Silence diminishes, devalues and dehumanises women. To be not silenced is to tell your stories. This is the method that Solnit followed in her earlier book Men Explain Things to Me where she used the word “mansplaining” that is underpinned by the deep-seated notion that knowledge resides within the purview of man.
The anecdote where a man tried to explain Solnit’s book to her after reading a review unaware that she was the author displays the blatant arrogance of a male world that presumes to know all. Drawing on history, literature and culture, Solnit uses her anecdotal style to speak of male aggression and female indignity evident in the story of a girl made to sign a no-disclosure agreement by the college establishment before reporting her rape, or a fellow colleague presumptuously explaining the rudiments of a novel like Lolita when Solnit expresses her sorrow for the heroine. Such personal narratives raise the consciousness of sexist oppression. How women are silenced is one way of speaking up for them, a strategy of “breaking through the shame that had kept them silent and alone.”
Solnit addresses ‘the mother of all questions’ thrown at women incessantly as to why they did not opt to have children. Her rejoinder is incisive. Being asked at a lecture on Virginia Woolf why she decided to not have children, Solnit is taken aback as this question would never be put to a man. To her mind “many people make babies; only one made To the Lighthouse .” Such closed questions “contain their own answers and their aim is enforcement and punishment.” When you refuse to be treated as a “bovine non-intellectual” it flies in the face of the established mindset that expects women to be “handmaidens to domesticity” and “let men in and babies out like some elevator for the species.” The question therefore need not be asked or answered.
Solnit has lived her life to the full, writing books, surrounded by adventure and “generous, brilliant men.” She has never allowed herself to fall into the conventional “recipes of fulfillment” and has unapologetically resisted and opposed misogynistic violence, gender bias and the masculine canon. Her writing contests gender binaries and acknowledges the fluidity, the ‘leakiness’ between genders as a valid step towards the evolution of our species, challenging the status quo by changing our understanding of representations of consent, power and silence.
The Mother of All Questions ; Rebecca Solnit, Haymarket Books, ₹728.
