The Women of South Asia Sing Their Defiance
In this weekend's 'Verse Affairs', an anthology of poems that embodies women's struggle to escape the maleness of language, and the world itself
A protest against violence on women, in the aftermath of Hathras. Photo: PTI
Women07/Mar/2021
In her poem ‘Tulips’, Sylvia Plath describes the emotional contours of a person recovering from an unknown operation in a sterile hospital room. Her husband, Ted Hughes, claimed she had written it while recovering from an appendectomy; other scholars have found the shadow of a previous miscarriage and hospitalisation in the poem. The invalid in the poem has received a bouquet of red tulips she doesn’t want â it prevents her from sinking into an anaesthetised oblivion, which is the only relief from physical and emotion pain for her. “I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself,” she writes. I was 16 years old when I first read this poem and immediately realised I could experience the trauma of miscarriage only through Plath’s poem.