“It is a very serious thing to be a funny woman.”

— Frances Miriam Berry Whitcher

Is literature gendered? Are some subjects gender-defined, particularly the modi operandi, some specific use of language and its tone, or even a dissimilar, at times, divergent, weltanschauung? Are then literary genres gender-specific? Why, after all, is a considerable contribution by women available in some genres and not in others? Regarding women’s overall meagre literary production, Virginia Woolf’s answer is economic dependence. Well, this might be one of the various reasons. But, once the barrier of financial restraints is removed, then?

Women have a valuable role in literature and many are already enjoying secure positions in various genres. But, despite all their productivity, women writers are generally and primarily assigned only a subordinate place and a little space, if they are included at all in the literary canon. The reasons for this bias or neglect might be traced to the centuries-long suppression by the system and exclusion of women from the intellectual sphere of human existence.

Women writers have excelled in fiction and found themselves not only on par with their male colleagues in the genre but, in some instances, far ahead of them. Aag Ka Darya, Qurratul Ain Hyder’s magnum opus, was proclaimed by the distinguished Pakistani critic Jilani Kamran the “first Pakistan novel.” Hyder is considered by many, including Shams-ur Rahman Faruqi, at the top of the hierarchy of all fiction writers that appeared in post-Independence Urdu literature – regardless of gender. The state and status of women poets, despite an overwhelmingly large bulk of contributions, are not so desirable, even though we have, in the meantime, a luminous line of brilliant names in the genre. Literary criticism – we may include here literary research as well – is another branch where the presence of women is, with the sole exception of Mumtaz Shirin, almost next to nothing, even though over the years, a considerable number of women have entered the academia, especially in the wake of the mushrooming growth of private universities in the country and their resultant churning-out of MPhil and PhD scholars. There are a lot of them, and they are actively writing and bringing out the fruits of their endeavours, which are mostly, sadly, to no avail but to themselves.

Our women do not turn to humour because they are discouraged from laughing. They do not laugh; they are laughed at and derided by male humourists in prose and poetry.

Our women’s engagement in the comic vision, i.e., in the humour, is almost non-existent – at least in quantitative terms. One can argue that humour per se occupies a marginal place in the larger scheme of human discourse, just like a pinch of salt in the whole meal – as an Arabic proverb aptly suggests. True. But, after all, we have a long and rich tradition of humour in our literature – in poetry as well as in prose. Why is there no woman practitioner of humour of some standing in our literature?

Laughter, or for that matter, its abbreviated form, smile, generally expresses pleasure and satisfaction. But it has myriad connotations: it could, for example, indicate embarrassment or shame or be a means of defence. However, it generally denotes the positive and spontaneous emotion of happiness. In our socio-cultural set-up, in our social history, mothers rebuke their chuckling teenage daughters by asking them rhetorically: why are you laughing like a mare? The analogy of a girlish giggle to that of a snort evinced by an equine female is as hard to establish as it is ludicrous to think about it and to interpret, except that both acts are considered inappropriate and unbecoming, something off-key. The laughter of a woman, especially that of a young, unmarried girl, is taken as something excessive and transgressive. If Medusa, in Greek mythology, is portrayed as a demon for her laugh, Draupadi, in our part of the world, is punished by disrobing for laughing at Duryodhan. Thus, the ground of the silence of female comic voices – the silenced female voices – is not to be seen in the female psyche but in the socio-cultural configurations with which we are surrounded. In our system, almost no agency is available to women in the vital decisions of their lives.

An objection may be raised here: why, then, are our women writers quite expressive in poetry; there they have, in some instances, their subject positions too? But, examining this question closely, one finds that most of them are writing, barring the grammatical gender, not differently from their male colleagues. And, when in some places some of them turn to the ‘women question’, it is, in most cases, a depiction of not more than men-pleasing femininity. Indeed, quite a negligible number assert their subjectivity and try to subvert patriarchal normativity.

Writing humour and practising literary criticism are two literary enterprises that require authority as well as the ability to wield it. Both vocations are essentially an exercise in criticism, which is to be taken forcefully, sometimes bitingly. Other undertakings, like poetry and fiction, do it more subtly and suggestively, if they do it at all. As for writing humour, our women do not turn to it because they are discouraged from laughing. They do not laugh; they are laughed at and derided by male humourists in prose and poetry.

The writer is a Pakistan-born and Austria-based poet in Urdu and English. He teaches South Asian literature and culture at Vienna University.