Anna Burns - Milkman

So that was the usual procedure for the breaking of the curfews. Regarding the latest to be broken, however, events unfurled in not quite the same way. This was because our seven issue women decided this time to involve themselves in it. As usual, and so many days into the curfew, the normal women had had enough. They went out their doors, amassing in contrariness to ‘RETURN TO YOUR HOMES. THIS IS NOT A GAME. THIS IS THE LAST INTIMATION. OBEY THE SIXTEEN HUNDRED HOUR CURFEW. IF YOU ARE NOT OFF THE STREET IN …’ This time, however, our issue women were among the normal women, with the latter at first thinking nothing of it. Everyone, after all, should be welcomed in standing up to the state. To the exasperation of the traditional women, however, and just as they themselves had once more defeated the curfew and were about to rush home to deal with the potatoes, the women with the issues usurped the purpose of the curfew-break, though later they maintained this was hardly their fault. They said it was the media’s fault, and indeed the media had espied the issue women via their placards in amongst the traditional women carrying their own placards. And even though there were only seven of these issue women compared to the few hundred of traditional women, all the world’s cameras instantly focused upon them. Wasn’t either, that the traditional women craved fame and celebrity, that they wanted to be on TV as well as in all of the world’s newspapers. It was that they didn’t want to be identified as part of protests that weren’t aimed at anything other than breaking the curfew and especially not with the issues these women talked ceaselessly on and on about. The normal women had been expecting, indeed dreading, that the issue women, once started, would take the exposure opportunity to harp on in a broad, encyclopaedic fashion about injustice towards and trespasses against women, not just in the present day but all through the ages, using terminology such as ‘terminology’, ‘case studies show’, ‘incorporates the systemic, transhistoric, institutionalised and legislated antipathy of’ and so on that completely these days these women appeared to be steeped in. There would be the injustices too, thought the traditional women, those big ones, the famous ones, the international ones – witch-burnings, footbindings, suttee, honour killings, female circumcision, rape, child marriages, retributions by stoning, female infanticide, gynaecological practices, maternal mortality, domestic servitude, treatment as chattels, as breeding stock, as possessions, girls going missing, girls being sold and all those other worldwide cultural, tribal and religious socialisations and scandalisations, also the warnings given against things throughout patriarchal history that were seen as uncommon for a woman to do or think or say. But no. Not that, which in the middle of a local curfew-break would have been bad enough. Instead these local issue women spoke of homespun, personal, ordinary things, such as walking down the street and getting hit by a guy, any guy, just as you’re walking by, just for nothing, just because he was in a bad mood and felt like hitting you or because some soldier from ‘over the water’ had given him a hard time so now it was your turn to have the hard time so he hits you. Or having your bum felt as you’re walking along. Or having loud male comment passed upon your physical characteristics as you’re passing. Or getting molested in the snow under the guise of some nice friendly snowfight. Or getting hang-ups in the summer about the summer because if you didn’t wear much clothes because it was warm, if you wore a little dress, that would bring upon you all that general summertime street harassment. Then there was menstruation and how it was seen as an affront to being a person. And pregnancy too, how that couldn’t be helped but all the same, an affront to being a person. Then they spoke about ordinary physical violence as if it wasn’t just normal violence, also speaking of how getting your blouse ripped off in a physical fight, or your brassiere ripped off in a physical fight, or getting felt up in a fight wasn’t violence that was physical so much as it was sexual even if, they said, you were supposed to pretend the bra and the breast had been incidental to the physical violence and not the disguised point of the physical violence, making it sexual violence all along. ‘Those sorts of things,’ said the traditional women. ‘Spoken too,’ they said, ‘in all that language of terminology, and only to be laughed at, for everyone was laughing at them – the cameras, the reporters, even the curfew-makers – and no wonder, with all this linen they insist in taking out in public all the time.’ What mostly got to the traditional women, however, was that anybody in the world watching would think that they, the sensible traditional women, were also these issue women. So frostiness set in, owing to this hijacking by the issue women of the curfew, and that was the state of affairs when the issue women said ‘Over our dead bodies’ to the renouncers. The traditional women, although irritated as one might be by idiots wanting to help wash-up but then clumsily breaking all the dishes, nevertheless felt they couldn’t just let the renouncers do their usual deadly thing.

Which was why they went to see them, to see the renouncers. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ they said. ‘You can’t kill them. They’re simpletons. Intellectual simpletons. Academe! That’s all they’re fit for.’ They added that to do away with the issue women, no matter how annoying they were, would be tantamount to unjust, inconsiderate and merciless behaviour towards the more fragile of our district; that by doing so, the renouncers would create one of those landmark incidents such as would bring regretful consequences for their reputation in history books later on. Instead the traditionals said the renouncers could leave the issue women to them, that they themselves would see to it, that they’d go downtown and have a private word with that eighth woman. This was said as diplomatically as possible, as if presenting to the renouncers not a directive but a favour or, even better, an urgent request for assistance and, although the renouncers in their turn knew the difference between a directive and a request for assistance, the fact that their survival as an armed guerrilla outfit in a tightly knit, anti-state environment depended upon local support in that environment, meant that they were quite willing to engage in polite brinkmanship too. They appeared to muse aloud, saying that those women being simpletons or not, and without fear or favour, they would not have the movement or its members jeopardised, nor would it be possible to make allowances for the seven should the eighth dare show her face again in the area. In the end, and after some backwards and forwards – and no matter how much the seven, meantime, continued to harangue about taking a bullet to defend their fellow eighth sister which the renouncers ignored and which had the traditional women telling the issue women just to be quiet and stop talking – both the traditionals and the renouncers seemed to close on some deal. Three of our traditionals then paid a visit downtown to the sub-branch eighth woman to explain the situation. ‘We don’t know what you’ve washed our women’s brains with,’ they said. ‘We don’t know if you’re Mata Hari. We don’t care what happens to you. What we don’t want is for us normal women always having to drop our common tasks and daily rounds to prevent our daft women from being taken away by our paramilitaries. So we mean it. Stay out of our area.’ The eighth woman agreed and that spelled the end of any outside issue woman with expansive worldviews coming to visit our totalitarian enclave and those three stories – the shed behaviour, the association with a state agent, and our seven women putting up the backs of not just our traditionals but also our renouncers – were the reasons why I kept away from these women myself. There was too much of risk, and besides, they were challenging the status quo while I was trying to go under the radar of the status quo. Plus they were being carefully reviewed for furthering signs of deterioration. Even if in some measure regarding their issues I might be in agreement, there was no way ever I was going to link with them. That was why I kept quiet in the lorry with real milkman, listening politely until he came to the end of his words.