Sanyü Iralu
Sechü-Zubza
My attention has been drawn to three articles that have appeared in The Morung Express consecutively in the last three days, all to do with women “exploitation,” “subjugation” “oppression” by men necessitating their liberation from the “patriarchal society,” and their subsequent “empowerment,” leading to the promotion of a “shared humanity” with all-round “equality” for everyone. I have thoroughly enjoyed the write-ups though I do not necessarily agree with all that have been written on this volatile topic.
What intrigued me the most about all the three articles was their common, animated discussions centered on the kitchen. I understand that the “kitchen” here is not really the physical descriptor in any house/building where only food is necessarily prepared, but a subtle, figurative expression to denote the kind of dehumanisation that women experience everywhere they live.
It goes without saying that all of us speak from our own perspectives and contexts. Hence, I speak from my own perspective where I see that women get their empowerment from the kitchen by dutifully discharging their role as the builder of a “home” (cf. Prov. 14:1). Here, I know I may be saying things that may not be acceptable today in a world riven by so much bitterness, hatred, disharmony, and agony.
I grew up in a big family of eleven children with my hard-working parents, perhaps, not in a very big house, but in a home where there was a lot of love and understanding shared among those in this family. Both my parents were Government servants, and both of them dutifully discharged their responsibilities in their workplaces. Outside their workplaces, they dutifully discharged their God-given roles in the family. Like all mothers, mom worked very hard in the kitchen (I grew up admiring her for the diligence with which she brought us up. I still admire and appreciate her so much. She is still around at age 84!).
One can imagine the amount of work that is done around the kitchen in such a big family. But not a day would mom feel dehumanised or complain, because she had an understanding husband who dutifully cooked a lot of the fine meals we ate growing up. Besides that, Dad would do a lot of the household chores, too. Better still, he also imbibed the sense of respect in us for them by teaching us to help mom around the house. All the eleven siblings to this day do not mind working around the kitchen and we have no regrets. This is because Dad, and Mom, in particular, showed us the sense of self-respect and regard she got from her man and children, right in the kitchen!
Speaking from this perspective, I still want to say that the kitchen is the place of empowerment for mothers, and not for them to see it as a place of servitude. This is the place for even other householders to project the good, noble, familial relationships that are missing in a world characterised by nonsensical polarities in vicious gender wars that were not part of our culture of yore.
Yes, we must all give due considerations to the female gender across all age groups, but rhetorics of inequality, discrimination, oppression, subjugation must be studied in their proper contexts before we drag one another into a world that is gone crazy with modern philosophies fired by materialism and the insatiable human ego.
