The Catherine Lim Collection (59 page)

“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!”

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!”