'The' Closet Drama

July 22, 2026. 11:20 PM

What’s a closet drama? Well. It is a play you read. Yes, that’s it. It is meant to be read by one solitary reader. Academics believe that women writers who couldn’t use their ‘voice’ employed this form of art/writing to put forth their political stances. One very well-known practitioner of this form is Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle-on-Tyne (1623–1673), who explored this tool and came to be known as one of the best-known women playwrights.¹

How did I get to know about this? Well, the past few days have been engulfed by maladaptive daydreaming about being a playwright² because the nonprofit organization I work for is doing an event, and it has plays. And yesterday, my manager asked me to conceptualize some endings for a last-minute new play in the line-up.³ She told me today that my endings were nice and hoped the director of the play [also, my big boss] would go for the first one. I liked the last one better, which was co-developed by another co-worker and me. 

Anyway, this set of daydreaming about being a playwright transitioned well from the last set about the mysterious video editor. I was searching for him recently to look up his recent work, and I found out he has been working for this very courageous, anti-establishment, subversive stand-up comedian. My daydreamings faded into him. I have been thinking a lot about his life. You know how the more you trace a person’s life backwards, going as far back as possible to pinpoint at what point they got induced with so much courage to make the choices they make. And you feel that cyclical force between their choices and courage that makes your cowardly brain a little bit cartoonishly dizzy. And when the machine of maladaptive daydreaming takes a break, the interval is occupied by its frenemy, comparison, which just makes you falter until the machine resumes.

Anyway. Whilst this has been happening in my head, the world is burning [still],⁴ and my country has been waking up. My country has been going to the streets. I am anyway a slow person in all aspects, as opposed to this exponentially advancing era. And if you are someone who, after a lot of dopamine struggles, has forgone the tech tools of this era, like Instagram,⁵ then you will understand that I could not grasp the intensity and the importance of this movement happening on the streets around me. But I will never expect, of course, that people condone my [self-?]isolatory cowardice. Why should they... all while they use their bodies on physical sites of fascism to dismantle all the structures of oppression? 

While I am stickied in my half-room, waiting for [more than a month] something to hit me so I could fantasize about becoming the next great literary mogul after I word-vomit in my unindexed Blogspot blog. I am no Emily Dickinson. Although I do have a trunk with some books. And I keep my writings hidden. But not in the trunk.⁶

Anyway. I feel it is impossible for me to be complicit in all of this because I am not morally bankrupt, of course. But my cowardice keeps me from turning my site of complicity into a site of solidarity.⁷ And I also wholly acknowledge that it is not an excuse in a state of fascism. In a state of fascism, if you dwindle around and do not resist, then you are a state apparatus, whether you like it or not.

I tried staying away from everything and just mindlessly slaving away for a morally bankrupt nonprofit that is organizing an event by creatively censoring its feminist politics for a morally bankrupt funder. They are dancing, singing, clapping, speechifying, performing, discussing, panelling. All while, in the city they are organizing it in, people are being arrested, detained, killed, molested, pelleted, beaten. 

By the way, this is the same event I was “invited to” very late, and I didn’t go.⁸ What if I had gone there? Would I have gotten anything done at work, all while being very much aware of the paralyzing ability my awareness has? I mean, any social situation can neuter the social animal in me. Just imagine, just collapsing and flailing. Did I make a better decision by not going? But what if I had gone, and that experience could have thrust me into something entirely different? 

Anyway, these questions do not matter. I mean, they do. But only for intangible feelings like regret, which only materializes to stagnate. 

While I dwell on these useless, mindless debates in passing, and the maladaptive daydreamings run in the background, subsuming my mind and body by nibbling on real life, real life still leaks in. Mother still knocks, and the inner hellish self-doubt–self-surveillance machinery in me keeps looking back at the door while the maladaptive daydreamings ushers me in.

I always draw lines to connect the home being a mini-state, the micro-oppressive bricks that keep institutional fascism alive and kicking. Is it wrong for me to draw parallels between my mother’s sudden descent into religious madness—all while, whenever she talks to me, she cribs about days passing, nights wearing down, and each date being a cross she has to bear—and the collective descent into religious madness in the society around me, as welfare is steadily dismantled while the fascists suckle on shards of democracy and dissent, and the hairy godmen dance around half-naked with sermons full of hatred, misogyny, hypercapitalism, and communal poison.

~ Oizys.

—

¹ Margaret Cavendish was a prolific poet, playwright, philosopher, fiction writer, and essayist who published under her own name. Her works include Poems, and Fancies and the closet drama The Convent of Pleasure.
² One idea that’s been permeating my brain revolves around the dowry-box trunk that my mother brought when she was married off to my father. That is where I store my books. Consider this a pre-emptive footnote 6 reference.
³ Yet again, the banality of my MDD hit me with a sock full of coins because I could not think of anything on my own.
⁴ Iran war latest: Tehran reacts after Trump's power plant warning - as president 'honours' killed troops // Israel is building a miles-long earthen barrier inside Gaza, entrenching its division
⁵ Am I the only one who feels like I am looking at stale, old self-brain-vomit when I go back to Instagram? It has become unscrollable for me.
⁶ For those who don’t know: Emily Dickinson’s profession as a poet was unknown to almost everyone during her life, and the poems we devour today were published posthumously. After her death, her sister Lavinia discovered hundreds of poems, including hand-sewn fascicles and loose sheets kept in a locked chest, with no instructions about what should be done with them. And she was a very productive poet during the Civil War in the United States. So, you get my overall reference. Also, a footnote 2 reference.
⁷ A reference to the previous blog where I quoted Nat Raha. What a hypocrite I am.
⁸ A reference to the previous blog: they asked me so late and tried to spin it as my fault, but I did not allow them.

[dVerse] June 25th — Ars Poetica with a Faulty Exit Door

A poem seldom arrive clean.

It comes in through the window

with dust on its knees,

carrying one cracked cup,

one unpaid bill,

one mother’s voice pressed

against the wrong side of a door.

It rarely ask for a desk.

It sits on the floor

beside the body

and begins taking attendance.

Here is the throat,

still functioning as a checkpoint.

Here is the stomach,

refusing citizenship.

Here is the girl under the desk,

still waiting for the bell

to mispronounce freedom.

A poem should never be used as a lantern.

Do not insult it with usefulness.

A poem is the matchstick

struck inside a locked room,

not enough to save anyone,

but... just enough to prove

there was oxygen here once.

Sometimes it is a witness statement.

Sometimes it is the broken crayon

smuggled out of childhood.

Sometimes it is my own handwriting

dragging a chair

to the centre of the court

and saying:

your honour,

the body remembers

what the father edited out.

As I have said before,

I do not write

because language heals.

I write because silence

keeps trying to inherit me.

I write because the wound

has developed clerical skills

and keeps misfiling my life

under manageable woman.

I write because somewhere

inside this humiliating machinery

there is still a small illegal door

with my name misspelled on it.

The poem finds it first.

Then it waits,

barefoot,

ink-mouthed,

disobedient,

until I remember

how to leave.

~ Oizys.

Written for dVerse - MTB: Ars Poetica Revisited by Grace on June 25th.