While re-reading the third chapter of the Zubaan edition of Sara Ahmed's 'Living a Feminist Life', I came across her retelling of a single-paragraph-long story, one of Grimm's fairy tales. I wasn't aware of it before, even though it seemed extremely familiar. It is often interpreted as "The Wilful Child", though a more literal translation from German to English would render it as "The Stubborn Child". In the original, the child's gender is neutral, but most translators tend to pronounce the gender as masculine. Ahmed's retelling uses 'she' as a way of reclaiming a feminist subjectivity (also because 'he' doesn't always include 'she').

In a nutshell, there was a nameless child who continually disobeyed its mother. As punishment from God himself, the child laid in its deathbed. And yet it remained wilful or stubborn or self-willed, to its detriment. When the child was lowered into its grave, the earth spread over it, its wilfulness resurfaced in the form of an arm that stretched upwards. Fresh earth was laid over but the arm resurfaced yet again. Finally, the mother violently struck down the arm with a rod. The arm was then drawn in and the child was allegedly at rest. It's a complicated story, especially in English translation with its focus on gender. In her New Yorker article about the lure of the fairy tale, titled "Once Upon a Time," Joan Acocella reproduces a translation by Jack Zipes, followed by this observation by the famous writer A S Byatt — "It doesn't feel like a warning to naughty infants. It feels like a glimpse of the dreadful side of the nature of things."