Pain is Built-In: A Brief Study of Blood and Femininity

CONTENT WARNING: talk of violence, sexual assault, blood, war, and generally severe topics. There may also be a joke or two.

Vocab check:

AFAB -- person or persons assigned female at birth

AMAB -- person or persons assigned male at birth

Patriarchy -- a system of society or government in which men hold power and women are largely excluded from it.

A non-professional (sort of) essay by Oliver Webb Wilkinson.

    You know those Tampax commercials that show women doing extreme sports? You see artfully cut shots of legging-clad women sprinting in slo-mo, hair hiked into a tight high ponytail while making vague remarks about feeling powerful and 'ready to play.' Ads like these make periods seem like a walk (or I guess run?) in the park. They conveniently seem to forget the realities of menstruation: bloody discharge, cramps that range from uncomfortable to excruciating, mood swings, and a general feeling of blegh. And let’s not forget the recent studies that reveal most tampons and pads contain carcinogenic chemicals that leech into the body upon use. Womanhood sounds fun, right?

    Of course, gender is not defined by what sex you are assigned at birth or the status of your reproductive organs (take it from me). However, seeing as SCORCHED (Incendies) focuses on the experiences of cisgender women, we’ll be focusing on the experiences of femininity as they apply to those assigned female at birth and how, in this play, they involve a lot of bloodshed.
 

   In season two of the popular BBC series Fleabag, viewers are treated to the following (impeccable) monologue:

“Women are born with pain built-in, it’s our physical destiny: period pains, sore boobs, childbirth, you know. We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives; men don’t. They have to seek it out. They invent all these gods and demons and things just so they can feel guilty about things, which is something we do very well on our own. And then they create wars so they can feel things and touch each other and when there aren’t any wars, they can play rugby. We have it all going on in here, inside.” 

                    – Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag: The Scriptures

Courtesy of BBC Three via Youtube

    Phoebe Waller-Bridge exposes a core difference between AFABs and AMABs here: menstruating people are born to face inevitable pain caused by their own bodies for the rest of their lives. In SCORCHED, the first scene that introduces Nawal (scene 5) establishes the imminent birthing of her son, followed by scenes 6, 7 and 8. Nawal’s existence is already plagued by feminine violence. She endures the trauma of childbirth, all of the emotions it entails, and the pain of her child being taken away against her will within the first 5 minutes of her stage time. I find Jihane’s insistence on Nawal forgetting the baby interesting. Why does Jihane find Nawal and Wahab’s child so shameful? The script and setting imply the classic scandal of intercourse and birth out of wedlock, both acts which are perpetuated by the patriarchy as shameful behaviour for women to display. But why would the patriarchy have such a presence in a family of women? There isn’t any mention of Nawal’s father, grandfather, or other male relatives, so why condemn her for her love of Wahab and their child? The answer probably lies in the time, culture, religion, or other factors of the play's setting, but I'll leave that to the actors.

    Despite many women (particularly Nawal and Sawda) experiencing great amounts of pain throughout their lives, SCORCHED has no portrayals of women committing violence. Women are not portrayed as inciting conflict in this play, save Sawda killing a militiaman, but only because he had Nawal at gunpoint. Simon pursues boxing as a career; the militia murders civilians in various ways; refugees retaliate against the militia, and, of course, Abou Tarek (militiaman/Nihad) commits numerous atrocities. Granted, Sawda threatens revenge on the troops who massacred innocent civilians before Nawal stops her. Other than these instances, all physical violence portrayed in the play is incited by men. Why? Referencing Phoebe Waller-Bridge, because AMABs aren’t born with pain, they seek it out and thrust it upon others.

    What's interesting is that Nawal does assassinate a militia leader, hence why she is incarcerated. This act of calculated violence was omitted from the stage directions of the play, but heavily discussed through dialogue. Said dialogue champions not using violence as a response to violence, but to only strike where it is most effective. "We’re going to strike. But we’re going to strike a single spot. Just one ... We won’t touch a single man, woman or child, except for one man. Just one." -- Nawal, page 63. Nawal insists that as women, she and Sawda cannot repeat the cycle of revenge that has put their country into the position it is now in, escalating aggression as revenge for previous aggression.

    The women of SCORCHED, particularly Nawal (as she is the show's focal point), are born to bleed in more than just the menstrual sense. Janine dives headfirst into the intense emotional turmoil of grieving her mother, while Simon avoids it until he can’t. Nawal gives birth, gives away her child, buries her beloved grandmother, watches countless people die, is repeatedly assaulted and raped in prison, then bears and raises the children of her assailant. A switch flips, however, when Simon reads Nawal’s journal. This is another challenge for the actors, I suppose. That moment of realization, the depth of that discovery, of how much Nawal endured and how little the people in her life knew of it. I wonder if genetic memory or generational trauma affected Janine or Simon’s grieving processes – another concept to think about for the actors, I suppose.

    The show ends with Janine and Simon listening to their mother’s stoic silence. Having not yet started rehearsals, this moment could go one of a million ways. However, it is the time for Nawal’s children to let the quiet wash over them, just like the rain that concludes the show. Washing away the dirt and the blood of the past, leaving wounds exposed and ready to heal, the stage directions read, “Torrential rain. The end.”

    PS: Remember that all the women in this story also menstruated on top of doing everything else. Tampax could never.