Spoiler Alert for The Power by Naomi Alderman : If you haven’t read the book yet please stop here, bookmark the page, read it and come back. Or if you like spoilers, please go ahead.
Let me first explain the photo displayed above. From where I come, patriarchy is rampant and the only value a woman is given is based on how successful her husband is. Without a marriage, most of her accomplishments will remain unappreciated. Growing up, I associated Mehndi (henna) with weddings. It is tradition for the bride to adorn her feet and hands with Mehndi. When I turned 23 and my parents started to bring up the topic of marriage and such, I wasn’t ready. To their credit, they did not start badgering me about it until I turned 26. At this point, I started to resent weddings and everything that went with it. This was a big deal for me because my secret ambition is to be a wedding planner when I grow up. I realized however, it wasn’t Mehndi or my parents that were causing my resentment. It was the system and the patriarchal culture that required a woman’s worth to be tied to a man.
After 3 years of debating and fighting, my parents finally have given up on the prospect of me ever being married. I have since decided Mehndi will be my symbol of the power I yield as an independent woman who doesn’t need a man to validate her.
Let us move on to the actual review of the book. Now, is a book really good if it made you extremely depressed? I think it is, because it must have been written well to incite such a strong emotion in the reader. In my last post, I talked about the best book I read in 2017. (If you didn’t read my last post, it was The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy). The Power by Naomi Alderman was the best book I read in 2018. I hated that book, only because of how accurate I thought it was in it’s depiction of a dystopian future.
If you are a feminist, like I am, you have, no doubt, daydreamed about what it would be like if the patriarchy was flipped on it’s head. What if men and women switched places? If the power lay in our hands, what would the world look like? One of the reasons I hated the book is because it shattered my bubble, it was a rude awakening to reality, my daydreams turned into nightmares.
Naomi Alderman’s writing style is pleasing, she knows how to write a story and most important of all, she knows how to captivate her audience and make them feel. For days after the book, I kept trying to find flaws in her argument, to find a way to avoid the dystopia she predicted. I could not! I was distraught. Did this mean, there was no point in our fight? Would we be committing atrocities against men? We would not! The point of feminism is not to rule over men! My fight isn’t against men – it is against patriarchy, toxic masculinity, this notion that somehow women are an inferior species.
The Power is a difficult read. But it is a very important book. If you meet men that do not believe in feminism or are the poster child for everything wrong with this world, I would have them read this book. Maybe if they read about what happens to women everyday in today’s world as happening to them, maybe then they will open their eyes and aid in our fight to smash the patriarchy.
P.S. I apologize if this post was more rant than review. I think The Power is a great food for thought and these ideas are worth discussing.
