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- “To have and to be able to exercise choice in matters of the heart—that is the ultimate goal…”
In conversation with HarperBroadcast, Smriti Ravindra talks about her phenomenal debut novel, The Woman Who Climbed Trees, how patriarchy diseases the society, and how her writing derives from her childhood stories rife with myths and folklores about the inner lives of women.
Q. Tell us about the title of the book: The Woman Who Climbed Trees.
SR: Well, simply put, this is what the prologue and the epilogue of the novel are titled, but more broadly, it is a metaphor for the world forbidden to women. It’s a world that can nurture women but which is kept away from them, and which is made dangerous.
Q. I really enjoyed the polyphonic element of the book, where characters get their own voices and perspectives, but also manage to converse with each other across time and space. What was it like to wear the skins and ideas of these characters and write them as individuals with independent thoughts?
SR: For me The Woman Who Climbed Trees is, among other things, about the relationship between parents and children, particularly mothers and daughters. For the first couple of years I wrote only from Preeti’s point of view. I was interested in how she experienced the world, and in a way this was not so difficult because I could translate how I experienced the world into her language. But also because I was putting so much of myself in Preeti, I began to wonder about the people in my life, and in Preeti’s life, who had shaped her experiences. I wondered about her mother and realised that like all children, Preeti had no real understanding of her mother’s life. She couldn’t even begin to fathom what it could mean to be married off at fourteen, to a foreign land. This would never be Preeti’s experience, and so she could not tell that story. Meena would have to tell her own story.
Meena’s direct story was written much later. I remember the day I decided Meena’s story would be distinct from Preeti’s. I had to quiet everything around me to bring Meena to the surface. Like Preeti, I had no direct experience of her life. What I knew of it, I knew by looking at the women who had raised me, and who were already adults by the time I had met them.
People who know me closely tease me and say that I am incapable of writing fiction. Everything I write, they say, I need to have somehow lived, and I think this is largely true. But in writing Meena I had to sink deep into my ability to imagine, to empathise, and to articulate that which was not my predominant reality. I had to mentally visit my ancestral village and try to imagine it as Meena’s space. It was very fulfilling because in order to do that I had to bring to myself the many women who were a part of my life. Some of them had been dead for years, some I had rarely ever seen, and yet they were mine. I saw how they were connected, generation to generation. I saw Preeti as a separate entity, but also as a link in a chain. Her desire for Sachi is Meena’s desire for Kumud. Meena’s anger against Manmohan is Kaveri’s anger against her husband. Sukumariya holds history in her art and Sawari Devi lives her history in her day to day struggle to survive in a fiercely masculine world.
I struggled the most with Manmohan. He was very, very difficult for me. He is the character I wrote and re-wrote and re-wrote. He baffled me. His absence, his blindness, his desperate desire to matter in the world, all of this baffled me. I would have not written him at all, but I have known so many men who are like him…and without him, there could be no Meena. I still don’t know if I have done justice to his character.
Q. What does ‘home’ mean for you? How do you think ‘home’ means different things to different people across genders and classes?
SR: I know it is horribly cheesy to say ‘home’ is ‘love’. But that is what home is to me. It is where I feel loved and seen. It’s a place where I don’t have to explain myself, where I can live without having to trim and shape how I live to make it palatable to others. It’s a place of ultimate freedom.
I assume that the ideal home would be the space of freedom for most people. And if this is the case, then it has to differ across genders and classes. Very few spaces afford freedom to women. Their physical homes can very quickly come to signify stringent rules and expectations. Public spaces often fill women with dread. Nations and larger communities have defined and set roles for them. All of this makes ‘home’ a difficult idea. This is true not only for women, but for all those whose lives are controlled by others. Anyone who falls outside the powerful mainstream will struggle with finding a place in the world. Home is, after all, one’s safe place in the world. It’s not something everyone is easily given. Many have to fight for it. Many have to let it go and live in a state of perpetual nostalgia. Many have to make do with whatever little they are allowed. These are fragmented homes. They lack wholeness.
Q. How do you think women’s freedom can be obtained in their solidarity with each other? And do you think it is only possible in a world removed of men – a ‘Herland’ as Charlotte Gilman and Hélène Cixous call this fictional space?
SR: Almost everyone will tell you, all the time, that solidarity between women is impossible, that a group of women will quickly and inevitably devolve into gossiping, maligning, back-biting bitches. Media will tell you this, books and movies will tell you this, men will tell you this, women will tell you this. And yet, in my experience, I have found this to be not true. I grew up in two very distinct female-centric worlds. I grew up in girls’ hostels, and I grew up in joint families with many women in it.
The hostels were the closest I came to living in a ‘Herland’. It was run by women and inhabited entirely by women. The inhabitants were generally interested in men, and the idea of guys was extremely exciting to all of us, but our day-to-day life had nothing to do with men. In this ‘Herland’ we were just people doing what young people do. We got on to the stage and danced our hearts out, we had eating competitions and tried to out-eat one another, we talked late into the night, we studied, we wondered about our future, we broke rules, we bunked. Stuff like that. Did we fight and gossip and bitch? Yes, we did, like we did everything else. In itself it was a very liberating world. I discovered so many of my likes and dislikes there, so many of my life choices were made there, and this happened because I felt I was with my people. I did not feel like an outsider trying to make space for myself. This was my space—this was a given. Men entered this world through the restrictions imposed on us. Be back before 7 pm. Don’t wear sleeveless shirts or shorts outside the hostel. And for many, get married after college. But despite these restrictions, within the campus, we were women living with women and trying out our lives.
The other place, the joint family, had a very different feel to it. The women here did not live their lives freely. Their lives and roles were dictated by the men who were the patriarchs of this household. The restrictions were not far and between, but were the constants that shaped actions and choices. It was not easy to grow well within these constraints, and therefore there was very little scope for real solidarity. Also, these women were not well educated, they did not make any money and were entirely dependent on men for their very survival. How can you come together when you are struggling daily just to survive?
And so, in moments of frustration, I do sometimes feel that a woman’s freedom is only possible in a world removed from men. But I also know this is not true. Women’s freedom does not require the absence of men, it requires the presence of independence—economic and social independence—and men can, and have, played significant roles in women’s journey to freedom. The problem is not men. The problem is patriarchy and its insidious violence. Patriarchal women disrupt solidarity as much as patriarchal men do. The issue of course is that patriarchy is everywhere. It’s like pollution in the air. You breathe it in all the time. It kills you all the time. You don’t even know it and you are dying.
Q. In the novel, ‘madness’ is a very natural, obvious response to the violence and neglect and lovelessness that women have to endure throughout their lives. Historically, the ‘madwoman’ as a trope has been exploited to represent nonconformist women. What is your understanding of this trope and how have you subverted it in your novel?
SR: The idea that madness comes from nonconformity seems to suggest that nonconformity is difficult and conformity is easy. But conformity is not easy. Conformity comes from fear, from suppression of self, from voicelessness. You might choose to delete your voice, to suppress your self, to not recognise you are a self, but this choice is difficult. This is choosing death over life. And death is difficult. The women in The Woman Who Climbed Trees are not necessarily nonconformists. They conform, and their conformity bubbles and blisters within them. Some, like Sawari Devi, are not even aware of their conformity and they are always angry. Kaveri conforms to expectations of marriage and patriarchal motherhood, and she hates her husband and betrays her daughter. Meena too conforms to heterosexual rules of marriage, and she goes mad.
The Woman Who Climbed Trees is not about the few who can resist, but about the many who cannot, or rather, whose resistances happen within the frameworks laid out for them.
Q. Another brilliant element of the book is how efficiently it normalizes homoeroticism… However, it manages to also underline the impossibility of these unions in our society. In context of the impending Supreme Court judgement on same-sex marriages in India, how do you think ‘marriage’ as an institution will respond to this legal sanction to love whomever we want?
SR: Well, first I have to start off by saying how proud I am of the fact that Nepal is now the first South-Asian nation to legalise same-sex marriage! I really hope India follows suit.
But honestly, I don’t know how to answer your question. I want to say that despite its fixed nature, marriage has had to adapt, however slowly, to changing social needs. But instantly, all the horrible ways in which the institute punishes and hurts those who deviate comes to mind. I want to say there is some space for love in marriage, and instantly the many headlines about persecuted love come before me. I want to say: Hey, look, we have gone from joint to nuclear; hey look, we now have examples of inter-caste and inter-religion marriages—but there are also gruesome examples of violent resistance. I think marriage as an institute will resist. It will throw a fit. It will be cruel. But it will have to relent, to make way. Anything that does not adapt, dies out. So it will have to adapt. But it’s a powerful establishment, and it’s been historically ruthless.
Q. Would things have been different for the characters in your novel if same-sex marriages were permissible and legal?
SR: Yes, definitely. Like for so many people in the world. To have and to be able to exercise choice in matters of the heart—that is the ultimate goal, is it not?
Q. The novel jumps between and across times effortlessly, to record stories of multiple generations. But these stories are distinctly marked by the constant feeling of loss. I have often felt time to be foremost a measure of loss. How do you think time and loss are related – and how does that reflect in your book?
SR: In her poem ‘The Way My Mother Speaks’, Carol Ann Duffy writes of a journey where, as the journey progresses, blue skies are swapped for cool grey ones. I think time is, among other things, about growing up, maturing, recognising the impossibility of some things, the futility of others. A child grows up and is no longer the centre of the universe. A girl grows up and is exiled from her home. A boy grows up and is no longer invincible. A parent grows up and his or her nest is empty. We call the accumulation of experience, wisdom. But wisdom often comes with loss. The Woman is about the progression of time, and so it is about loss.
Q. Finally, the book weaves folklore and myths with such ease that I often felt like I was reading stories that I grew up listening to as well. The legends of the witch on the tree, wedding rituals, conversations about desire – there was so much that I could visualize, that happens across cultures and families. Tell us about how the everyday stories found their way into The Woman Who Climbed Trees?
SR: There was no way on earth that I could write about the people I was writing about without bringing in folklore and myths. Kathmandu is a city of temples, and every temple has its story. To set a story in Kathmandu is to set it amongst temples and palaces. How does one then escape myths? And then to write about people from the Mithila belt. They are always drawing. They are practitioners of the Madhubani art. My grandmothers would have laughed if you had called them artists. They did not know they were artists. Art was a natural part of their lives. They drew in their pooja-rooms. They drew for marriages and festivals. And they sang all the time. The dholak was pinched under their thighs and their songs were loud and several. As a child I thought it was all cacophony and chaos! I was mighty embarrassed of my mother’s high, nasal singing. And as an adult, as a writer, those moments of chaos came to me in waves. There was no way to escape them. They are a part of my DNA.
In conversation with Kartik Chauhan for HarperBroadcast
About the Book - The Woman Who Climbed Trees
The Great Nepali Novel is here! - PRAJWAL PARAJULYMagnificent ... If you have loved and wondered why, you will want to read this book. - JERRY PINTOMeena is fourteen years old when her parents marry her to Manmohan, a twenty-one-year-old…
About the Author - Smriti Ravindra
Smriti Ravindra is a Nepali-Indian writer. She is a Fulbright scholar and holds an MFA in creative writing from North Carolina State University. Her fiction and journalism have been published globally including the US, India, and Nepal. The Woman Who…
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