I regret not blogging about it earlier, but I was at a lost for words about what to write. I wondered if the day called for a simple appreciation of womanhood in general, when I realized I didn’t know what ‘womanhood’ meant to me. The more I asked myself what that term meant, the more I found myself delving deeper and deeper in an incomprehensible otherness, and found myself lost.
I became lost in my own incapacity to speak about women, and yet helplessly fascinated by them. Women appear like heady mixes of the strongest cocktail, a whirling tempest of emotion and a calm in the eye of a storm. They are like willed creatures with a mind of their own, whose motives remain incomprehensible and whose desires I can hardly understand. Who also suffer the labels and categories in which we have squeezed them, who have become compartmentalized into neat identifications, who suffer the male - and habituated female - view of ‘womanhood’.
At the same time, I realized that my own seeming incapacity to express what ‘womanhood’ means, at least to me, might be an affectation (if conditioned): is the feminine incomprehensible because, as an unknown quotient, ‘woman’ remains distinct and less real than ‘man’? It’s a question of dismissal, isn’t it? If I conclude that God, for example, as beyond understanding, then He remains a mystery I do not need to unravel.
I think about the old, old men now dead and gone who’ve come before me, and I think about the comparison of the ‘eternal feminine’ with the inchoate Other so many have made before me, and I wonder if incomprehension is a mask for a refusal to engage. It silences the female.
I think about the email I received from another blogger, alerting me to the fact that the 9th of March would be International Women’s Day. And I think now it might be better if men stopped talking about women, and that women start speaking of themselves.
Perhaps it’ll be best if men, on International Women’s Day, listened.