The forked walkways less taken

A simple walk has gender, political and economic sides to it 

“I had a profound desire to be alone... because only alone, lost, silent, on foot, can I recognise things, said Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Walk has gender. The act of walking that Pasolini has mentioned is not a physical activity but has got a political and economic side to it. It will be facile to pretend otherwise. I walk. I walk alone. I walk early hours. I walk late hours. When I walk, I do not walk with intent. I see more when I walk. I saw the fish bone-shaped stamens of the unassuming flowers of adathoda. On them I wrote a poem later, on my walks.

Only when I lost my access to safe, solitary walks as I moved back to my hometown in Kerala did I realise that the safe walks that I enjoyed where I lived so far has been a privilege. My hometown, which proudly offers tantalising copious green spaces, belongs only to the other gender in its stark divide.

Women’s inaccessibility to public spaces has been discussed, dissected and deplored; however, how it affects art has not been addressed head-on. Safe solitary walks, or access to nature in general, undeniably have a key role in art. Claude Monet said, “What keeps my heart awake is colourful silence” and his residence of 43 years in Giverny, where he painted in open air, is a standing testimony. When it comes to literature, among many who attributed walks to their literary contribution, here are a few. Thoreau’s Walking, an essay in which he expanded on the benefits of unhurried walking in fields and the woods, said “walking” laid the foundation for all he wrote. The unbridled “wild and dusky knowledge” that you gain from outdoors in your own terms is not very accessible to women. Also, Wordsworth, who composed as he walked, needs to be mentioned for if he hadn’t wandered lonely as a cloud, he wouldn’t have seen the daffodils.

Writers are intrepid beings. Most are. For a writer, the walk is not a walk. It’s not a physical activity. It’s a walk where the path leads. Walk involves times spent quietly. Walk involves unbridled thoughts. It isn’t only sunshine and birdsong.

Writers claim to be in a relationship with nature. It is the sensitivity with which they belong allow them to feel, see, experience. “Immersive walks” that make it possible is not simply available to everyone. The right to safe access to nature is not granted and guaranteed to women even in societies that are ahead of the curve in many other things. Women’s nature has been limited to her backyard for centuries, which has shrunk to the balconies of the apartments in the modern urban environs, suggesting the economics of it.

Upon the bridges, sidewalks, seashore sit men alone and in company. Ever since photo albums were conceived, they have been replete with photographs of men swimming to glory in verdant green ponds or perched on the culverts, or where never a solitary woman in a bucolic setting or space gives a quantifiable difference of the disparity. In my seaside hometown , surrounded by creeks and green strips of land that hold them, I am yet to see women occupying the same spaces as men.