notes

Frequently, I wonder if there is some undoing of the political in the understanding of this blog. It started off as wanting to be a radical form of writing for two women, trying to unravel some of the complexities in their understanding of Self and the World, sometime Love and the Family. The idea of anonymity also came from that space. We discovered soon that the anonymity of this space triggered a very different kind of writing and the political, sometimes brash voice that we hoped or foresaw did not happen at all. Instead the writing over time has become more quiet, more everyday. The World has become smaller, the Family fictional, the Love more difficult and written in hushed whispers and coded letters, the Self began to see autobiography as something entirely different.

With time we began to value this form of writing, perhaps appreciating that the anonymity is allowing for us to write the way we really want to and a more apparent political agenda seemed more forced. It has however rankled me from time to time that this space masks a little too ‘beautifully’ the various turmoils that is changing the Self in difficult ways. The periods of silence on the blog is usually when there is no sense of calm to transpose the writing into finding a nuance in some obvious political terms. What do I mean by this? I mean to say I don’t want to call Gender or Caste to explain how difficult it is to be with the  Family. Not because that is not what it is, but that popular writing has turned those terms into a miserably misunderstood, poorly articulated sloganeering which has done a lot more harm than good.  Yet, when this translates into easy conversation with a man which becomes my only space for discourse it makes me uncomfortable.

Blogs as autobiographical writing has so much potential in allowing a conversation with the Self. What then am I undoing with this beautiful looking blog? I wonder if its aesthetics, which is where we thought the political would be apparent is not so much dialectical as it is convenient. Convenience in having not to articulate in more uncomfortable ways.