“I had a profound desire to be alone... because only alone, lost, silent, on foot, can I recognise things, said Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Walk has gender. The act of walking that Pasolini has mentioned is not a physical activity but has got a political and economic side to it. It will be facile to pretend otherwise. I walk. I walk alone. I walk early hours. I walk late hours. When I walk, I do not walk with intent. I see more when I walk. I saw the fish bone-shaped stamens of the unassuming flowers of adathoda. On them I wrote a poem later, on my walks.
Only when I lost my access to safe, solitary walks as I moved back to my hometown in Kerala did I realise that the safe walks that I enjoyed where I lived so far has been a privilege. My hometown, which proudly offers tantalising copious green spaces, belongs only to the other gender in its stark divide.
Women’s inaccessibility to public spaces has been discussed, dissected and deplored; however, how it affects art has not been addressed head-on. Safe solitary walks, or access to nature in general, undeniably have a key role in art. Claude Monet said, “What keeps my heart awake is colourful silence” and his residence of 43 years in Giverny, where he painted in open air, is a standing testimony. When it comes to literature, among many who attributed walks to their literary contribution, here are a few. Thoreau’s Walking, an essay in which he expanded on the benefits of unhurried walking in fields and the woods, said “walking” laid the foundation for all he wrote. The unbridled “wild and dusky knowledge” that you gain from outdoors in your own terms is not very accessible to women. Also, Wordsworth, who composed as he walked, needs to be mentioned for if he hadn’t wandered lonely as a cloud, he wouldn’t have seen the daffodils.
Writers are intrepid beings. Most are. For a writer, the walk is not a walk. It’s not a physical activity. It’s a walk where the path leads. Walk involves times spent quietly. Walk involves unbridled thoughts. It isn’t only sunshine and birdsong.
Writers claim to be in a relationship with nature. It is the sensitivity with which they belong allow them to feel, see, experience. “Immersive walks” that make it possible is not simply available to everyone. The right to safe access to nature is not granted and guaranteed to women even in societies that are ahead of the curve in many other things. Women’s nature has been limited to her backyard for centuries, which has shrunk to the balconies of the apartments in the modern urban environs, suggesting the economics of it.
Men everywhere
Upon the bridges, sidewalks, seashore sit men alone and in company. Ever since photo albums were conceived, they have been replete with photographs of men swimming to glory in verdant green ponds or perched on the culverts, or where never a solitary woman in a bucolic setting or space gives a quantifiable difference of the disparity. In my seaside hometown , surrounded by creeks and green strips of land that hold them, I am yet to see women occupying the same spaces as men.
Though angst and anguish over inaccessibility to “spaces” has been kept simmering, the past few years, however, have seen fiery debates on women’s spaces in the physical and abstract senses. The complacent stasis of perspectives abided with and fostered is broken; its ripples felt. Nonetheless, the right to safe walk, safe green walk is definitely a part of the struggle for women’s access to safe public spaces, that ought to be taken up, discussed and discoursed, and legislated, if necessary.
Nature writing as a genre has been out there for a while. We have revered and celebrated nature writers — John Muir, who has six volumes on his explorations of natural settings, John Borroughs’s multiple essays on his favourite Catskill mountains, or in excerpts of John Steinbeck, wherein he contemplated on the greatness of redwood, whereas we do not have as many “saunterers” in women here. While writers in general admire the twisty weathered oak trunks, white flowers on the kerbside crack, a millipede that just decides to cross the street, a woman writer will be more concerned about her safety, her thoughts withheld and blocked out by the necessity of her own.
Mary Oliver, whom I resonate with and relate to, was introduced to me fairly late. All the poems that I had buried for the assumption that its too much nature had a new-found meaning when I found Oliver. My poems talked about nature, much like her. I remember being exalted at her discovery. Much more when I also discovered that both of us walked.
Walk gave us poems. She retreated to the nearby woods, I to the shrimp farms in the backyard of my house, childhood refuge for me and my beloved dog Jimmy. I walked “safe-footed”, getting down on knees, among the nameless birds and flowers and fish; and wrote in my head, which after three decades I discern as my privilege. Today as dusk falls, I look down from the balcony of my apartment and see streams of people walking briskly, through crowded alleys and snaking traffic, but my heart yearns, away from this maddening, cacophonous tirade of a metropolis, for that faraway strip of green around the backwaters, at eyes’ end, where my gender does not take me.
Janice Pariat, my favourite writer of the period, on her discovery of the forest behind her family home during the pandemic, writes, “I am beginning to understand that to be a writer I need to walk into this forest world. To live, but also to inhabit. There is a difference. I might collect experience like an assiduous archivist, but to walk into the forest world is to be, brush against the trees, touch the wild flowers, to step into the leaves.” Amen.
resmiprakash@gmail.com
