Lives of Women in Karnali

The Perfect Essay

By JOHN KAAG

MAY 5, 2014, 8:20 PM

Looking back on too many years of education, I can identify one truly impossible teacher. She cared about me, and my intellectual life, even when I didn’t. Her expectations were high — impossibly so. She was an English teacher. She was also my mother.

When good students turn in an essay, they dream of their instructor returning it to them in exactly the same condition, save for a single word added in the margin of the final page: “Flawless.” This dream came true for me one afternoon in the ninth grade. Of course, I’d heard that genius could show itself at an early age, so I was only slightly taken aback that I had achieved perfection at the tender age of 14. Obviously, I did what any professional writer would do; I hurried off to spread the good news. I didn’t get very far. The first person I told was my mother.

My mother, who is just shy of five feet tall, is normally incredibly soft-spoken, but on the rare occasion when she got angry, she was terrifying. I’m not sure if she was more upset by my hubris or by the fact that my English teacher had let my ego get so out of hand. In any event, my mother and her red pen showed me how deeply flawed a flawless essay could be. At the time, I’m sure she thought she was teaching me about mechanics, transitions, structure, style and voice. But what I learned, and what stuck with me through my time teaching writing at Harvard, was a deeper lesson about the nature of creative criticism.

First off, it hurts. Genuine criticism, the type that leaves an indelible mark on you as a writer, also leaves an existential imprint on you as a person. I’ve heard people say that a writer should never take criticism personally. I say that we should never listen to these people.

Criticism, at its best, is deeply personal, and gets to the heart of why we write the way we do. Perhaps you’re a narcissist who secretly resents your audience. Or an elitist who expects herculean feats of your reader. Or a know-it-all who can’t admit that stylistic repetition is sometimes annoying redundancy. Or a wallflower who hides behind sparklingly meaningless modifiers. Or an affirmation junkie who’s the first to brag about a flawless essay.

Unfortunately, as my mother explained, you can be all of these things at once.

Her red pen had made something painfully clear. To become a better writer, I first had to become a better person. Well before I ever read it, I came to sense the meaning of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” And I faced the disturbing suggestion that my song was no good.

The intimate nature of genuine criticism implies something about who is able to give it, namely, someone who knows you well enough to show you how your psychic life is getting in the way of good writing. Conveniently, they’re also the people who care enough to see you through the traumatic aftermath of this realization. For me the aftermath took the form of my first, and I hope only, encounter with writer’s block.

It lasted three years.

Franz Kafka once said: “Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.” My mother’s criticism had shown me that Kafka is right about the cold abyss, and when you make the introspective descent that writing requires you’re not always pleased by what you find. But, in the years that followed, her sustained tutelage suggested that Kafka might be wrong about the solitude. I was lucky enough to find a critic and teacher who was willing to make the journey of writing with me. “It’s a thing of no great difficulty,” according to Plutarch, “to raise objections against another man’s oration, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome.” I’m sure I wrote essays in the later years of high school without my mother’s guidance, but I can’t recall them. What I remember, however, is how she took up the “extremely troublesome” work of ongoing criticism.

There are two ways to interpret Plutarch when he suggests that a critic should be able to produce “a better in its place.” In a straightforward sense, he could mean that a critic must be more talented than the artist she critiques. My mother was well covered on this count. (She denies it, but she’s still a much, much better writer than I am.) But perhaps Plutarch is suggesting something slightly different, something a bit closer to Cicero’s claim that one should “criticize by creation, not by finding fault.” Genuine criticism creates a precious opening for an author to become better on his own terms — a process that’s often excruciating, but also almost always meaningful.

My mother said she would help me with my writing, but first I had to help myself. For each assignment, I was to write the best essay I could. Real criticism isn’t meant to find obvious mistakes, so if she found any — the type I could have found on my own — I had to start from scratch. From scratch. Once the essay was “flawless,” she would take an evening to walk me through my errors. That was when true criticism, the type that changed me as a person, began.

She chided me as a pseudo-sophisticate when I included obscure references and professional jargon. She had no patience for brilliant but useless extended metaphors. “Writers can’t bluff their way through ignorance.” That was news to me — I’d need to find another way to structure my daily existence. She trimmed back my flowery language, drew lines through my exclamation marks and argued for the value of understatement. “John,” she almost whispered. I leaned in to hear her: “I can’t hear you when you shout at me.” So I stopped shouting and bluffing, and slowly my writing improved.

Somewhere along the way I set aside my hopes of writing that flawless essay. But perhaps I missed something important in my mother’s lessons about creativity and perfection. Perhaps the point of writing the flawless essay was not to give up, but to never willingly finish. Whitman repeatedly reworked “Song of Myself” between 1855 and 1891. Repeatedly. We do our absolute best with a piece of writing, and come as close as we can to the ideal. And, for the time being, we settle. In critique, however, we are forced to depart, to give up the perfection we thought we had achieved for the chance of being even a little bit better. This is the lesson I took from my mother: If perfection were possible, it wouldn’t be motivating.

( John Kaag is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and former visiting assistant professor of expository writing at Harvard. He is the author of the forthcoming book “Finding Westwind: A Story of American Philosophy.” And yes, Becky Griffith Kaag, his mother and a former high school English teacher, took her editing pen to this essay. )

(cited : http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/05/the-perfect-essay/?ref=opinion)

Women in Nepal Suffer Monthly Ostracization

 JUNE 14, 

By ALLYN GAESTEL

ACHHAM, Nepal — Next to an abandoned stable now used to store firewood; a reluctant young mother crouched to pass through a tiny door into a dark, musty room. Barely looking at her baby, she glanced around the mud walls at the place she was raped. It was not strange for her to be in this space, haunted as it was with violent memories, because she still sleeps here each month when she is menstruating.

Chaupadi is the ritual isolation of menstruating women. It is a tradition practiced in Achham, a district in the remote Far Western region of Nepal. Each month, women sleep outside their homes in sheds called “goths,” in stables or in caves. They are deemed impure and treated as untouchable. They eat separately from their families, cannot enter their homes and often have to wash at a separate tap.

The practice has roots in Hinduism, though many scholars in Kathmandu, the capital, consider chaupadi a bastardization of the Vedic precept that women sleep apart from their husbands during menstruation. But in Achham the majority of women still practice this monthly separation.

Communities believe that to break the tradition would bring devastating bad luck: crops would fail, animals would die, snakes would fall from the ceiling. The imagined consequences are so dire that few dare to test stopping, even when the practice brings deadly consequences. Women have died from asphyxiation or burned to death when they built fires in the cramped sheds to shield from the Himalayan winter. Others have suffered rape and deadly snakebites and jackal attacks.

It takes two days to drive to Achham from Kathmandu, and most people don’t bother. The impoverished district is better known for sending migrants south to India than for drawing more cosmopolitan Nepalis in. It is in this isolation that the chaupadi practice became entrenched.

The practice has gained some national attention and is widely denounced by women’s rights activists. In 2005, the Supreme Court of Nepal deemed the practice illegal, but the distant court decision has had little impact on the daily lives of women in Achham.

More influential has been the slow spread of awareness that comes with increased connectivity. The construction of roads and the implementation of solar power in remote villages have led to the slow permeation of televisions and cellphones that offer a window into other worlds where chaupadi is not taken for granted.

Countless organizations have also campaigned against the practice through radio shows, awareness campaigns in schools and town meetings, and by declaring villages chaupadi free.

But social change is plodding because faith in the tradition runs deep. In only a few villages have women started sleeping inside when they are menstruating, but in many villages there is a growing discussion about the monthly ostracization. Some girls who hear messages in school want to quit the tradition but are restricted by more conservative parents. Some families stopped the practice, but when bad luck followed, it reignited their faith in the old ways.

And some, like the young mother who was raped, cannot imagine life without it. “Things are done according to tradition here,” she said.

If she has a daughter, she said, “I won’t do anything different — I’ll send her to the goth.”

http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/women-in-nepal-suffer-monthly-ostracization/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0