Years ago, Bee Rowlatt, a journalist and mother of three in London, contacted May Witwit, an Iraqi academic, while working on an article. Soon they began to exchange letters about their vastly different lives, their husbands, dreams, cultures and religious beliefs, and hatched a plan to get Witwit out of war-torn Iraq and to London. The collection of letters of their poignant friendship was published as a book, Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad (2010), and later dramatised by the BBC.
Rowlatt followed this up with In Search of Mary (2016), in which she went looking for the life and legacy of writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, whom she describes as the “first celebrity feminist”. On the sidelines of the Jaipur Literature Festival, Rowlatt speaks of the decision to publish private letters as a book and why she thinks female friendships are exceptional. Edited excerpts:
At what point did you decide that your correspondence with Witwit should become a book?
The letters were always private and a genuine representation of a friendship between me and May. The only reason they became a book was sheer desperation — to get May out of Iraq. As she pointed out, ‘Your country smashed my country, get me out of here.’ She was an academic teaching English literature at the University of Baghdad. Following the invasion, her life had become intolerable. The situation got worse, forcing her to become a refugee. The letters were published as a book so that there could be funding for her to come to the U.K. and complete her Ph.D. We had tried for years to find a way out. The idea of the book was the missing piece of the jigsaw.
After you made the decision to publish the book, did you go back and edit the letters because some of them were so private?
Yes, we did, but only because some of it was so boring. The book was cut and edited for narrative shape and brevity. Someone actually complained in a review that it is too long in the middle. And I was like, ‘Yeah, try being a refugee, it takes ages’. The narrative does dip in the middle only because it’s bloody hard to get someone in desperate need across the border.
What’s your relationship with Witwit now?
We’re still in touch, we message each other. She lives in Scotland. She completed her Ph.D.
I am curious about how both your husbands reacted to the book. There are some not-so-flattering portrayals of them in parts, for the whole world to read.
They were both really good about it, actually. Both of them acknowledged that they were an important part of the story. Obviously, it wasn’t flattering sometimes, but that’s part of the basis of women’s friendships: sometimes you need to complain about men. So, we couldn’t remove it.
This is a book about female friendship. What do you think makes female friendships different from male friendships?
I think we’re just better at it. I hate to be gender stereotyping, but women nurture their friendships more. I put huge energy and thought into my friendships; my friends mean everything to me. I don’t see men nurturing their friendships or paying attention to their networks in the same manner.
The book also mentions Wollstonecraft in passing. She later became the subject of your second book. Where did you discover her?
My first encounter with her was as an English literature undergraduate and that’s because I read the romantics. They rely to a great extent on their forebears, one of whom was Wollstonecraft. I read about her as a footnote and found out that in 1795, she went on a treasure hunt with her baby. Who does that? That one sentence had me immediately hooked. The other spur to writing was that nobody knew who she was. This is true of every culture and every nation and every body of literature — there are voices that have disappeared and been rendered invisible. Sometimes, it happens by accident and sometimes it’s a conscious act of erasure, which is what happened to her. There’s an important act of justice in bringing these voices back.
How do you call her the first celebrity feminist?
Yes, that’s probably unfair. There were other feminists and this was Eurocentric. I just probably had to amp her up, be her cheerleader and get people to know of her.
Your first book had two strong female characters and the second was about a feminist. There is today a huge backlash against feminism in the world. Why do you think that is?
It’s days of darkness really, that’s not just against feminism but against the general liberal enlightenment fold. One thing that does upset me is the infighting, the petty squabbles within feminism. Those are damaging the movement against right-wing fascism. We don’t have the luxury of it being exclusionary. We really don’t. So, we just got to hang together and keep going.
radhika.s@thehindu.co.in
