Page 230 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

Grindmill Songs 205

a capacity of effective sharing that is not only superior to conceptual
articulations but is altogether of a different nature:

1. Insignificance, distress and dereliction qualify female existence.
Such concepts as lack of status, gender discrimination and stig-
matization abstractly convey the same import though with less
communicative impact:

You may laugh and laugh again great delusion your laughter
The life of a woman is fake, men bear no scars.
A father says: a boy is as good as gold
A mother says: a girl’s is a worthless life.
To be born a daughter to parents is to be born a whore
How’s the father to blame? It’s the mother’s womb that produces
her.
I was born a woman, what way out can I find?
I am not born a man, to go and find a job.

2. The lack of identity and recognition as a human entity happens
to be bitterly felt when at the time of getting married a woman
feels considered by men no more than an item with exchange
value. A woman is handled as a commodity:

The father says: ‘My child is a kid-goat I have raised.
I’m going to the marketplace to sell you.’
A father gave over his daughter and took a hundred rupees
The beautiful cow was tied up at the door of the butcher’s house.
In the crowded marketplace, the father and son, that pair
They didn’t place the slightest value on my daughter.

3. The lack of authority is most severely resented when others,
male or female, decide upon her fate with no consideration for
her opinion. A woman is not meant for autonomy. Her status is
instrumental to the ends of others. She is an object:

As a girl returns to her in-laws: ‘I handed you over, woman,
I am no longer answerable for your destiny.’