Refusing to Look Away: Notes on Writing Feminist Characters

craft lecture + esim fundraiser

Hi all! Last month I had the pleasure of facilitating a workshop on writing feminist fiction for the Lums Young Writers Workshop. It was fantastic to meet so many brilliant emerging feminist writers and to engage with their work. We read Nawaal El Sadaawi’s Woman at Point Zero, debated whether or not to make our feminist work more palatable to general audiences, discussed the sites of street and home in feminist fiction, and recommended many great books to one another. I came away from the experience feeling rejuvenated and affirmed. The kids are alright!

The facilitators of the 2024 LYWW have also released a statement against the war on Gaza and are organizing a fundraiser for esims. Please read our statement here and buy an esim for Gaza today via Connecting Humanity

As part of the workshop, each facilitator delivered a public lecture on craft. You can read mine below.

Refusing to Look Away: Notes on Writing Feminist Characters

In this craft lecture we will consider how to write and develop nuanced and multifaceted characters that resist patriarchy in their everyday lives. Make no mistake, even if you are not a feminist the subject of this lecture still very much concerns you. This lecture, maybe I should call it an essay if I’m being perfectly honest, is aimed towards anyone who wishes to write characters that question the unnerving conditions of the world that we are contending with today.

Before we turn to the question of how to craft feminist characters, I would like to unpack a character that we encounter often in the landscape of Pakistani media – which is the empowered woman. One does not have to venture too far to run into this empowered woman – she features on countless billboards across the country, in ads for Glow & Lovely, not-so-long-ago known as Fair & Lovely, in ads for Tapal tea, laundry detergent, Lux soap, and, of course, the many design houses that peddle lawn, luxury pret, ready to wear, and bridal collections. The empowered woman also features in the other most popular form of women-centric storytelling in Pakistan - the drama serial. Coming back to billboards, let’s take a closer look at these depictions of empowered women tenderly rubbing product onto their faces before going to play cricket in the sun, or coming home from a long day of work to make a quick and easy cup of tea in a Tapal-red mug for their husbands.

It is instructive for writers to study the characterization of the empowered woman – in other words how this character is formulated - so as to be able to confront the messaging of the story she is a part of. Many writers feel uneasy about explicitly stating what stories are trying to do. There is an oft repeated claim that literature is subjective because readers will inevitably take their own meanings from stories. A writer, however, does not write for readers. To my mind, literature is not an apolitical project through which one can be brought towards meaningless abstractions such as ‘What it means to be human’ or how stories can ‘increase empathy’ and illuminate the lives of ‘others.’ Writing is an inquiry into the world we live in, and this inquiry is as likely to be regressive as it is to be progressive. In the world of advertising, for example, storytelling is a tool that is used to further the hold of capitalism over society. The empowered woman is a device within that larger story in which women are compelled to purchase their empowerment.  For writers to first be able to distinguish between stories of empowered women and feminist narratives is essential if we are then to write against the regressive projects that stories of empowered women sit alongside, and also if we are to create narratives that participate in the building of progressive futures.

Now, onto the question of how to go about distinguishing between stories of empowered women and feminist narratives. Firstly, are stories of empowered women – women who fight to go to school, take up either vocational jobs such as teaching or nursing, or wish to climb the corporate ladder, women who choose their partners in marriage, albeit always respectable men either from the same social class as theirs or above, women who sometimes wear ‘Western’ clothing, play sports, or are a little darker or fatter than what is thought to be conventionally attractive –are these stories necessarily in opposition to feminism? It is a fact that these stories hint towards patriarchy by railing against the much more neutral term ‘gender inequality.’ In many of these stories about empowered women, men are often portrayed as the problem. The parochial mindset of society is also openly disapproved of, and the audience is encouraged to sympathize with women who cannot make their own choices due to ‘Loag kya kahein gaye.’ You could say there is some common feeling then between feminist sentiments and narratives about empowered women. However, common feeling is simply not good enough. We are here today to note where the two sharply diverge. Stories of empowered women portray women as simply being victims of gender inequality. The underlying message being that if women work hard and overcome their personal obstacles, they may stand shoulder to shoulder with men. In doing so, these stories focus on individual narratives of women who often go on to perpetuate the same cycles of inequality, as opposed to seeing patriarchy as a structural and material problem that affects everyone.  

Let’s use an example here to illustrate. In Nayab, a 2024 Pakistani sports film, Yumna Zaidi plays a feisty and ambitious girl who wishes to become a cricketer. Her elder brother supports her, persuading their parents to let her play and enrolling her in a cricket academy. Going after what she wants marks Nayab as an empowered woman. She doesn’t care about getting tan while playing in the sun, or even about how her chosen career will affect her marriage prospects. So, what makes this movie antithetical to feminist storytelling? Our answer lies in the movie’s articulation of how women should navigate a) the streets and b) the home. In a scene the girls on the cricket team decide to sneak out of their hostel and play a late-night game of cricket on the streets. What could have been a moment of feminist resistance is compromised by the decision to feature the girls riding on bikes waving Pakistani flags as they embark upon their nighttime adventure. Working class people sit on the side of the road and proudly brandish flags as well. A roadside artist draws a picture of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. The girls play cricket in front of a national monument. Everyone is wearing green and white. It is interesting to witness this juxtaposition. Middle class women in Pakistan have been confined to the home and private spaces due to state sanctioned patriarchy – a lack of public transport and city planning, sure, but also the maintenance of caste and class endogamy, concerted fearmongering against working class men, and of course the respectability politics that keeps women off the streets lest they be labelled women of the streets, in other words women that the state refuses to protect. Hence, the state is the reason that middle class women do not traverse the streets at night. Nayab, however, gives us a different narrative – one in which women are indebted to the Pakistani state for allowing them to come out into public space, riding motorbikes and playing cricket on the streets at night, just so long as they remain respectable and do not question the state’s authority.

still from Nayab

Now, let’s take a look at the film’s approach to the role of women in the home. According to the intertwined forces of patriarchy and capitalism that shape our everyday lives, women must maintain the home. They might be allowed to have desires outside the home, but the home remains sacrosanct. At the beginning of the film, Nayab’s brother and his wife live with Nayab and her parents in a too small Karachi apartment. Nayab’s sister-in-law Sadia is perpetually burdened with domestic responsibilities. When she persuades her husband to let them move out of his parent’s house, the ensuing montage is replete with grief and hurt. Sadia is cast as an evil homewrecker who has torn her husband away from his family. In the film’s portrayal of Sadia, we can clearly see the limits of its feminist politics. Though she is overworked and dissatisfied, Sadia is not permitted to reject the duties that patriarchy dictates to her. In fact, her questioning of the home is enough to remake her into an antagonist.

Nayab is a recent example, but there are countless others. Perhaps we may even come to see certain trends in popular culture not as serendipitous but purposeful, such as why Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is widely regarded as a classic in Pakistan, such as the gradual erasure of feminist writers Fahmida Riaz, Qurutulain Hyder, and Ismat Chughtai due to their works never being taught in schools or adapted for television, while Nazeer Ahmed’s Mirat Ul Uroos has been taught and adapted a hundred times over, such as the only acceptable narrative of sex workers being of the Pakeezah variety – featuring the courtesan with a heart of gold. How fitting that in 2024, the main character of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Heeramandi, Alamzeb, too does not wish to be a courtesan but a poet who writes romantic verse. Her desire to fall in love is what empowers her to change her situation. Indeed, the empowered woman is an archetype that has created a genre of its own. Within this genre, the resolutions are always neat, everyone is happy in the end, everyone finds the promise of fulfilment within the family unit and gains the approval of society. Empowered women strike patriarchal bargains and pass off their subsequent acceptance as a result of simply having worked hard. Within feminist narratives, however, these easy and convenient resolutions are simply impossible.

Alright, let’s turn now towards more promising texts. The title of this lecture, ‘refusing to look away’ comes from the nonfiction work ‘Of Cities and Women’ by feminist artist and writer, Etel Adnan. The full quote has influenced much of my own thinking about the responsibilities of writers who are committed to progressive ideals and is as follows –

“I know that seeking political and philosophical notions in the street is like trying to construct a barrier to hold back the ocean, but I refuse to look away.”

Coming back to the streets for the briefest of moments, as we have seen in the example of Nayab, the streets can tell us a lot about the politics that informs a work of art. Women can exist on the street as long as they are performing state approved activities such as playing cricket and contributing to the national pride in some way. Observing who is on the streets, how, and why is key to telling feminist stories because the patriarchal distinction between good and bad women springs from the question of what kinds of women are out on the streets and what kinds of women maintain the home.

I want to devote more time, however, to the second part of the quote in which Adnan, despite knowing that in our current articulation of the streets liberation is impossible, still refuses to look away. Adnan thus implies that it is the task of a writer to insist on a better world for us all. But this is a lecture about writing and developing feminist characters, not so much about the ethos of writing although of course the two are interlinked. With that, I wish to expand upon this idea of refusal that Adnan has brought forward. Unlike the empowered woman, successful feminist characters embody a politics of refusal. They refuse to accept the manufactured frontiers between home and street. In doing so, they reject the paternalism of the state and the maneuverings of capitalism just as much as they question the patriarchs of their homes.

Let us quickly tackle a question that many of you may be wondering about and something I clarify often when I teach writing. Writing feminist characters does not necessarily mean writing characters that wear ‘Yes, I am a feminist’ badges and roam around with copies of Angela Davis’s memoir. Although there is always space for such characters, and I admittedly am the sort of reader that greatly enjoys them. Feminist characters do not necessarily have to identify as feminists, just as many women and gender non-conforming people who resist patriarchy also do not identify as feminists. Writing feminist characters means to write characters that do not pledge allegiance to the intertwined forces of patriarchy, capitalism and imperialism. Feminism is often sold to us as an identity, but feminism can also be an articulation of refusal, a place of opposition, a grassroots action, or a radical intervention.

This week I’m teaching Nawaal El Sadaawi’s seminal novel, Woman at Point Zero. Firdaus, a sex worker and the protagonist of the novel, has been sentenced to death for killing her pimp. Let’s look at a scene from the novel, from around the time where Firdaus has made her way up from being a working-class sex worker to a highly sought after escort.

I realized I was not nearly as free as I had hitherto imagined myself to be. I was nothing but a body machine working day and night so that a number of men belonging to different professions could become immensely rich at my expense. One day I said to myself,

“I can’t go on like this.”

I packed my papers in a small bag and got ready to leave, but suddenly my pimp appeared in front of me.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“I’m going to look for work. I still have my secondary school certificate.”

“And who said that you’re not working?”

“I want to choose the work I’m going to do.”

“Who says anybody in this world chooses the work they’re going to do.”

“I don’t want to be anyone’s slave.”

“And who says there is anyone who is not somebody’s slave? There are only two categories of people, Firdaus, masters, and slaves.”

I tried to slip through the door, but he pushed me back and shut it. I looked him in the eye and said, “I intend to leave.”

He stared back at me. I heard him mutter, “You will never leave.”

I continued to look straight at him without blinking. I knew I hated him as only a woman can hate a man, as only a slave can hate his master. I saw from the expression in his eyes that he feared me as only a master can fear his slave, as only a man can fear a woman.

In this passage, El Sadaawi’s Firdaus realizes that bargaining with patriarchy will never afford her the freedom she so desires. Moreover, she understands that her pimp is scared of the possibility that she will refuse to obey him. Eventually, Firdaus kills her pimp, thus breaking the cycle of exploitation that she is trapped in. She is told she will be pardoned if she admits to being guilty, but refuses. In Firdaus, El Sadaawi has crafted a character that, unlike the character of the empowered woman, rejects the promise of liberation on the terms that patriarchy, capitalism and the state have set for her– knowing that this is not true freedom.

Let’s look at another example – this time from Toni Morrison’s Sula aka the best friendship novel you will ever read. Nel and Sula are childhood best friends, two black girls living in the American south in 1965. Nel is obedient and well mannered, Sula is rebellious, sexually adventurous and unafraid of everything. The two go on to lead very different lives and grow apart. Isn’t that always the way? Haven’t all women lost a loved one as a result of the choice they are forced to make between home and street? Towards the end of the novel, Sula becomes very sick and Nel visits her former best friend. Sula says to Nel:

“You think I don’t know what your life is like just because I ain’t living it? I know what every colored woman in this country is doing.”

“What’s that?” (Nel says to Sula)

“Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.”

“Really? What have you got to show for it?”

“Show? To who? Girl I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me.

Lonely, ain’t it?”

“Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A secondhand lonely.”

I realize that both these examples are about death and women dying and I’m not so sure what that says about me and the sort of literature that speaks to me. All I know is that in enacting a politics of refusal, feminist characters remind us that, to quote feminist geographer, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “it’s people who make history, but not under conditions of our own choosing.” Firdaus knows this. Sula knows this. They are aware of the importance of their refusal and so, as they live by it, they also die by it.

Now of course, women are the main characters in these stories. But what about stories in which women are less prominent? Is their relegation to the sidelines of a work of art enough of a reason for them to be two dimensional? I do not wish to be too prescriptive, even though I have spent the past 20 or so minutes trying to convince you to write characters in a very particular kind of way. Instead, I would like to offer a final example, in the character of Joan Pinto, from the excellent movie Albert Pinto Ko Ghussa Kyun Aata Hai. Albert Pinto is the protagonist of the movie, a young working-class mechanic from Bombay who believes that if he works hard and maintains connections with the rich people whose cars he fixes he will one day himself become rich and powerful. His sister, Joan, however, is not so delusional. She supports the mill workers strike that carries on in the background of the movie. Joan also walks with a limp, the origin of which is unexplained in the film – something I find very refreshing as the lack of context implies that Joan is not meant to be seen as a passive victim of circumstance. This scene that I’m quoting from, in which a rich, lecherous customer approaches her at the sari shop she works at, is one of the few in which she is the center of the scene.

“I need to buy a sari for my sister. It’s her birthday. Can you select a sari for me? You look just like my sister, actually come to think of it you are more beautiful than her.”

(Joan is sitting behind the counter. She rolls her eyes and selects a sari.) “Here is a suitable sari for your sister.”

“Yes, this is perfect. The exact color I wanted. Will you do me another favour?”

“What?”

“It’s only a small thing. Will you try on this sari for me? I want to see how beautiful my sister will look.” (Gets up and puts the pallu around Joan’s shoulder. She leans away from his touch)

Joan snatches the sari away and gets up angrily, “I’ll try it on to show you.”

(She walks around the counter, her body now in full view, and begins to pace up and down the shop in front of the man.)

“I’m just like your sister, aren’t I?”

(She goads the man, continuing to pace up and down and watching him as he realizes that she has a permanent limp.)

“And your sister is just like me, isn’t she? Exactly like me?”

Joan Pinto, Albert Pinto Ko Ghussa Kyun Aata Hai (1980)

Joan could have remained behind the counter and enjoyed the attentions of the man. If she had she would have received no judgement from me. After all, in a patriarchal world, the attention of a man is what women are told to relentlessly chase after. Instead, Joan chooses to decline what has been pushed onto her as the most valuable commodity for a single woman with few prospects. In a subtle but powerful move, she rejects her own objectification while also showing the man how he has essentially played himself. She is clearly not the woman he thought she was.

To end, I will admit – I have no blueprint to impart to you. What I will do is caution you against one last thing, and that is to not bow to the pressure of writing perfectly progressive or feminist characters. Not only are perfect characters boring, but they are also besides the point. Just as there is no such thing as an ideal feminist praxis, there is no such thing as an ideal feminist or feminist figure. We come into feminist struggle with our weaknesses, our blind spots, and all our baggage.  It is the struggle that teaches us and changes us immeasurably. We are never the same again. Allow your characters their imperfections, allow them the joy of change as they navigate the world you have built around them, allow them their anger. I say allow, even though I hate that word. It reminds me too much of my own young life, growing up, as many girls do, with any hope of my survival hinging upon allowance. Let me try again. Celebrate and honor the anger of your characters. Do not dismiss or reduce the circumstances of their lives by writing stories in which they are somehow magically liberated by capitalism and patriarchy. Think of Joan Pinto, standing in front of the man who thought he could claim her and steadily meeting his gaze. Think of Joan Pinto, refusing to look away. Thank you.