the reception when I was writing them. It is only recently that I have come to recognize this aspect of the reception of my own work. I am still processing it, and I don't have any well-developed theorization about it.

But I have my suspicions. I think, men and women are taught/socialized to think about inter-generational relationships differently. Men think conflict as an integral element of inter-generational relationships. Women think of them more in terms of nurturing. Coming-of-age for girls often translates into accommodating themselves into the imperatives of the roles of nurturers and care-givers. Personally, I don't think these are either/or realities. Both conflict and nurturing can co-exist within a particular relationship. In fact, I would say, most relationships, which move beyond a superficial exchange of niceties, involve both. Where the whole thing gets more complicated is the place where our inter-generational experiences get constructed in specific ways by the societies and cultures we live in.

By that token, women are not expected to write about conflicts, the anger they feel for their mothers. Instead, mother-poems, like grandmother-poems, are supposed to be all about nostalgia-- of finding that space of purity where mother and daughter come to share bonds. Of course, there are plenty of women poets who have written against that expectation, but in my experience, it still throws people off, and especially women readers, when they encounter a woman writing about conflict in their relationship with the mother. It is as if the denial of the mother would come to an essential denial of the writing woman's own femininity. And this is something, I plan to write about very soon, it's still very hard for women writers (and women in general) to lay claim to their own anger. The mainstream women's poetry in this country (written mostly by white women) bears important testimony to that. I can say the same thing about Bengali women's poetry too. But that's going to be a whole different post.