Liberation in the middle of a lockdown
A lot of people have discovered and rediscovered themselves this lockdown. I have, too. A week into the lockdown, I discovered that I have bronchitis.
Not the kind of discovery I was hoping for, especially when Google tells you it means you have weak lungs and the zeitgeist confirms that it makes you more susceptible to catching you know what. But then I discovered something far worse: I was supposed to “talk less or not at all for the next three weeks,” said the pulmonologist.
I bypassed the early phase of excitement around zoom calls with friends, family, and even colleagues. Putting a cap on talking, especially in the middle of a lockdown, made the extrovert in me feel a bit shackled.
Then one day, I stumbled upon a stray tweet, on my otherwise grim timeline, about an international female standup comic’s show. Since I had finished watching all the pandemic-themed movies by then, I thought a little laughter could help weaken the feeling of impending doom.
It did not.
However, it taught me what “liberation” sounds like, in six different languages and three different English accents. Because over the next few days, I watched several female comedians from around the world speak their minds like I had never seen before.
For once, I was glad I wasn’t talking because now I had all the time to just listen.
I listened to Rawsan Hallak from Jordan talk about farts in Arabic, wearing her hijab like a crown on her head.
“Every fart has a distinct personality,” she says. Her favourite is the one that usually needs an empty space, and is often accompanied by a weird movement. Its owner lives happily and peacefully, she claims; and leaves the audience — split between amazement and amusement — in splits.
I listened to German-Iranian comedian Enissa Amani.
In her 30-minute Netflix Special, Enissa doesn’t punch up or down. She punches forward — at all the stereotypes around women.
“People are prejudiced against women like me in Germany,” she says, speaking in German. “We can’t possibly be intelligent, because intellect and hair extensions don’t go together,” she adds, flaunting the tresses she claims to have bought off the darknet.
“I feel like to be considered intelligent, it is imperative to have armpit hair down to your knees,” she says, eliciting a fist bump from someone in the first row. Closing the segment a few minutes down, she talks about an allegedly competent lawyer she hesitated to hire recently, “because the lady wore hair extensions!”
To see these women laugh and let others laugh, at them and with them, felt good.
To hear them talk about their mothers as individuals instead of a giant hub of unconditional love, felt better.
“Most people talk about the noble intentions behind studying medicine. My (Iranian) mother told me she became a physician because she wanted to be allowed to say to a man in Iran to sit down and get undressed,” says Enissa.
In another Netflix special, South African comedian Tumi Morake talks about donations to her continent from the first-world countries: “While travelling Air Canada, I had a flight stewardess approach me with: “Excuse me, I’m collecting a dollar for the African children.” And I was like, “B*tch, I’m not ready to pay it forward yet.”
Then, she takes a room full of people from different cultures and nationalities through her three failed attempts at fertility control. “I’m not a mother, I’m a fertile woman. When I had the second child I realised this isn’t going to work out as the World Vision dollars aren’t coming any faster. So, I e-mailed Angelina Jolie every day to please take my kids.”
Parenting in the current times is hard indeed.
Urzila Carlson would know.
“My wife and I have a couple of kids. Don’t worry they’re both straight. We just want them to be normal, you know,” says the New Zealand-based comedian from South Africa, about raising kids in a lesbian household.
Canadian-American comedian DeAnne Smith also takes lesbian stereotypes head-on in her Netflix Special. She confesses she is in love with her chihuahua at the moment, and that it makes her feel she is letting “her people” down.
“As a lesbian, I shouldn’t have this silly little purse dog. I should have three rescue pit bulls,” she says, evoking a hoot from a woman in the audience.
In the UK, Mae Martin talks about gender fluidity in a standup special and owns the floor.
“I’ve been in consecutive long-term relationships with women all through my 20s. Now I’m mixing it up and dating boys again,” says the Canadian comedian and actor.
“Admittedly a weird time in the world to be getting into men.”
(When is it not, Mae!)
As I listened to these women LOL at all the stereotypes about them, I heard myself speaking vicariously through their voice(s).
I found freedom in the uninhibited world they create. A world in which farts and hair extensions happily co-exist. Where lesbian and queer households couldn't care less for societal labels.
It’s a world I hark back to often in these times of crippling anxiety. When international flights got banned left, right and centre, these voices helped me travel.
It felt like the world tour I never had.
