Such Anais Journey!

I love being a woman. I am saying this today because on March 8 they celebrate womanhood in seminar rooms, in flag-holding ceremonies, in the streets, sometimes in the villages. They talk of reservation quotas, empowerment, education, hygiene, victimhood. All this is absolutely essential. But they don’t ask a woman whether she loves being a woman.

They don’t talk about souls crushed in the solitary confinement of shame; they don’t talk about life on the fringes of sanity where every yelp for help gets rewarded with a wired shock; they don’t talk about trail-blazers who have kicked up mud and in their awkward manner upset many an apple-cart; they don’t talk about spider women caught in their own webs; they don’t talk about the mazes the muddled find their way out of; they don’t talk about women with gypsy minds who are forced to follow milestones; they don’t talk about those who shed their skin and bare their raw flesh; they don’t talk about those whose lives get messed up and yet manage to pick up the debris and own up to it, their only possession.

They don’t talk about you and me, people less likely to leave a mark and more probably a few stains.

This is my small tribute to a woman who, along with my Nanima and mother, makes me love being a woman.

I can smell her on me, a faint whiff, and with every throb of the pulse her scent gets sharper. A woman stinging another woman. A woman drawing blood from another and therefore sustaining herself.

Anais ceased to be just another perfume when a friend told me, “You must read her. Especially you.” I did not understand the implication of the emphasis. Till I saw a photograph of Anais Nin. Just a touch of cleavage, like the shadow of a doubt, eyes downcast, the heavy lids weighed down by thoughts and emptiness, and the lips pursed like an angel contemplating sin.

And of course those words splashing forth like ocean sprays frothing behind a speed-boat. As she wrote, “Life only became real when I wrote about it.”

Was this what the “especially you” advice was designed for? Am I not guilty of sometimes living through words rather than merely using them? Or is it the other Anaisism, “If I had not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s” that I can relate to?

Is all this necessary? Why is it that we seek to identify with something even if our worlds are far removed and just a flicker of recognition charms us into believing that the waters we are seeing our image in have witnessed hundreds of others who have passed by and done the same?

I think some people have that quality to convince others not only about what they say but make believe that they themselves are what the person is saying.

Anais, a “mythomaniac”, was obviously successful on that score, although to admit to understanding her and, worse, feeling like her is not a very palatable thing. It may be all right to “create myself” in the struggle for “constructing a satisfactory persona for a self”, however self-indulgent it may seem. But, how many of us women can accept with a straight face the verdict of being the “Madonna of St. Clitoris” or the “Venus with an over-bite”? Anais could because it was while clothed in words that she stood most naked, the parchment shield of literature left her bare for the arrows to pierce through. But, then, she asked for it. “I am a writer. I would rather have been a courtesan.”

A creative friend recently told me something that shook me up. He said, “Every writer wants to be seduced, you are seeking attention when you write.” Perhaps it answers a need; it replaces the routine emotions one gets with something more palpably exciting. It goes beyond the tactile to gnaw at the innards.

In the case of Anais, her past was to set the tone for her future, as it is in most instances. As a child she was seduced by her father who photographed her nude. As she was to recall, “He always wanted me naked. All admiration came by way of the camera.” Such was the hold of the man on her life that it has been suggested she suffered from anorexia in adulthood because “only in the guise of a thin, girlish soubrette could Anais retain the slender form of the nude child whom Daddy loved to photograph.”

Was this her revenge, the classic self-destructive revenge where the person feels responsible for the wayward behaviour of others? At 30, of her own free will, she slept with her father. As one of her biographers has observed, “She not only became the bad girl her father desired, she became his double, a Don Juana.”

However, much earlier, after he had deserted the family when she was but a child, she started writing a letter to seduce him to return. This became part of a diary, 35,000 pages in 150 volumes. The first diary was not published until she was 63. It was described by Kate Millet as the “first real portrait of the artist as a woman.”

Despite her dependence on an older man, Henry Miller (“I…a sperm-filled woman am walking down the street loaded with the phrases Henry has given me”), she was in charge of her life. “Like Oscar Wilde, I put only my art in my work and my genius into my life…I play a thousand roles.”

Some narrow-minded, one-eyed commentators could not grasp the immensity of such a broad vision. A friend said of her, “She had to alter reality to suit her own view of the world.”

How I wish I could! Perhaps I do, for it lessens the conflict between desire and realisation, thought and action. Or, as Anais put it, “We write to create a world that is truer than the one before us. I am guilty of fabricating a world in which I can live.”

It was this constant need for change, to challenge it, that made her so self-sufficient even if not quite complete. What more can a person wish for than not to be betrayed by one’s own ideas?

Anais wanted that. I guess that’s what I want most.