“SHE CANNOT SPEAK, IT’S BLASPHEMOUS!” FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF DURRANI’S BLASPHEMY”

Abstract

Decolonization is still a far cry from liberation and freedom of masses with the rank and file members of the former colonies still languishing in oppression of one form or the other even after the traumatic era of colonization. Gayatri Spivak’s essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ takes into consideration many oppressive networks left by the colonizers after they finally departed from the colonies. Such apparatuses include the power of local elite which they had acquired from their colonial predecessors. Women in this scenario are doubly oppressed and colonized. On the one hand, they are oppressed at home by tyrannical tools of patriarchy while on the other they are faced with oppression at a higher level in shape of foreign and local elites thus, as per Spivak, losing their agency or voice. The research work aims at analyzing the voicelessness of Subaltern women through the lens of Tehmina Durrani’s masterpiece Blasphemy to expatiate on how the Subaltern women can or cannot speak.