Flowers Are Also Laid on Tombs

Not long ago, at a literary gathering, a young man recited a few lines with great feeling: without woman, the universe is a soulless corpse. Shakespeare’s love, Hafiz’s rapture, Romeo’s longing, Farhad’s chisel, all of it, he said, is tribute paid to woman’s existence. The hall erupted. I clapped too, then stopped. The line was lovely. But after the applause I felt the unease of a guest whose host, mid-compliment, has just turned her into furniture.
The unease lives in the final sentence, which says that “we men” will be left with scrap paper, blind cinema screens and a meaningless solitude. Notice who loses. Woman departs, and the loss is man’s. Literature vanishes, and it is man’s literature. Loneliness descends, and it descends on man. In this picture she is the soul of the universe, but of someone else’s universe, like a household whose warmth is credited to the daughter-in-law while the deeds are in the son’s name.
I do not resent the sentiment. The loneliness in it is real, and such lines are usually written by someone who has glimpsed life without a particular person and flinched. But love and custody are different things. Calling someone your “soul” can quietly make her a part of your body, and parts, when they malfunction, get replaced.
So let us audit the claim. Of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, the first 126 are addressed to a beautiful young man. The woman arrives later as the “dark lady”, and with such grumbling that the poet seems baffled at having fallen for her. To call “Shakespeare’s love” a tribute from woman is like addressing someone’s letter to the wrong house. Hafiz is more fun still. Persian’s pronoun “u” has no gender, and his beloved is by turns a cupbearer, a heartbreaker, God. We filed the receipt under “woman” for our own convenience, and forgot to write down who collected the payment.
And Juliet? The heroine whose longing has dampened eyes for four centuries was played, on Shakespeare’s stage, by a teenage boy, because women were barred from acting. The most famous voice of a woman’s love came out of a man’s throat. Against that, the claim that woman will carry all the world’s literature away with her sounds like a tenant telling the landlord that the house will be empty if he leaves. The tenant, alas, did not build the house.
Virginia Woolf squeezed this contradiction into a single thought experiment in A Room of One’s Own. Imagine Shakespeare had a sister, equally gifted, equally restless. Her brother goes to school; she sits by the hearth. He heads for London; she flees an arranged marriage. No room, no money, no solitude. Her end is obscurity and, very likely, tragedy. Woolf’s point is plain: in literature woman is on every page, in history almost nowhere. So how will she carry away a literature we never allowed her to write? The real elegy is not for tomorrow’s departure but for countless poems buried before birth, on whose graves we then carved our own names.
Consider our own Shirin, whose name sank beneath Farhad’s chisel. We say “Farhad’s chisel”, never “Shirin’s verdict”. Yet in Nizami, as far as I know, Shirin is no mute maiden but a queen with opinions and authority. The story did not shrink her; our memory did. We kept what felt romantic and forgot the rest, and so she slid from character to prize. That is what a muse is: someone you take inspiration from and never ask for an opinion. Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura live in the same handsome cage, where the food is excellent and speech is forbidden.
The cage had more walls than poetry. In The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar showed that male literature offered women two boxes, angel or monster, and none marked human. They also ask what happens when a tradition treats the pen as a masculine instrument: of course the woman who lifts it is eyed with suspicion. Woolf, in a lecture, told women writers to kill the “angel in the house” first, that sweet voice murmuring in every draft that respectable ladies do not write such things.
But prisoners do not stay silent forever. Anna Akhmatova spent years in the prison queues of Stalin’s Leningrad with the other mothers whose sons were inside. One day a woman with lips blue from cold whispered, “Can you describe this?” Akhmatova said, “I can.” From that “I can” came Requiem. Here woman is not a muse but a witness. She is not receiving inspiration; she is giving the world a language.
Witnessing, however, has a price, and women have paid it. When Ismat Chughtai published “Lihaaf” (“The Quilt”), she faced an obscenity trial in Lahore in 1944. She won, but the label of the “shameless woman” stuck, while nobody has ever tried a male writer for glorifying men’s exploits. Fahmida Riaz, writing under Zia’s regime, paid in cases and exile. And Sylvia Plath’s story is irony at its most exquisite: when Ariel appeared in 1965 it had been arranged by her husband, Ted Hughes, who reshuffled poems and dropped some. Her own ordering was restored only in 2004, thirty-nine years later. Even a woman’s voice reached us after passing through a man’s hands. I could not ask for a better witness for my case.
So what if women vanished from the world? Yes, literature would be empty. But not because men lost their muses. Half of humanity’s vision, vocabulary, questions and silences would be erased for good. We would be left in a world telling itself half the truth, and a half-truth is the most dangerous lie, because it is believable. Goethe wrote that the Eternal Feminine draws us upward. Thank you, but woman does not want the job of hauling anyone up. She wants her own ladder and her own footing.
And here the corpse from that first sentence returns. The eeriest thing about a corpse is that it is always surrounded by flowers. Garlanding woman with praise, calling her the “soul” of everything, is a similar ritual: love on the surface, tomb decoration underneath. With the living we argue, interrupt, disagree. Flowers go only to those we need not fear will answer back.
Shirin does not need flowers, or a chisel. She needs her own voice, and a listener who sets down the bouquet and opens his ears. The day we hear her side of the story with the same appetite as Farhad’s, we may no longer need to say that without woman the universe is a corpse. Because then it will not be one.
👉The columnist is a research scholar of English Linguistics at the University of Gujrat.