Purple Prose (26 page)

Today in the twenty-first century, there's room for everyone. IWD is a global phenomenon, albeit a rather commercialised Remembrance Day laden with lunches, speeches and twenty-four hour bonhomie. Modern histories now include Clara. I am content – Clara has emerged from ‘exile'.

Non-conformity and defiance are traits that fascinate me perhaps more than they should. I associate them with history, politics, literature – and the wonderful world of cinema. I've been a movie buff practically all my life and used to wag grade seven primary school to sneak into picture shows (globite case in hand) and gaze enraptured at the big screen and the big stars. My parents
and teachers never found out and of course I forged my mother's signature on notes to the teacher, claiming, ‘poor Hanifa wasn't well yesterday …' Sometimes I wonder if I'd not ‘descended' into writing non-fiction, might I have written the odd (perhaps very odd!) screenplay? How do you define a feminist movie in the twenty-first century?
Thelma and Louise, The Colour Purple –
so many contenders – surely not ‘chick flicks' – I hope not.

A screenplay about Clara that oozed box office appeal? Somehow I doubt it. Yet the material is all there even if the audience isn't! The closing scenes all based on a day in August 1932 … not fiction but fact.

Physically frail, seventy-five-year-old Clara travels 1,000 miles by train from Moscow (where she now lives) to Berlin to claim her right, as the Reichstag oldest member, to open Parliament. Leaning on her walking stick, she denounces her old enemy, Paul von Hindenburg, President of the Weimar Republic. On that day SS troops wait outside shouting battle cries, demonstrating what is yet to come. A year later the way is clear for Hitler. Clara dies that same year.

Wake up! Time for a reality check! Even if Clara was played by the ever-imperious Dame Maggie Smith, looking down her nose, ready to box ears and thump anyone in her way with a black ebony-handled walking stick, it would be a flop. Sixty or so years after the end of McCarthyism and the Un-American Activities Committee, I somehow doubt that Hollywood is ready for Lenin's voice-over at the end.

‘The German Communists have only one good man and that is a woman: Clara Zetkin.'

Music swells … Camera fades … credits run – and there's my name on the list. Curtain descends.

The road to purple was a long and winding road with rest stops along the way. Every few years, for a month or so, I left Germany and returned to my hometown Perth. To my surprise I found that hems were longer, a new ‘ism' called ‘multiculturalism' was hailed as a prestigious government policy and, following the end of the Vietnam War, South Vietnamese refugees (dubbed ‘boat people') were settling in, plus – lo and behold – some women were keeping their maiden names after marriage. And long overdue changes in some aspects of Aboriginal affairs had begun – Land Rights in 1976. The Deaths in Custody Commission and the Australian Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation were yet to come.

On each visit I noticed the exciting development of the second wave of Australian feminists. These were heady times; I read one feminist book after the other …: I fell in love with Betty Friedan's
The Feminine Mystique,
Germaine Greer's
The Female Eunuch,
Anne Summer's
Damned Whores and God's Police,
Marilyn French and a host of others. I finally returned home for good in late 1979 and nearly drowned in the new wave of purple. Wearing purple became a statement, but the colour didn't move me emotionally. I ticked the box but worried that I was becoming an ‘absentee feminist', just as I had once been an absentee Australian.

Dale Spender used to say, ‘If someone says, “Oh, I'm not a feminist,” I ask, “Why? What's your problem?” Spender, in the 1980s, began wearing purple in recognition of the early suffragettes and this rich colour now became ‘ours'. But as I have already confessed, that is not why I befriended purple. In the 80s, Reclaim the Night marches and the colour purple took off with a vengeance. I joined the marches but not the organisations for two reasons: firstly, I felt Australian – I always had but saw no traces of me in these new organisations; secondly my energy and commitment was focused on the nascent migrant workers' movement and the emergence of ethnic communities' councils around Australia supporting the
new policy of multiculturalism, which in those days was not a ‘dirty' word. Multiculturalism to me meant more than applauding culinary exotica and smiling on Harmony Days. Harmony has never been one of my strengths; as a writer I am more interested in clarifying conflict. I smell conflict and I see red!

After a stimulating and unsteady career in the public service in the government bureaus of multiculturalism, equal opportunity and human rights, I grew weary of my
Yes Minister
style reports written in turgid prose that dulled the senses and should have led to my arrest for murdering the English language. Finally, I handed in my public service uniform of cream suits with padded shoulders, stocking tights and mini-heels and turned to full-time writing about people who were reflections of me and my family – my tribe in the good times – and the bad.

By the mid-1990s there were approximately 350,000 Muslims in Australia – the White Australia Policy was over. The vast majority of Australians looked at Muslims with indifference – the term ‘Islamophobia' was not yet a part of Australian mainstream language. September 11, the Bali bombings, and other murderous outrages committed in the name of Islam would one day change this. Being ignored but nevertheless getting on with your life wasn't possible any more – mindsets hardened. Muslims became trapped in an age of circling the wagons, forced, or ‘seduced' into constantly defending Islam. I took another way out: writing non-religious books about Muslims as people who mowed their lawns (or didn't), worried about losing weight or paying the mortgage, who fell in and out of love or told their kids bedtime stories.

On one of my many research trips to Bangladesh for my book
Broken Bangles,
I discovered so many reflections of myself that I grew dizzy. I felt completely at ease with the proliferation of women's groups run by sari-clad NGO workers; we adopted one another. They introduced me to a remarkable Bangladeshi feminist
from the past, unknown to Western feminists – just like Clara – and another woman to add to my collection of feminists from other cultures and ideologies.

Begum Rokeya Hossain, more than a hundred years ago, created her own utopian vision in her 1905 satire
Sultana's Dream.
In a country called Ladyland women run the country: women are the politicians, the scientists, the soldiers and the traders. Where are the men? In Ladyland it's the men who languish on soft couches inside – the harem – in purdah – in total social isolation. Rokeya's husband, an unusually progressive man for the times, remarked on reading her story, ‘What a splendid revenge!' Rokeya wrote her satire ten years before Charlotte Perkins Gilman's famous work,
Herland,
in 1915
.

Three years ago, inspired by Rokeya's writing, and together with a small core group of Australian Muslim women, I began an online magazine written and produced by Australian Muslim feminists called
Sultana's Dream
.
⁴

The story of women's struggle for equality belongs to no single feminist nor to any one organization but to the collective efforts of all who care about human rights.

Gloria Steinem

I have always admired disobedient women in history, literature and real life. There is something about being a disobedient woman that is intoxicating and liberating. Clara Z., Rosa Luxemburg, Begum Rokeya, Emmeline Pankhurst and the English suffragettes, the New York garment workers, Simone de Beauvoir, Scheherazade, Madame Bovary, Marie Curie, Miles Franklin, Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, Lena Horne, Nina Simone, Ingrid Bergman, Katharine Susannah Prichard. Disobedient women in real life, literature and on the screen, joined by a chorus of nameless, faceless women around the world who have rallied, marched,
shouted, refusing to surrender to prejudice and the social shackles of the period in which they lived. I thank them all.

The latter decades of the twentieth century marked the epicentre of my own feminism but, using the language of the times, I don't think being a ‘women's libber' ever meant being ‘cool' or ‘hip'. Neither was it ‘fashionable' in the nineteenth century; risky – yes; unpopular – yes. Women rallied, in spite of being ostracised, knowing they needed numbers to win the right to vote, own property and the rights that men took for granted.

And in the twenty-first century – where are we now? Is the era of female empowerment over? Julia Gillard, as Australia's first female prime minister, would have something to say on the subject.

Feminism has a PR problem – but then it always has. The mantra ‘No, I'm not a feminist, but …' I find tedious. Do we need a surge of celebrity feminists to make the ‘f' word functional once again or more Dale Spenders asking ‘Why not? What's your problem?' Reducing the number of weight loss articles in women's magazines, diluting recipes and trimming fashion promos is not going to happen. A petition banning the Kardashian family from social media and magazines may be doomed to failure – someone else just as embarrassingly puerile would step into the spotlight. Western women seem trapped between thinking they have it all, but knowing deep down that sexual harassment, discrimination, rape and family violence remain with us. Pay gaps between men and women today are no laughing matter – a woman earns less than eighty-two cents for every dollar a man earns.

I sometimes fantasise about having my own signature flag, my own identity icon, incorporating black, red and purple. Flying defiantly from my rooftop or (in more maudlin moments after an hour at the gym) draped over my coffin, my imagination plays with colours and what they mean to me. Perhaps it's just as well that I
write non-fiction, for any attempts at fiction could easily lurch into the horror genre.