Structured silences

Ritu Menon

For material, she uses the findings of an impressive "10-language project on the gendered nature of censorship in India" of which she was coordinator; and the analysis provided by Women’s World Organisation for Rights, Literature and Development, an international network of writers battling for free speech, of which she is in the board.

Menon is herself a solid source of information on the subject. She is co-founder of Kali for Women, a feminist publishing house in Asia, and her paper "The Structured Silences of Women: Culture, Censorship and voice in a Globalised Market" is a piece of excellent, informed prose.

1. Censorship is when a work of art expressing an idea which does not fall under current convention is seized, cut up, withdrawn, impounded, ignored, maligned, or otherwise made inaccessible to its audience.

2. Censorship is when the "thought police" —whether chauvinist, fundamentalist, militant, rightist, leftist, conservative, or extremist— go about their business of silencing.
3. Censorship is not just about keeping an audience from reading, it is about keeping a writer from writing.

4. Censorship is leading a woman—whether by praise or push, persuasion or power—to produce only poems and stories that are like delicatessen or fine embroidery and bother no one.

5. Censorship is as Parvathy Devi comments: "Writing that reinforces or is uncritical of prevailing societal norms and values is praised, while that which critiques patriarchal values or promotes the idea of women as individuals, provokes censure. Men who write differently are honoured, but women who do so are isolated."

6. Censorship is telling a woman, whether by social censure or withdrawal of support, that there are proper subjects for her, outside of which a man is the better author.

7. Censorship is keeping women disconnected from what they think and what they say, from what they say and what they write—and even from what they think and what they do not say.

8. Censorship is when husbands and fathers reassure and urge wives’ and daughters’ in their work only if these works conform to the husbands’ and fathers’ norms. And when these do not, show obvious, offended silence. Women, made to feel guilty about the discord in the home, end up censoring themselves.

9. Censorship is when women are made to believe that to be good housewives, good mothers, and good daughters:

o They must not allow the writing to get in the way of these "primary" roles. That, therefore, the writing must be done only in the time and space left over from completing the duties that come with these roles. That to do otherwise is selfish.

o They must not make their family life the subject of their writing. To do so is to expose husband and children or even set them up for ridicule. The assumption of course being that, when the writer is a woman, the characters she creates are necessarily those found in her private life. An assumption, incidentally, not made automatically when the writer is a man.
This is censorship: its net effect is to silence women.

10. Censorship is when women, following a lifetime of being edited, begin censoring themselves almost spontaneously, without conscious thought or hesitation.

1i. Censorship is when women, inundated with the rules of the "home," deliberately avoid writing about topics which meet with disapproval from husband, children, neighbour, pastor. In other words, family and societal rejection weigh in heavily to favour censorship.

12. Censorship is when literary establishments deny publication of women’s works ostensibly because the works lack literary merit or a commercial audience. In fact, their objections have to do with content. In many cases, editors are not receptive to feminist ideas.

13. Censorship is when a male editor of a high-circulation newspaper or magazine demands sexual favours in exchange for publishing a woman’s work.

14. Censorship is when a woman is denied access to education, to debate, or to a general life of the mind. Because to do so (a) opens her up to "wrong" influences, (b) interferes with her family’s plans for her as a female, (c) wastes family resources that can otherwise be put to more "productive" use. This is censorship because, in later life, it denies a woman full use of her faculties as a writer.

15. Censorship is when a woman’s manuscripts are ruined, suppressed, changed, or otherwise interfered with by anyone whatever the motive. That a husband, for instance, has only the best intentions does not make his suppression of the manuscript any less censorial.

16. Censorship is when anyone, very likely a member of the family, appropriates the work of his wife/daughter/sister as his own because:

(a) He feels that any work by a female member of the family belongs to him ultimately.

(b) He does not want a female member of the family taking on an identity independent of that given by his name.

17. Censorship is when a woman is physically or psychologically threatened, hurt, and otherwise made to fear for her life unless she makes her writing conform.

18. Censorship is when society denigrates, trivialises, ridicules, or ignores a woman’s writing in order to silence her.

19. Censorship is when the big presses decide who becomes, or does not become, a best-selling woman author. This not only contains the intellectual output of women, it also bears on the intellectual content of that output.

20. Censorship can come from the self, family, culture, religion, government.