A thinking thing. Have you ever been a part of a Natural…
By: Aparchit Sharma
Tags: Rape, Feminism, Thinking

Have you ever been a part of a Natural Catastrophe? Like present in there when all the nature around doesn’t even care whether you are there or here or anywhere? Like you matter only as much as the tin can or a bottle cap on the road which you kick away in a brazen playfulness just to entertain yourself or in order to project your anger or everyday frustration at some event? Doesn’t it seem like you become an object like that for the nature, a plastic bottle’s lid to be kicked as hard as possible as the encapsulating space around you begins to treat everything like that for the sake of its frolic or fury? Ever thought about it carefully, in all awareness, as the trauma of the natural tragedy recedes and you unthing yourself from the other things that mankind has created? Think about an earthquake, like Bhuj 2002 maybe? Or the 2006 tsunami? I mean not in the conventional academic geographic and scientific sense of tectonic shifts and other fancy linguistic representations of measuring instruments such as richter scales and what not, but in a more deeper and real way? That is also as close it can get to your existence as qua human, not thing but human.

Like as someone with, say, a free willing soul moving within the wholeness of your body in opposition to unsoulful seemingly whole things? The free will, as you like to put it, no? Rights, will to will? But from the pov of nature, nature in its unforgivable fury, what to make of this soul, this will or these rights? Doesn’t it end up transforming into a sub-soul or at best a thing? Like other things? That the sine qua non of being a human with a soul, a free willing being, who wills to will, as opposed to an inert commodity, an object of neutrality, stands void during these natural disasters? When was the last time you dealt with a thing? Maybe the last door you closed shut really hard, banged it, because you knew that door is made of this dead, vapid wood which has no will? Soul-less? Or the way you put down your smartphone, as if you were ashamed to be owning it, so you simply either threw it away on the mattress, with a measured force so that it didn’t land on the floor on the other side but did get as far away as it could from you because it represented something completely antithetical, something so unyou, a device, an inanimate thing, an unthinking object? Doesn’t the nature throw away a man like that during such times, hurled into an unassailable abyss to become an object, a thing? ? I remember my brother was psychosomatically hurled into the same abyss when he was taking a shit and the first rumblings of the Kashmir earthquake were felt, resonating with rumbles of his bowels. To either resign to be crushed along within the debris of concrete and his own excreta or to make a jump beyond the boundary wall of our house where most of the migrant labour women of the shanty houses had gathered in their red and green and blue bloused sarees whilst he himself was to stand therebare naked with his thing, dangling like rest of the things. Predisposed to nature’s behaviour as an object?

Say, what about rape? Remember 2012 gang-rape? Don’t you think that treating someone as a thing is what rape is? Didn’t they shove an entire metal rod into her, rupturing her innards, untangling the complex and intermingling wholeness of her body and tearing it apart, like a thing, a sheet of paper? Ever tore apart a paper, to maybe just pass time, in complete unawareness of the sound of tearing it, entirely removed from the act? Did the paper have any agency, any soul when you were treating it like an object, lacerating its wholeness which is further constituted by the lacerations imposed by man on trees and their siblings? Women were still raped afterwards, weren’t they? Still are, right? Kicked like a football, out of sheer infantile whim? Does kicking a football arise any question of violation? When someone only sees you as an object, treats you as an object and you understand, realize at a very deeper level that it is possible to be seen as an object, like a thing, that you could be thrown in a dumpster, burnt like dead rubber, sliced up like tiny bits and pieces of fruit or be eviscerated into fly dust, like you weren’t even there, a noumenon, a non-entity, what do you do? What choices do you have? Do you continue to be a commodity, an object, a thing? Or you chose to be as someone with soul, with agency, will and the will to will? Do you make a choice? Are you willing to believe that Feminism is a choice to be something other than the thing? Can you wrap your head around it?