Growing Strong
MOURNING b y
M i s b a h
A n s a r i
Art by Ellie Zheng I reminisce frantically penning down these lines last year at the funeral of my aunt. Women from the paternal side of my family are characterized by their widowhood, a case of uncanny marital fate, they say. When my aunt passed away last year, they said that she witnessed two demises—one her husband’s suicide and one her own. The two deaths built in her slowly and she died of a sudden breathless fit, my family suspects that her intestines burst due to the pressure of her death. Mourning is a wellpunctuated political act that dictates the grief of widows in hegemonic ways, thus, making the act of grief a highly dictated one.
empowering processes, but the transformative impact of loss is hardly planned. It is sudden, inalienable, and in the case of widows, forced. My aunt, just like me, a lover of the darkest lipsticks, fanciest hair clips and stitching the best clothes for herself, knew of happiness in her own life. She loved my uncle immensely, but in independence and comfortable isolation, however, people mixed their deaths. The way mourning is arbitrated for people who have lost their husbands makes us wonder: how is it that someone’s loss is so heavily mediated that the society decides what their mourning should look like? How does the transformation happen, and when does it stop? For widows, a husband’s death is less of a longitudinal change, but a short, tumultuous one followed by stagnancy. It is a declaration that your husband is dead, so now you give up all your worldly matters, move away from your family, and live in a stupor as governed.
Butler claims that perhaps mourning means “submitting” to a transformation, and it is worth questioning the intricacies of transformation concerning widowhood. The institution of marriage moulds women’s identities, and the hegemonic patriarchal system governs all the changes that take place in their lives in place. The position of widows in Transformations are otherwise Indian society perpetuates the 12
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adamant societal structures in controlling their bodies and identity. Nash (2013) grounds her argument about black love-politics in Affect theory, investigating how bodies interact with different emotional phenomena. The sexuality of widows is set in place by rigid norms to contain their high libidinal energy, and they are expected to lead a life of celibacy, utter modesty, or sex work, depending on their caste status (Ahmed-Ghosh, 2009). Apart from the erasure of identities, the sexuality of the lower caste is allowed as they are endowed with the labour of upholding the purity of the upper caste. The deployment of the sexuality of minorities is a way of controlling their image as sexually deviant and impure individuals, and this hierarchy is advertent in the lives of widows quite a lot. Their bodies interact with the vulnerable phenomena of longing and desire in hegemonically mediated emotions, for their sexuality is not their own. It is laboured, strewn, and empty. Butler elaborated on our bodies never being our own and
