Reflecting on Sheema Kermani: nostalgia and struggle in Pakistani feminism

It’s an amazing thing, watching a woman’s rights activist from my parents’ generation in action. The passion that those women had at the height of the women’s movement in the 80s when they were protesting the seclusion of and state-sponsored violence against women, that passion was a sight to behold – then, with 8-year-old eyes, and now, at 30.

I came to this realization when I was dragged by friends to a one-woman show by Sheema Kermani, dancer, actor and feminist activist, at the Awami Jamhori Forum (the People’s Democratic Forum) in Model Town, Lahore. I didn’t really want to go; after a long day at work, ennui, hot chocolate and an oft-read Terry Pratchett beckoned. But the play was going to be outdoors, Lahore wasn’t quite cold yet but it had finished being hot, and my friends have been jeering at me for phoning in my feminism lately. So I went with them to watch Sheema Kermani perform on the evening of October 24, 2009.

The thing about clichés is that they endure because of a fundamental truth. And “Mein Kon Hoon?” (“Who am I?”) is a show filled choc a bloc with feminist clichés: invisible women in history, early marriage, violence against women, lack of bodily autonomy, religious fundamentalism.

It began with a dance dramatization of all the women leaders who went to war in sub-continent for their kingdoms, fighting at the head of an army while tending to their children. These are the few visible women, Kermani said, the few who make it into history. The rest are invisible sufferers and resist their suffering invisibly as well.

This somewhat ungainly transition took us into the real meat of the show: what it is to be a woman in our culture. Here lay the true strength of the form as the tired familiarity of the cliché fell away to reveal in the voice and body of Sheema Kermani to horrible familiarity of the oppression of women.

She played a conversation between a young woman bemoaning her husband’s decision to take a second wife and an old crone who has been through all of that and, wearing a black shroud, pronounces the futility of resistance against it. The younger woman revels in her long hair, her supple body, her full breasts; the old woman laughs at the transience of such attractions. Characters transition into each other, emerging first as the woman who gets beaten by her husband because he was beaten down out in the world, and then into the woman who must be ready with her body any time for his sexual want.

It is cliché. And yet ever present in Pakistan is the reckless disregard for and denigration of any notion of female autonomy, bodily or otherwise. The power in her body, the fire of an activist from a dying movement and the sheer undeniable truth of her words made “Mein Kon Hoon?” powerful. The woman who came up to the artist afterwards, crying and saying that Kermani had just performed her life, made that all the more real.

It is, however, a dying movement, or at least a movement in dire need of blood and sinew. At the end of the 70s, the Left in Pakistan watched in horror as the hero of socialism, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, moved away from Leftist ideals of social justice and became a megalomaniacal despot. In the 80s, when General Zia-ul-Haq made himself actual dictator and women’s rights were being eroded, the Left had already begun to shake off its crushing disillusionment and spring to action. The Left went heavily arty. In response to the Islamization of ostensibly the legal system but in reality every aspect of life, the Left and the women’s movement particularly employed theatre, dance and visual art to combat the rapidly escalating social conservatism.

The eighties was not the beginning of the women’s movement, but the fire of the women’s movement was ignited then, when women were flogged in public squares for adultery and teenage boys were hanged for handing out fliers against the regime. It seems that since the death of Zia, those fires have been banked in internationally funded NGOs and the writing of reports.

When they are revived, as they were this one autumn evening, it is nostalgic, but not galvanizing. Despite the truth of her words, there is a disconnect: there is always this lingering feeling that there is a hierarchy of female oppression and the women who have the benefit of money, status and education behind them must uplift the poor, the rural, the uneducated woman because her plight is worse, and more immediate. Really, it just makes for a better story, perhaps, than saying that the reason the hag in the play denounces the young woman’s yearning for her sexual power is the same reason that young urban women who sneak out of their houses to date and perchance sleep with their boyfriends hate themselves.

It’s a better story, in the end, to repeat the old clichés of downtrodden womanhood than to bring in new ones, of self-loathing womanhood. That the penis-centred patriarchal culture that is Pakistan allows date rape in Lahore to go unreported is directly connected to the flogging of a woman in a northwestern tribal area for being seen out with a man unrelated to her. The power of the women’s movement, once, was its reach, and the immediacy of the struggle under Zia. Now, it’s foundering because the immediate threat is gone and all that’s left to fight is the entire system.