The Catherine Lim Collection

by Catherine Lim

  Dora chuckled as she saw herself borne aloft in a churning sea of women, her long blonde hair shaved off in a gesture of defiance, and beside her, fluttering in the evening breeze, the banner proclaiming ‘The Bald Truth about Man’s Oppression of Woman’. She stopped chuckling, stared and said, “Oh my Josie, my poor little Josie,” for she had noticed a small, five-year-old girl in a red coat, standing forlornly in the crowd, clutching a rag doll.

  “Mother! Mother!” the child screamed, but the screams were drowned in the wild hurrahs.

  Thoroughly intoxicated by her success, she had gone on to produce a giddy string of equally successful books: Woman: The Foundation Of Society That Should Not Have Got Laid, Her story Of The World, In Definitely More Than 10 1/2 Chapters, Adam And Even, the last carrying the definitive message that the time for redress was now or never.

  Click. Click. Click.

  Dora Warren. Dora Warren. Dora Warren.

  She had become a household name.

  You are our voice.

  You have saved us.

  From now onwards, women’s issues can only be meaningfully discussed in terms of two categories, B.D.W. and A.D.W. – Before Dora Warren and After Dora Warren.

  Dora, thank you.

  Thank you for daring to be the lone voice in the wilderness.

  The familiar face on TV, with the wide eyes and Wife of Bath gap-tooth raised cheers.

  She loved the adulation.

  And then things began to go wrong, terribly wrong. She was inclined to put the blame on Josie.

  “My mother’s the most bizarre person I have ever met,” said the self-assured young lady in an interview in her college during the long period when Dora went into seclusion in the Mexican desert to reflect and work on the final grand theory about man’s victimisation of woman. The newspaper proclaimed with glee the next day: “‘My Mother’s the Most Bizarre Person I have Ever Met’, says Feminist Dora Warren’s Daughter.”

  In the quiet of the desert, she meditated and worked and had her second apocalyptic flash: man’s most enduring weapon against woman was not the phallus, as she had previously believed, but language. Man had been using language to enslave woman for hundreds of years and he did it with such cunning that woman suspected nothing and fell into his trap, so that each time she opened her mouth to speak, she fell deeper. Man’s privileging of language, the most precious human heritage, was his most successful ploy to hide his weakness and perpetuate the myth of his strength.

  Awe-struck by the ingenuity of her own intellectual processes that had led to the unlocking of this secret, Dora Warren was soon galvanised into feverish activity to make it known to the world. She searched the language for proof and came up with armfuls which she triumphantly flung at her stunned audiences.

  “Listen carefully,” she thundered. “While words like ‘master’, ‘lord’, ‘bachelor’ and ‘wizard’ have acquired new meanings of approval and admiration, the exact opposite has happened to their feminine equivalents. ‘Mistress’, ‘madam’, ‘spinster’ and ‘witch’ have been degraded to the point that we are immediately condemned by their application. Oh, the negative associations that have accreted around words used by men to shame woman! Do you not recoil at ‘Black Maria’? Why does a maximum-security vehicle for hardcore criminals have to bear a woman’s name? Are you not revolted by ‘Venus Trap’? Why does a killer jungle flower, a total botanical aberration, have to be named after a woman? Men want to subjugate us by making us cringe in shame! And they have succeeded! Sisters, we must get out of this Shame Syndrome!”

  Dora Warren’s eyes swept over the audience in a blaze of fury.

  “Listen to this,” she boomed with growing menace. “‘Arabella Destroys 10,000 Homes.’ ‘Death Toll from Lizzie’s Fury Reaches 6,000.’ ‘Amanda Screams Across California: More Damage Expected.’ Why do men name hurricanes and tornadoes and typhoons and the most destructive of nature’s forces after women? Why, to make us feel guilty and cow us further. Sisters, let’s rid ourselves of this Guilt Syndrome!”

  Dora Warren stood to her full height in the glare of the TV lights, put one fist on her hip and with the other, began to punch the air.

  “Are you aware,” she shrieked, “that the language is riddled with words that condemn us to a class of beings with no identity of our own, so that we can only define ourselves in relation to men? Manageresses and authoresses and poetesses and waitresses are nothing more than little appendages of ‘esses’, totally dependent on males for their existence! Sisters, this dependency is not just the result of specific terms in the language but of its very structure and grammar! You know what I did?” And since the audience did not know what she did, she told them.

  “I went round with a little secret tape-recorder in my handbag and taped 100 conversations of men and women,” she announced with aplomb. “And do you know what shocking discoveries I made?” The audience gazed at her spellbound.

  “I discovered,” bellowed Dora Warren, “that women use the Question Tag 82 per cent more than men! Do you know what it means when a woman continually says to a man, ‘It’s going to rain, isn’t it?’ ‘I’m not too late, am I?’ ‘You will pick me up at eight, won’t you?’ It means that she is continually seeking confirmation, validation, assurance and approval from a man. She is saying her own judgment and feelings are suspended until a man endorses them! She is nothing without him, a nonentity, a nought, a cipher, a nothing. She is a dependency class that lives on the surplus of man’s approval, like the first foolish woman born out of a man’s redundant rib! Let us get out of this Redundancy Syndrome!”

  On a rampage of talks, seminars and workshops through the country, Dora Warren urged women to pull themselves out of the Shame, Guilt, and Redundancy Syndromes. She organized demonstrations to heckle recalcitrant sisters who still allowed themselves to be addressed as ‘chairman’ or to be called ‘waitress’.

  At this stage, some confusion set in. While the women had been totally in agreement with the need to get rid of the Phallacy Syndrome and indeed had participated most enthusiastically in the demonstrations of protest during which objects conspicuously cylindrical in shape or projectile in function were symbolically set ablaze in a tremendous bonfire, they were less sure about the other syndromes which seemed more abstract and therefore less comprehensible. Already some women were beginning to ask each other: “What’s happening to Dora Warren? What’s she talking about? Can we continue to trust her?”

  “Tell us, Dora Warren,” one of them asked boldly, “how come if women are so oppressed by men, they live longer? The statistics show that worldwide, women outlive men by an average of five years.”

  “True!” cried Dora. “But what’s the use of living longer to suffer more? It just means five more years of oppression, that’s all. Would you like to be that woman who, when she was about to draw her last breath, instructed that her epitaph should be these words: ‘She died at thirty, and was buried at sixty’?” She looked round challengingly.

  “I read in an article somewhere,” said another woman in the audience, “that in a survey conducted among women to find out how many of them would like to be reborn as men in their next life, 81 per cent said ‘No’, they would prefer to be reborn as women. Now how would you account for that?”

  “Ah, this proves my point!” cried Dora. “It shows how very much oppressed women are, for they want to come back to take revenge on their oppressors, and nobody avenges like a woman!”

  The heckler sat down, nonplussed. But the confusion and disillusionment had set in, and that was the beginning of Dora Warren’s fall.

  One night, Dora looked up at the bright stars, breathed deeply, reflected and was struck by another blinding flash on her road to the Damascus of woman’s liberation from man. The discovery was so electrifying that she had to sit down for a while and steady herself. Then she got up, stretched her arms out to the stars and exclaimed, “This is going to be the apotheosis of my career! The grand theory at last! My magnum opus!�
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  She announced to the world that she had discovered the three most insidious words in the language, whose excision would free woman, once and for all. The audience held their breath, as Dora Warren gathered hers to deliver the ultimate coup de grace.

  “I love you!” she screeched to the audience. “The three most sinister words in the language are ‘I love you’. Men have been enslaving women for thousands of years with these words, and women, in responding, have put the seal of acceptance on their own doom. In the Japanese language,” continued Dora, her eyes taking in the entire audience in one imperious sweep, “there is a little suffix ‘yo’ sometimes used at the end of an utterance. It has different meanings for men and women. When a man says, ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill, yo,’ he means, ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill, I’m telling you this and you had better believe it!’ but when a woman says, ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill, yo,’ she means ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill, and will you be so kind as to believe me.’ Now,” went on Dora Warren, her voice rising in a crescendo of emotion, “when a man says ‘I love you’ to a woman, he means, ‘I choose you to be the one for me to own, possess, dominate, tame, subjugate, oppress, enslave, to be my entire staked territory over which I and only I will roam at will!’ and when a woman replies, ‘I love you,’ she means, ‘I accept all of the above!’ Beware! Beware! The words that you have always thought to be music to the ear and honey on the tongue are the very poison that kills!”

  A thrill of consternation ran through the audience. One woman stood up tremblingly and said, “The bastard! He has been saying ‘I love you’ to me every day for the last 20 years and I believed him!”

  Another stood up and said with great anxiety, “All these years I could not get my live-in boyfriend to say ‘I love you’ to me. I would be the one to say the three words first, and he would say ‘So do I. Then last night, he did it! He said ‘I love you’ all on his own. You mean I have now to tell him to stop saying it?”

  “Tell him,” said Dora magisterially, “never to say that dirty four-letter word of enslavement again.”

  “What happens to our thousands of songs and poems and Valentine Day cards? Are we to empty them of their words of love?” quavered a woman who was clearly a romantic at heart.

  “Put them to the bonfire,” said Dora sternly. “Put an end to love. Put an end to our enslavement, sisters!”

  And that was Dora’s final undoing, for the women were not ready to relinquish love. Her new theory drove a cruel wedge into the sisterhood which thereafter splintered in confusion and resentment and broke away, forming their own A.D.W. or ‘Against Dora Warren’ groups. One of them, led by the woman who had been distressed by the prospect of never hearing her live-in boyfriend say ‘I love you’ again, spitefully arranged for another interview with Josie Warren who once again denounced her mother.

  ‘“Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know. I should know.” Says Dora Warren’s Daughter’, sniggered the newspapers the next day.

  Dora was not daunted.

  ‘Has Dora Warren Gone too Far? Dump Dora Warren!’

  When the face with the wide eyes and gap-tooth appeared on TV, there were hisses, boos and jeers.

  Dora fled into the Mexican desert once more, but this time there were no more flashing insights. Instead she slipped into deep depression and checked into a sanatorium. Then one morning, she went into the bathroom and slashed her wrists.

  Click. The celestial slide-projector clicked to a stop with the last slide which was of her in the bathroom, slumped against the wall, wrists bleeding, but with a peaceful expression on her face. She was looking at herself from a height and saw the top of her head, more grey than blonde, and a rapidly spreading patch of red which was both the blood and the hibiscus print on her favourite caftan, bought during the trip to Bali, the island paradise in the Far East.

  “Goodbye, I’m off!” she thought blithely, as she felt herself drifting away.

  It was a wonderful sensation, this drifting, floating, gliding, sliding, whatever earth word you wanted to use for it. It was rather like the delicious sensation of small friendly waves slapping against one’s body.

  “Oh, this is so good,” she thought, “I haven’t felt this sense of peace in a long, long while. Heaven, here I come! I deserve you after the Hell they gave me on Earth!”

  “Not so fast.” It was a voice, a man’s voice, that plucked her out of this warm amniotic bubble and put a stop to the drifting.

  “Hey, you, what do you think you’re doing?” cried Dora to her Guardian Angel, for that was who he was.

  “I’ve got to take you to Transit, you cannot go to Heaven straightaway, you know,” said Fordora, for that was his name.

  “Transit? Oh, I understand,” cried Dora cheerfully. “Like Transit at an international airport? Passports. Papers. Boarding Passes. The whole works before passing on. Heaven must be very security-sensitive!”

  “Precisely,” said Fordora. “Now please follow me to E-station or S-station.” He paused, looked her up and down and said, “E-station, most likely, unless you can prove otherwise.”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about; all I know is that I’m rather enjoying myself in this place which is a lot better than the old one where you get stabbed in the back by the very people you’ve fought for,” said Dora.

  “You may be speaking too soon,” said Fordora.

  He led her to E-station and S-Station, separated by immense, dense rolling clouds, so that their occupants, despite the abuses being hurled to and fro, could not get at each other.

  “Holy Moses!” exclaimed Dora.

  The E-Station had a small group of women, all looking sleek and healthy and prosperous (one Chinese woman was still wearing a fabulously expensive pair of jade earrings that she had been cremated with), but with gloomy, sullen expressions on their faces. The S-Station, on the other hand, was crowded with women in rags, half-starved, with bruised faces and bodies, but remarkably cheerful. They jeered and hissed exuberantly atthe occupants of E-Station, some of whom roused themselves sufficiently from their gloom to hiss back.

  Fordora explained: All women who died went to Heaven on the sheer merit of their being born women (not that he agreed with this ruling, as he quickly pointed out, but who was he, mere Guardian Angel, to be disputing rules made up there?). Not all women, however, deserved the same grade of Heaven; the greater the suffering on Earth, the higher the grade. Thus Egg-Receivers went to E-Station which was really a very low grade of Heaven only, with its own internal sub-grades, while Scorpion-Receivers went to S-Station which also had its own internal levels, the highest being then occupied by a young slum woman from Calcutta who had been blinded as a child, thrown out at age five upon the street, rescued by a man who collected mutilated children to form a brigade of beggars to make money for himself, was further mutilated at age eight by having some fingers hacked off to have a competitive edge over rival beggar brigades, raped at age 10, raped and mutilated repeatedly into adulthood and finally starved to death in an airless, rat-infested hole in an alley.

  She had been unanimously voted for top prize in S-Station.

  “Your place is in E-Station,” said Fordora. “Get ready.”

  “Wait a minute!” cried Dora Warren defiantly. “My place is not with those sleek, fat, prosperous and placid Egg-Receivers who never suffered. I suffered terribly. I deserve more than the minimum Heaven. I deserve to take my place with the best of the Scorpion-Receivers. Oh, how my flesh had quivered to the stings of treachery!”

  “They will never allow you into S-Station,” said Fordora.

  “Who’s they?” demanded Dora.

  “The Scorpion-Receivers themselves,” said Fordora. “They will take one look at you and hiss you all the way to E-station!”

  “Now look here,” said Dora belligerently. “Do you see these slashes on my wrists? Would a woman who has never suffered try to kill herself?”

  “Show your slashed wrists to the Scorpion-Receiver who
had had both arms hacked off, or the one doused with petrol and set on fire by her husband because her dowry was insufficient, or the one called ‘The Horizontal Woman’ because she was precisely that, servicing 30 men a day,” said Fordora savagely.

  “All right, all right,” said Dora pacifically. “Guardian Angels are rather given to melodrama, aren’t they? But why don’t you let me present myself to the Scorpion-Receivers and argue my own case? I have fought so hard on behalf of women that I’m sure they’ll view my case sympathetically,” she concluded.

  “All right, as you wish and good luck to you,” said Fordora.

  Dora Warren presented herself for admission to S-Station.

  “You with the well-fed rump, tell me how you qualify to be one of us,” snarled Rani, whose bruised and battered body had been found crushed on the railway tracks.

  “Gently, gently, please, and no vulgar language,” said her Guardian Angel, Forrani.

  “You said you suffered. Have you any evidence of that?” jeered Amina who had been infibulated three times for her husband’s bursting pleasure and had died of an infection after the third infibulation, “You want to see my evidence – ”