A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my title Ten Avatars and the unexpected commotion it stirred in a particular audience. This time I’m writing about a different commotion, coming from the other end of the political spectrum. What the two stirrings have in common, though, is that they’re about a name, and all the staggering propriety that can often go with it. This time it’s about the name of what’s turning out to be quite a movement - Yoni ki Baat (the South Asian adaptation of Vagina Monologues).
I have the honor of directing Seattle’s YKB, 2011. This means that I get to have a small hand in a big movement – be a catalyst for shaping dialogue, championing transformation, building community, creating art. All of this is not just exciting, it is also an immense responsibility. I step into this role knowing full well that I cannot do a perfect job. I can only hold my highest and best intentions, take my most courageous, creative, informed, wise and kind actions, and let the rest unfold out of the amazing community voice that YKB has begun to channel.
In my quest for wisdom to benefit this new role, I revisited (among other things), a critique written on the Seattle YKB two years ago (when I too had performed in it), for greater understanding and perspective. Written by the inspiring Pakistani poet Kyla Pasha, the rather scathing and unequivocal piece published in the Global Comment is titled, Yoni is the Wrong Damn Word: marginalization and exoticism.
I did come away wiser and more aware in many ways. While I can understand where Kyla is coming from in all of the points she raises, (- there are a few ”facts” she furnishes as foundations to her arguments that I can nitpick, but won’t-) I am, however, stumped by the fact that that’s what the critique hinges on - the NAME. Of course Yoni is the wrong (damn) word! Guess what, for this staggeringly large volume of hyper-diverse peoples with hundreds of languages and the most ancient of cultures, loosely labeled South Asian as if it could remotely be considered a monolith, any word is going to be the wrong word! And diversity aside, how can there be an appropriate, current word for something, we as a people, have avoided talking about for centuries? We can argue, till the cows come home, about a fitting, most representative word and never find one. And then where would we be? We’d be sitting around struggling to find the word that can best describe a space to have conversations we’ve not been able to have! We’d be spinning our wheels about the name, and skirting the real issues. We’d be hiding behind our colonial baggage, our familiar divisions, our petty “identity” squabbles, in search of the ever-elusive ”correctness,” “representativeness,” and “appropriateness.” (And how sad if, inspite of the culturally rich collective we are, we must, as a result of our inability to let go of our baggage, settle for the English “vagina”!)
We’d be losing (more) time.
I’m absolutely delighted that a group of spunky women, the South Asian Sisters in California, just said one day, “Let’s start talking” and picked a name. (I can’t vouch for the details of their thinking when they picked Yoni; I can only imagine that they simply went back in time to find a word in the most ancient texts in the subcontinent for the female sexual energetic center, but I’m positive it wasn’t loaded with intentions to marginalize and exoticize.) And it stuck. And it’s now a movement. So, that’s what we have to work with, sisters! We can either stand by the sidelines and yell out all the ways it’s all wrong, or we can choose to help shape it into what it can be, to aptly represent the South Asian Woman’s sexual experience – in itself, an incredibly complex, diverse and evolving thing. And the name ”Yoni ki Baat” is hardly the last word in this journey. It is but a conversation starter … a womb, a canvas, a scaffold … to be filled with our stories (including why “Yoni” is the wrong word for someone). It’s what we put in it that counts.
So, I wish from the deepest place in my heart that Bhutani women, and Nepali women, and Afghani women, and Sri Lankan women, and Bangladeshi women, and Pakistani women … and oh, those ubiquitous Indian women … would step into this amazing space that waits with open arms, and fill it with their stories. It’s the entire gamut of stories that will make it the South Asian Woman’s experience, not the name. Yoni ki Baat is the house, but we need all of you to make it home.
Oh, and I wish the amazing Kyla would somehow reappear in Seattle, stand with us, tell her story, and help us be richer and wiser for it.
