Women, as a category, are vulnerable, of course. Privileged or otherwise, women are vulnerable to abuse, and to being overlooked, talked-over, patronised; to being systematically excluded from positions of political, social and cultural power.
Some weeks ago, I was invited to judge a college essay competition, in which my co-juror and I turned out to be friends from our own undergraduate days. This was a happy coincidence; as was the fact that the essays from which we chose our winners were all by women. An all-female pool of writers and an all-female jury was a nice thing, no doubt, but neither of us would claim it was radical. We were also, after all, graduates of an elite college, judging students of an elite university: Our disruption of the norm was limited.
It was with similarly mixed emotions that I read the news of the women-dominated Booker Prize shortlist. Yes, five of the six shortlisted authors are women, but only one of the six is Black — the lone man. Breathless headlines declare that this is the highest number of women shortlisted in the Booker’s 55-year history, but a cursory glance at the prize’s website reveals that women — and certainly White women — have been well represented from the award’s inception. Two White women were shortlisted that year, in 1969: Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark. Of them, Murdoch would be shortlisted six times in all, win the prize once, and have the trophy itself named after her, posthumously, in 2023. The Lost Man Booker Prize, announced between 1969 and 1970 to fix a logistical error that passed over a year’s worth of nominations, had four White women authors in a shortlist of six; and the very next year, Bernice Rubens, a White woman, won the award.
By contrast, a Black author, Chinua Achebe, first made it to the shortlist in 1987 — 18 years after the Booker was born. An essay on the prize’s website, attributed to Ben Okri, though it reads like a defensive press release contesting the notion that Black writers are underrepresented in the Booker, claims that Achebe’s shortlisting was “fitting because Achebe was already an icon of Black literature with the publication of Things Fall Apart in 1958”. In other words, Achebe had been celebrated for nearly 30 years before the Booker thought fit to recognise him. The first Black winner was Okri himself, in 1991; and the first Black woman to win the prize was Bernardine Evaristo, in 2019, a full half century after the prize was instituted.
Even then, as followers of Booker controversies will remember, Evaristo had to share her prize with Margaret Atwood. It’s worth noting that this was Atwood’s sixth shortlisting and that The Testaments, for which she won the award, cannot hold a guttering candle to Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other. I write this as a lifelong fan of Atwood’s work, as someone who waited with bated breath for The Testaments to come out, having read and re-read its precursor, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), countless times. But this sequel was less a book, more a marketing ploy — clumsily written, poorly plotted, entirely forgettable — while there are moments and characters from Evaristo’s book that are still alive in my mind.
Such asymmetry is not peculiar to the Booker alone. Women with caste and class privilege are better represented in Indian (certainly Indian English) writing and publishing than women or men without either. But given its oversized, global influence, the Booker might have been a little more reflexive while patting itself on the back for shortlisting five women of varied origins (they may well come from five countries, but American, Australian, British, Canadian and Dutch citizenship is not the bouquet of diversity the Booker imagines it to be).
The chair of this year’s jury, Edmund de Waal, has said that the shortlisted books explore the “fault lines of our times… conflicts of identity, race and sexuality”. I haven’t read the books but they all sound fantastic, and I’m sure I’ll enjoy them. This is not, therefore, to denigrate the talent of the shortlisted women authors; it is only to question the easy celebration of the mere fact of their shortlisting. Isn’t one of the most glaring fault lines of our times the privileged and weaponised vulnerability of White women? We saw it clearly during the Olympics and the hounding of Imane Khelif for being a better boxer than her White opponent. We have seen it play out, day in day out for a year, in the lasting outrage over Hamas violence and the indifference to violence, sexual and otherwise, inflicted on Palestinian women (and men) by Israel.
Women, as a category, are vulnerable, of course. Privileged or otherwise, women are vulnerable to abuse, and to being overlooked, talked-over, patronised; to being systematically excluded from positions of political, social and cultural power. But here’s the rub: Power, unlike intellectual nuance, does tend to operate in black and white. Across the world, it aligns along axes that are all too clear-cut — gender, yes, but also race, religion, language, wealth. Thus, power will side with men possessed of great fortunes and ipso facto threatened by gold-digging wives as easily as it will favour wealthy women eternally oppressed by their cooks and cleaners.
How then does a writer answer the tricky question of identity? Which identity does she assume, the one of greatest vulnerability or most privilege? Am I female in the global south or savarna in south Delhi? I used to say that the only kind of label I’d like as a writer is “great”, and I thought this was quite witty of me, but wanting to be canonised is a very conservative ambition, after all. Writers, of all genders, might serve our deeply unequal world better by asking why greatness is so often reserved for the few with the power to allocate it to themselves.
Sharma is the author of Akbar of Hindustan and Jahangir
© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
First uploaded on: 21-09-2024 at 00:30 IST
