The short story as quintessence: The art of Rabindranath Tagore (cont)

Rabindranath seems to follow the nineteenth century dictum upheld by Poe, of using a “beginning,” “middle” and “end” in his stories.   Although, his endings cannot always be termed definitive endings, they do bring the stories to some degree of closure or resolution. In Kabuliwala, the aesthetics of romance, that between a low class father figure trader from Afghanistan, and a little upper middle class Bengali girl child, provides an  ineffable and unforgettable dynamic which illuminates both the universal and specific  conditions of the child and the father in this case. Although, we associate with Rabindranath’s art qualities that have been celebrated in English Romanticism  such as the primacy of the child,  passionate reverence and continual evocation of Nature, celebration of both romantic and Divine love and their interchangeability through the mythic evocation of   the Radha-Krishna paradigm, Rabindranath can also be supremely classical not only in the symmetrical and chiseled finish of  most of his poems and short stories, but as in  Classical Tragedy  he often evokes  the eternal and universal rhythms of experience.

The Short Story as Quintessence: Some Stories of Rabindranath Tagore

                                                            Sreemati Mukherjee

                                              

The short story as a genre made a belated entry into the world of European genres. In its earlier avatars it existed as the fabliau, the animal fables, the Panchatantra stories, the stories of the Arabian nights, as numerous contes, nouvelles and novellas.  It is from the term novella or novelle that the word novel is derived. Having had a career in Boccaccio’s Decameron and Margaret de Navarre’s Heptameron, it surfaced as a full fledged genre in the nineteenth century in the writings of Chekov and Maupassant. Overseas, in America, the short story made an appearance in Edgar Allan Poe, Melville and Hawthorne.

The short story in India and in Bengal in particular, has had a pretty prolific career. Bankim Chandra authored some short fiction, but it is Rabindranath Tagore who took it to a level of thematic and formal fulfillment. The three stories that I have chosen for discussion in this essay are Kabuliwala, Hungry Stone and Subha, which are quite disparate in their focus and approach, attesting thereby to the multifarious reach of Tagore’s art and imagination. Of these, Kabuliwala and Subha are written in what we call the realist mode, while Hungry Stone is conceived within a supernatural or fantastic mode.

In his short but succinct introduction to the short story Ian Reid informs us that the short story is characterized by three formal features, which are “unity of impression,” “moment of crisis” and “symmetry of design.”¹ Symmetry of design refers to an Aristotelian “beginning” “middle” and “end” favored by short story critics like Edgar Allan Poe, who stressed a  tight knit structure and also emphasized the need for closure or a proper ending.  In The Modernist Short Story Dominic Head posits that the short story is a modernist genre, corresponding to the fragmented quality of modern existence, that the span of the story’s events is usually a day as it is in modernist novels like Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses,² and that in keeping with the experimental and innovative aesthetics of the modern project in Art,  it is also extremely self reflexive or self conscious in its artistry.³ Head also points out that Chekov claimed that his stories did not have any “end” but were all “middle” instead.³ Head also points out that in order to work within economical means the short story might use “ellipsis” ⁴ and “resonance”⁵ as artistic strategies.

Text and Context in the Art of Toni Morrison (cont)

In Song of Solomon, Morrison recreates what might be termed as a black and culturally specific bildungsroman, or an adventure story which has a black male as its central protagonist. European models of this genre, realized most specifically in the genre of narrative fiction, actually begin with epic examples like the Aenid, and grail stories like Parsifal.  They include Tom Jones, Humphry Clinker, The Sorrows of Young Werther, David Copperfield and the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as well as the The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 

 My contention in this paper is that Morrison creates a dialogue between the  “dominant” and “muted” of culture by fusing the specificity of black experience with a narrative model that is European. If she is capable of producing in Gates’s terms a “speakerly” text, she is also superbly capable of fusing “speakerly” with scripted traditions, and actually taking narrative to the borders of both the oral and the scripted.

In this novel, a young Black man, Milkman Dead, unwittingly goes in search of his origins as he looks for a treasure that his father and he believe lies buried in some cave in the South. Macon Dead, the father, was wedded to the American dream of power through material acquisition. In this context, it is important to say something about the name Dead, that Milkman and his family all bear. The name “Dead” stuck as a result of a drunken whim of a Yankee.  In a conversation with Thomas Le Clair Morrison talks about how black people lost their names and its psychological impact:

Text and Context in the Art of Toni Morrison...

If a text like Beloved helps to interiorize the life of the “anonymous people called slaves”⁵² through a process that is very “personal,”⁵³ and  if it helps to engage with history on an epic level, Song of Solomon, illuminates certain contexts of black cultural activism in the 1960’s. As Madhu Dubey tells us in Black Women Novelists and the Black  National Aesthetic, Black Nationalism and the Black Aesthetic movement  stressed the unified, historically undetermined black male agent who was perfectly free and autonomous.⁵⁴ In the age of militant black Nationalism, Black aestheticians preferred poetry and drama as suitable literary modes through which the black artist could communicate his message to a black community that was deemed or posited as unified.⁵⁵

Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon emerges as a critique of such unilateral positions. Madhu Dubey posits that black women writers of this period emerge as highly interrogative of both the seamless view of history that the black aestheticians and nationalists were positing, and also of the privileging of the black male subject.⁵⁶

Text and Context in the Art of Toni Morrison (cont)

Although, the last word or name in the novel is “Beloved,” Kristin Boudreau suggests that contrary to the reading of several critics that Beloved was “story” to pass on” and thereby underscoring the commitment  to history that Morrison has emphasized over and over again, perhaps one should take Morrison’s words at face value and accept the fact that it was indeed, “not a story to pass on.”⁴⁹ Boudreau’s contention is that it was “not a story to pass on” because Beloved finally becomes an absence.⁵⁰ She will always embody that part of African-American history that modern day African-Americans do not want to remember. If Morrison can gesture towards the necessity of remembering she can also suggest elliptically, the necessity of forgetting. There are no real closures in the novel. . All this ties in very neatly with the poststructuralist skepticism that history is not a definitive text. However, in keeping with Morrison’s avowed commitment to History, we may accept Caroline Rody’s position that the text embodies, “the affective aspect of history writing, insofar as the historiographic project enacts a relationship of desire, and emotional implication of present and past.”⁵¹

Beloved remains an artistic choice and a decision to partly exorcise a part of black history, which remained extremely difficult for modern day blacks to deal with, and in the process it provides “catharsis ” and “revelation.” It becomes a way of remembering the “Sixty Million and more” who died under slavery. The remembering and telling the past lived experience of one’s race acquires a moving subtext in the Biblical echoes of the novel’s opening epigraph:

I will call them my people,

Which were not my people ;

And her beloved

Which was not beloved.

The primary religious text of the oppressing powers is thus skillfully used  to become an  emotionally moving and artistically resonant way of claiming the marginalized and oppressed of history into mainstream discourse. The haunting poignancy f the lines suggests that justice can never really be done in claiming and reinstating those who have suffered, and the emphasis on the “her” that was not “beloved” also becomes a way of alluding to  the absence of woman from discourse.

After Beloved’s eruption into her “separate parts”⁴⁷ the moment of catharsis arrives for both the community and Sethe. In a magnificent and poetic rendering of Beloved’s retreat from the world of 124 Bluestone Road, Morrison writes,

Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don’t know her name? Although, she has claim, she is not claimed…⁴⁸

Text and Context in the Art of Toni Morrison (cont)

The narrator adds,

…in all of Baby’s life, as well  as Sethe’s own, men and women were moved around like checkers. Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved , who hadn’t run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought  back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized. So Baby’s eight children had six fathers.  What she called the nastiness of   life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.⁴³

             Where Morrison brings a new angle to an ancient motif of crime, guilt and retribution, is in her demonstration of how helplessness in protecting the best part of oneself, that is one’s children, might lead to extremely drastic choices. Morrison lays the ground for tragic irony and paradox in her novel when she tells Gloria Naylor in an interview, “..it’s interesting because the best thing that is in us is also the thing that makes us sabotage ourselves.”⁴⁴  It’s apposite that Morrison should say this, because in response  to Paul D’s accusation that her love was too “thick”⁴⁵ Sethe replies, “Love is or it ain’t . Thin love ain’t love at all. “ ⁴⁶ For many critics, Beloved symbolizes not only Sethe’s repressed past, but also the past of the race. This is why she is so powerful and for sometime at least, exerts a compelling presence in Sethe and
Denver’s life and even in the reader’s consciousness

Text and Context in the Art of Toni Morrison (cont)

Morrison’ work participates in the “dominant” in a number of ways. She tells LeClair in the interview referred to above, that she writes within the tragic mode and that her writing offers “catharsis” and “revelation.”³⁷ In this respect, one could also say that Morrison takes on the mantle of the African griot who healed through her stories.³⁸ In Woman Native Other, Trinh T Minh-Ha speaks about how a woman gifted with the hu and the evu ³⁹can take on the role of storyteller, sorceress, magician and healer for the community and also serve as its repository of tribal wisdom.⁴⁰ In an interview  with Nellie Mckay, Morrison refers to the role of the African griot,  and we wonder if she is taking on the same role herself.⁴¹  The strong historical orientation of her writing  brings  with it its own healing through the telling and retelling of traumatic events, effecting the purging of excess emotions, often residual in a people that have suffered a dehumanizing and dispossessed  history.

The process of catharsis is enacted through the haunting that the novel provides. 

Beloved reminds one of the Oresteia which contains similar instances of child murder and haunting. In the Oresteia, children are killed to square an outraged husband’s anger over his brother’s infidelity with his wife and the effects of this act continue through generations in the form of a dark and implacable fate. However, in Beloved, the choice to kill is made by the mother, rather than the father, and it is a choice that is historically conditioned. Slavery denied slaves the right to form families. As Baby Suggs tells Sethe,

My first –born. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can you beat that? Eight children and that’s all I remember.⁴²

Text and Context in the Art of Toni Morrison (continued)

Toni Morrison fills in all these omitted spaces and as Ashraf H.A. Rushdy suggests, presents a different order of signification altogether.³⁰ Beloved is about maternal narratives and the writing of the postcolonial text in the interruptions, dislocations, ellipses and the breakdown of the mother –daughter symbiotic relationship. The rewriting of the history of slavery and colonialism as a woman’s narrative, serves to put gender as the focal concern of the novel, as much as it is about reinstating the black voice and black presence experiencing history. In “Maternal Narratives: ‘Cruel Enough to Stop the Blood’” Marianne Hirsch posits that although feminist scholarship had explored motherhood and mother–daughter relationships from a variety of personal and disciplinary perspectives, “ most of these perspectives belonged to “daughters.”³¹ Beloved in that context becomes the “great unwritten story” of the mother herself, told in her own voice. ³²

In her article “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness, “ Elaine Showalter claims that although women’s writing may emanate from the “wild zone”³³ or the  spatial, experiential and metaphysical space which carries the “symbolic weight of female  consciousness”³⁴ making the “invisible visible and the “silent speak”³⁵, in “reality women’s writing is a double voiced discourse that always embodies the social, literary and cultural heritages of both the “muted” and the” dominant.” ³⁶

Text and Context in the Art of Toni Morrison (cont)

If a strong historical orientation characterizes Morrison’s work, then it is history told with a difference. In the essay “Daughters signifying(g) History: The Example of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, “ Ashraf H. Rushdy points out that Toni Morrison has provided an alternative text to the dominating text of  American history about slavery. ²⁷ Rushdy asserts that Morrison is engaged in historical reclamation, in bringing occluded subjects to the forefront of people’s consciousness and that she wishes to break the silence that prevails on the subject of slavery.²⁸ By centering the narrative on woman, Sethe, a slave mother,  Morrison engages in an act of double revisionism. She wishes to present slavery from the point of view of a woman’s consciousness—how such a woman would define her own agency as well as he identity, and what choices would be left to her when her “back is up against the wall”²⁹ Of course, we have Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), a narrative of the nineteenth century presenting slavery from the point of view of the woman. However, texts written at this time were papered over, with shocking details of slave life left out. Such a text often geared to a white audience, was full of silences and omissions.

Text and Context in the Art of Toni Morrison (cont)

A strong historical commitment characterizes Morrison’s work. As she tells LeClair in an interview in 1981,

My work bears witness and suggests who the outlaws were, who survived under what circumstances and why, what was legal in the community as opposed to what was legal outside it. All that is in the fabric of the story in order to do what the music used to do. The music kept us alive, but it’s not enough anymore. My people are being devoured. ²⁵

In the dedication to the novel Beloved (1988) Morrison states that it was dedicated to the “sixty million or more” who perished under slavery. She tells Bonnie Angelo in an interview in 1989 that she had felt that Beloved would be least read of her novels, because it is a subject on which a “national amnesia”²⁶(qtd. in Taylor-Guthrie, 257) prevails  where whites don’t  want to look at it and neither do blacks because of the quality of its dehumanization. 

Text and Context in the Art of Toni Morrison (cont)

By the continuous use of the word “holy” with reference to Suggs, her actions and the action unfolding in the story, is raised to a level of the deepest significance. Similarly, Suggs’ use of “O my people.”¹⁵while referring to the ex-black slaves, reveals not only a primal acoustical significance, but communicates the sense of an epic event. In an interview with Judith Wilson, Morrison comments that her style is “…very biblical and meandering and aural—you really have to hear it.”¹⁶ This is also how Morrison achieves “intimacy”¹⁷in the novels where the reader is drawn into the action in a participatory manner.

The story as “talk cure” facilitating healing for those scarred by personal and collective experience is best affected through the primal agency of orality, or speech. Thus, the origination of the term “talk cure’ in psychoanalysis, where through “return”¹⁸ to the repressed past, scarred and fragmented aspects of the self are claimed and conjoined, through the basic process of “harmony”¹⁹ embedded in sound experience. Since repetition and recall embedded in oral narration, create a “hearing dominant mode,”²⁰where the interiority of both speaker and listener is accessed, they help to reconnect with repressed and buried aspects of the self, which ultimately lead to healing. Thus the narrator’s constant use of the words “crawling already?”²¹ in Beloved, to describe the child Sethe murdered, allows the text to resurrect the ghost, and by an obsessive and constant “return” to it, allows the text, the narration and the character Sethe, to come out of the thrall that the past had clamped on both the narration and the character, Sethe. It is only through oral utterance of her story that Sethe is finally able to “lay. ..down…Sword and shield” ²²the “mess”²³of her life. A term coined for those texts that have a strong oral dimension is the term “speakerly,”²⁴ used by Henry Louis Gates in The Signifying Monkey to indicate those texts that resound with the speaking voice like Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. This aesthetic strategy could also be viewed as a revisionary strategy by black women writers to fashion and recast their writing traditions along lines of difference vis a vis dominant scripted traditions, both black and white.

Text and Context in the Art of Toni Morrison (cont)

One can therefore understand the importance of oral narration for a text like Beloved that is accessing some of the most buried and remote areas of the collective  psyche of a community that has undergone the trauma of slavery and the Middle Passage.¹⁰ The recursive patterns of oral narration, create a reverberating resonance that penetrates the “aural being”¹¹ of the reader, drawing him/her into the action. While referring to the “aural”¹² and oral dimensions of Beloved, let me focus on Baby Suggs who helps to concentrate these energies in the text. This is done through the  affixation of the word “holy”¹³  to her. She is Sethe’s mother-in-law, Sethe being the embodiment of generations of occluded black motherhood, who speaks in her own person in this text of revisionist historiography. Baby Suggs functions as the unfrocked priest who told the ex-slave congregation who gathered in a forest clearing in the post-abolition times that the novel is set in,  to claim themselves through an act of will.  She told them that,

The only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.¹⁴

Text and Context in the Art of Toni Morrison (cont)

In Orality and Literacy, Walter J. Ong explaining the “psychodynamics of orality”(31) asserts that not only is sound more interior than sight, but it also integrates and harmonizes vis a vis sight that isolates and perhaps distances.⁶   Besides, oral narration which allows the use of “formulary structures,”⁷  enables the repetition of sound motifs which help the reader to immerse himself/herself in sound if necessary.⁸  This is the significance of oral narration for culturally displaced people like the African-Americans,  which allows them to reconnect with the lost sounds of their culture, or helps them to revive and remember what they have lost. Indirectly, oral narration allows a certain ritual of remembering which is pivotal for cultural identity.⁹

Text and Context in the Art of Toni Morrison...

To Claudia Tate in another interview in  1983, Morrison  declares,

When I view the world, perceive it and write about it, it’s the world of black people. It’s not that I won’t write about white people. I just know that when  I’m trying to develop the various themes I write about, the people who best manifest those themes for me are the black people whom I invent. It’s not  deliberate or calculated or self-consciously black, because I recognize and despise the artificial black writing some writers do. I fell them slumming among black people.⁴

There are other contexts that frame Morrison’s writing. Two of the most pivotal are black music and black preaching or the black church service.  In the essay “Rootedness the Ancestor as Foundation,” she indicates how her art is related to music, oral aesthetics and the ritual of black church services:

There are things that I try to incorporate into my fiction that are directly and deliberately related to what I regard as the major characteristics of Black art, wherever it is. One of which is the ability to be both print and oral literature : to combine those two aspects so that the stories can be read in silence…but one should be able to hear them as well. It should try deliberately to make you stand up and make you feel something profoundly in the same way that a Black preacher requires his congregation to speak, to join him in the sermon, to behave in a certain way, to stand up and to weep and cry and to  accede and  to  change and to modify—to expand  on the sermon that is being delivered. In the same way that a musician’s music is enhanced when there is a response from the audience….I have to provide the places and spaces so that the reader can participate. Because it is the affective and participatory relationship between the artist or the speaker and the audience that is of primary importance, as it is in these other art forms that I have described.⁵

Text and Context in the Art of Toni Morrison

 This article was published in Essays and Studies XXVI, Jadavpur University, 2012

                                                                                                

At the very beginning of Woman Native Other Trinh T Minh Ha posits that a writer is “located at the intersection of subject and history”¹ whereby the positionality of each writer becomes intersected by race, class, gender and historical context. To these factors we might also add sexuality and language. Toni Morrison’s art, one of the richest,  most plural and diverse of contemporary women writers, makes brilliant use of context, without ever seeming to write from a programmed point of view. In an interview quoted in Terry Otten’s book the The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison, Morrison posits “The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.”² In an attempt to explain the overlapping categories of the regional and the universal in her work she tells Thomas LeClair in an interview in 1981,

 “It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. It is good-and universal—because it is specifically about a particular world.”³

Globalization and Gender: Kiran Desai...

In Guadeloupe-they love us there?

No. (77)

                Restaurant talk also introduces the subject of globalization:

“We need to get aggressive about Asia,” the business men said to each other….big buying power in the middle classes, China, India, potential for cigarettes, diapers, Kentucky Fried…this country is done …(136)

Another aspect of globalization is the journey of basmati rice,(you might know about it if you eat in Indian restaurants) the finest Indian rice to Indian restaurants in America.  It’s  journey parallels Biju’s own:

Looking at a dead insect in the sack of basmati that had come all the way from Dehra Dun, he almost wept in sorrow and marvel at its journey, which was tenderness for his own journey. In India almost nobody would be able to afford this rice, and you had to travel around the world to be able  to eat such things where they  were cheap enough that you could gobble them down without being rich; and when you got home to the place where they grew, you couldn’t afford them anymore (191)

So, this is the story of the three writers that I wanted to talk about. They all use the generic dimensions of the novel to suit their own purposes of history telling, story telling and social documentation. Language is more or less referential, expressing reality as it is perceived. There is however, rich indigenization of the English language to mark it as Rao would have wanted, with the specific origin of Indian Writing in English. Regarding the aspect of “gender” that the title promises to talk about, there is nothing feminist per se in any of these novels, except affirming the radical and iconoclastic identity of Rahel, the girl twin in The God of Small Things. Also, there is little poststructuralist skepticism of narration itself. Language is held as an important mediator between truth, nation and history.

Globalization and Gender continued...

History and what we may call postcolonialism and globalization, is one of the biggest actors in Desai’s novel The Inheritance of Loss. Linking the  lives of several families, within a social sweep that is almost encyclopaedic, Desai writes a novel where a  circularity of design and a symmetry of structure, affirm some sort of closure as both aesthetic principle and life’s resolution. Since the purview of this paper is short, I will only focus on what is global or what refers to globalization in Desai’s text. It is sometimes humorously and sometimes pathetically realized. Parallel to middle and uppermiddle class diaspora to the New World, is the journey of the cook’s son Biju

Biju goes to America on a tourist visa and never comes back. Initially he works for Baby Bistro and Le Colonial which was,

 “On top rich colonial, and  down below, poor native. Colombian, Tunisian, Ecuadorian and Gambian…….There was a whole world in the basement kitchens of New York, but Biju was ill equipped for it..”(21-22)

 He next  works for a steak shop called Brigitte, where the owner’s wife smells a particular brand of oil in his hair. Selling “holy cow”(135) as beef and therefore “unholy cow”(135 ) to customers including Indians, becomes too much for Biju. He eventually goes to work for the vegetarian Gandhi Café whose owner is a man called Harish, who also bears the name Harry. In fact, his dual name Harish-Harry becomes a point of fine irony throughout the text as an example of the commodification of the self that many Indians abroad put themselves through.

“Harish-Harry—the two names, Biju was learning, indicated a deep rift that he hadn’t suspected when he first walked in and found him, a manifestation of that clarity of principle which Biju was seeking. ..He[Harish] tried to keep on the right side of power, tried to be loyal to so many things that he himself couldn’t tell which one of his selves was authentic, if any (147-148).

Biju who  “possessed an awe of white people”(77) and a “lack of generosity regarding almost everyone else,”(77) learns from other kitchens how Indians are disliked everywhere:

In Tanzania, if they could they would throw them (Indians) out like      they did in Uganda

In Madagascar, if they could, they would throw them out.

In Nigeria, if they could, they would throw them out.

In Fiji, if they could, they would throw them out.

In China, they hate them

Globalization and Gender continued...

History and what we may call postcolonialism and globalization, is one of the biggest actors in Desai’s novel The Inheritance of Loss. Linking the  lives of several families, within a social sweep that is almost encyclopaedic, Desai writes a novel where a  circularity of design and a symmetry of structure, affirm some sort of closure as both aesthetic principle and life’s resolution. Since the purview of this paper is short, I will only focus on what is global or what refers to globalization in Desai’s text. It is sometimes humorously and sometimes pathetically realized. Parallel to middle and uppermiddle class diaspora to the New World, is the journey of the cook’s son Biju

Biju goes to America on a tourist visa and never comes back. Initially he works for Baby Bistro and Le Colonial which was,

 “On top rich colonial, and  down below, poor native. Colombian, Tunisian, Ecuadorian and Gambian…….There was a whole world in the basement kitchens of New York, but Biju was ill equipped for it..”(21-22)

 He next  works for a steak shop called Brigitte, where the owner’s wife smells a particular brand of oil in his hair. Selling “holy cow”(135) as beef and therefore “unholy cow”(135 ) to customers including Indians, becomes too much for Biju. He eventually goes to work for the vegetarian Gandhi Café whose owner is a man called Harish, who also bears the name Harry. In fact, his dual name Harish-Harry becomes a point of fine irony throughout the text as an example of the commodification of the self that many Indians abroad put themselves through.

“Harish-Harry—the two names, Biju was learning, indicated a deep rift that he hadn’t suspected when he first walked in and found him, a manifestation of that clarity of principle which Biju was seeking. ..He[Harish] tried to keep on the right side of power, tried to be loyal to so many things that he himself couldn’t tell which one of his selves was authentic, if any (147-148).

Biju who  “possessed an awe of white people”(77) and a “lack of generosity regarding almost everyone else,”(77) learns from other kitchens how Indians are disliked everywhere:

In Tanzania, if they could they would throw them (Indians) out like      they did in Uganda

In Madagascar, if they could, they would throw them out.

In Nigeria, if they could, they would throw them out.

In Fiji, if they could, they would throw them out.

In China, they hate them

Globalization and Gender: God of Small Things (continued)

And the effect of his silence on his other twin was to give her a hollowness and  emptiness:

that the emptiness in one twin was only a version of the quietness in the other.(21)

 The powerful critique that the story mounts is not only against the entrenched forms of social hierarchy in  India, and their continued tenacity, but also how this society may also seem inhospitable towards love. It is important to point out however, in this context, that the setting of Roy’s story is a village in Kerala,(Ayemenem),  and not a city. Within urban contexts, the question of caste bigotry is less pronounced and in many cases, non-existent. What Roy puts on the stage is a specific kind of truth, perhaps true of some parts of India. But it is not a uniformly national reality, but she has been able to make it global by using the English language.

  What is even more ironic in this story is that the vehemence against broken caste taboos is practiced by a family that is Christian—Syrian Christian, whose forbears came to India in the 4^th century A.D.  And a savagely ironic twist is further given  to the story by the fact  that the person who informed on the illicit lovers is  the Untouchable man’s own father, who was terror-stricken that his son had dared to flout centuries old conventions thereby venturing into the “unthinkable” and “impossible.”  

Critics of Arundhati’s story say that she was playing up to Western audiences by giving them exactly the kind of story that they want to hear about India. In fact, there are references to the “Heart of Darkness”  a couple of times in the novel, referring to the dark jungle in which Velutha takes shelter. Arundhati’s valuation of this jungle seems ambivalent. Does she mean that India is a” heart of darkness”? However,  her work is honest and forthright, delving deep into a tragedy that  by most accounts was deeply personal , herself being one of the twins involved in the story.  In the process she unveils a rural society, where people  like the Syrian Christian  Ipe family may be literate and wealthy, but still ruled by centuries of Indian caste taboos. This is a novel about which one can apply Morrison’s famous pronouncement that all great art is political but irrevocably beautiful as well.  

Globalization and Gender: Bapsi Sidhwa (concluded) and Arundhuti Roy (begun)

The story reaches its tragic climax when Muslims headed by the Ice Candy Man come to look for Ayah because she is Hindu and Lenny gives out that she is hiding in the house. Lenny’s mother had informed the mob that ayah had gone back to India, but Lenny submitted to Ice Candy Man’s cajoling of her to tell the truth and his assurance that he would never hurt ayah. The result of the truth telling is that   Ice Candy Man then drags ayah out of the room and the mob then take her away on a cart.

In spite of the fact that the narrator of this novel is a child and the events focalized through a child’s consciousness, Sidhwa’s novel is political in the way that Morrison says all great art must be. I don’t know if Sidhwa writes a great book, but perhaps reflecting the opinion of the more mature Lenny who reconstructs her experience over time, bad press is given to the Indian leaders Gandhi and Nehru, while Jinnah is praised. Regarding the relationship of this book to “globalization” which is the topic of today’s paper, I would say that Sidhwa puts in the map of English literature, the specific history of the partition of India and indigenizes English in her own way by using words like   “badmash”( naughty,) “choorails” (witches), “khutputti” (puppets).

The next author or writer Arundhati Roy is an activist of sorts who speaks out  against rampant technologisation and globalization  in India  as well as U.S. imperialism. In The God of Small Things she   weaves a tragic story of a pair of two-egg twins caught and destroyed  in the fatal net created when their beautiful thirty-one year old divorced  mother has an affair with a so called Untouchable man, and the affair is discovered by her family. The story set in rural Kerala in the 1960’s achieves tragic intensity as the inseparable twins who thought of themselves as “WE” and “US” are separated and the boy Estha sent away to his father, after which he permanently stops talking .This is how Roy describes Estha’s quietness and descent into silence. Her language I feel, can rival the best of English writing done by anyone, achieving a  density,  and visual intensity that  is reminiscent of Keats:

Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of  his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory, dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip  of his tongue (13)

Globalization and Gender (continued). This part deals with Bapsi Sidhwa's novel, Ice Candy Man

As Lenny grows observing the many kinds of sexual interplay between the two principal contestants for Ayah’s affections, the masseur and the ice candy man, how the Ice Candy man wiggled his toes under ayah’s sari and masseur put his hand inside her blouse, and packs in details of how her family dealt with her polio, how her mother spoke about her bowel movements to Gandhiji, and how Gandhi seemed a cross between a clown and a demon ,how her godmother looked like a “dolphin” and godmother’s sister emerged from her bath looking like “melting tallow and oozing moisture from powdered pores” (165)   the story of the bloodbath that the Partition of India was,  unfolds through a child’s consciousness.  The Ice-Candy Man comes one day while the little group or ayah and her admirers were sitting  in the back  lawn of Lenny’s house,  and frantically announces, 

A train from Gurdaspur has just come in,” he announces, panting. ‘everyone in it is dead. Butchered. They are all Muslim. There are no young women among the dead.  Only two gunny bags full of women’s breasts.

Eventually, when Hindus die in a mass massacre there is elation on Ice Candy Man’s face:                           

 There is the roar of a   hundred throats: “Allah o Akbar. Ice Candy Man stoops over us, looking concerned; the muscles in his face tight with a strange  exhilaration I never  again want to see(135).

Globalization and Gender(continued)

Bapsi Sidhwa’s  third novel Ice Candy Man and also known as Cracking India in the U.S, was written in 1988 and  focuses on the Partition of India. Sidhwa is technically Pakistani, although, now an American citizen. Sidhwa belongs to the Parsee community of India/Pakistan, the Zorastrian  Parsis having arrived to India  from Iran or Persia  in the 7^th and 8^th centuries A.D., in order to escape forced conversion to Islam. Ice Candy Man, focalized through the child narrator Lenny, an eight year old child stricken with polio, weaves the personal and the political, family events and national catastrophe  with insight, sympathy, pain and humour. Set in Lahore, one of the great cities of undivided India, but now belonging to Pakistan because of its Muslim majority, the story centers around Lenny’s Hindu ayah or maid who was the object of adoration of various men hailing from the various small trades of Indian society at that time—Sharbat Khan(Muslim) the knife sharpener, Masseur( Muslim), the Ice Candy Man (Muslim), Hari, the gardener who later turns Muslim in order to survive and the Sikh, Sher Singh, the zoo keeper:

I lie on the grass, my head on Ayah’s lap basking in—and intercepting –the warm flood of stares  directed at  Ayah by her circle of admirers. The Falletis Hottel cook, the Government House gardener, a sleek and arrogant butcher and the zoo attendant, Sher Singh, sit with us. (88)