On the 15th of December, Gyaan Adab presented the newest meeting of the Storytellers Club, wherein they presented works on Witches, Vamps and Wayward Women.
This event was a part of The Heroine’s Journey, an arts festival that sought to analyse the representation of women and their roles as heroines in various media such as film, art and literature.
The storytellers regaled us with various short stories, Hina presented Angela Carter’s ‘The Werewolf’, a story that portrays a new interpretation of Red Riding Hood, a young girl’s shift from the hunted to the huntress, and makes a bleak commentary on the persecution of witches in the (perceived) middle ages. Chetan chose to narrate ‘Gharwali’ by Ismat Chughtai, a story that shines a bright light on the subject of female sexuality and it’s perception in society.
This humorous, enjoyable and daring piece of fiction, written over seventy years ago, is still relevant today.
Peter chose to read ‘Skeleton Woman’, written by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, is an old Inuit tale of healing which follows the plot of a young woman, cast aside, who is restored by means she did not and would not anticipate.
Somnath narrated ‘What Women Want’, a short story found in ‘Fe-mails: Ecelebrating Women One Click at a Time’ by Millicent Perry. The moral of the story was, if your woman doesn’t get her own way, things are going to get ugly! And truer words have never been spoken.
Bhavna chose to portray a more contemporary perspective by choosing to read, ‘When Eve and Eve Bit the Apple’ by Kristen Scharold. A piece of fiction that questions the religious rigidity that we enforce upon ourselves, and the truth of knowing one’s self in the face of love, When Eve and Eve Bit the Apple is a modern-day forbidden love story. The audience, in due time, laughed and cried, and an informal discussion on the subject of these stories, the context they were written in, and their relevance to the perception of women was initiated.
