Stumbled upon this essay about Rituparno Ghosh while looking for something else that was prompted by my reading of Want. The protagonist in the novel struggles against her desires in quiet desperation where I am in the book. She is the product of choices she made in part because she could not bring those needs and wants to fruition.
I watched the fluid transformation of Rituparno Ghosh over the years and was struck by now natural his transition to feminine seemed. It was as if in the core of him there was this beautiful woman who had emerged like a butterfly from its chrysalis. He must have served as inspiration who felt the way he did but lacked his power of expression. The news of his death was saddening and made me wonder if what appeared so effortless was actually far more complex and heartbreaking for the person. His cinema mirrored his world-view:
..his disbelief in absolutes, painful trappings of the body and need for inclusion of gender, sexuality and minority communities into the political and social mainstream...
While the reality of his own life may have been dark and lonesome, Ghosh was able to recreate it with magic and luminosity on screen. Reading the book and now this essay brings to mind The Left Hand of Darkness - one of my favorite sc-fi books.
Le Guin’s use of her creative practice is courageous. She has referred to the novel as a “thought experiment,” writing, “I eliminated gender to find out what was left. What ever was left would be, presumably, simply human.”[2] Imagination here is a radical, exploratory tool. Le Guin uses her writing to reach beyond the constructs of gender and race, looking for the “simply human.” At the same time, she projects an alternative configuration of how human societies might look. Le Guin uses her practice to write her way into another world.
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