The Writing Imaginary of Shumona Sinha.” Crossings in Women’S Writing in French in the Twenty-First Century, Crossways Journal, No3.1 (2019)

Lee, Mark D. “Crossing Boundaries External & Internal: The Writing Imaginary of Shumona Sinha.” Crossings in Women’s Writing in French in the Twenty-First Century, Crossways Journal, No3.1 (2019)

Crossing Boundaries External & Internal: The Writing Imaginary of Shumona Sinha

Mark D. Lee Mount Allison University Canada

Shumona Sinha is part of the current generation of authors writing – among many things – the immigrant experience in France. Topical and at times acutely contentious, the question of immigration and immigrants, of who is a foreigner, has been repeatedly politicized in France as elsewhere in Europe, eliciting reaction ranging from hospitality to hostility. Through a close reading of two of Sinha’s recent works this article will explore the limits of gender, space, person and imagination encountered by transnational narrators – border crossers by definition – who find themselves directly or indirectly involved in transgressive acts of violence. The first part of this study will frame a traumatic scene of public violence between immigrants at the center of Sinha’s 2011 novel, Assommons les pauvres!. In exploring the boundaries this violent act crosses, we see the novel’s narrator seeking but ultimately failing to fully grasp the object and the source of her wrath, suspecting it lies across a different border. The second part of the study traces out the echo from this exterior assault to a similar but different portrayal of ‘intimate’ violence in Sinha’s subsequent novel, Calcutta (2014). I propose that, in order to come to terms with an inordinately intense and unresolved attack against an Other posited as Foreigner committed in the public space of Assommons les pauvres!, we must leave the external and, guided by Sinha’s narrator and Freud’s notion of the uncanny – the unheimlich in German, the inquiétante étrangeté in French – we should turn inwards, to cross into the intimate space of ‘home’ found in Calcutta. Following a path through stories of family origins, we are led in this novel to a transgressive, erotic scene of violence and rupture inhabiting the narrator’s imagination. By moving from the dramatic, exterior violence between immigrants that caught the reading public’s eye when Assommons les pauvres! first appeared, to the elaboration of a foundational, interior violence in Calcutta, Sinha brings into the light the shadowy, uncanny Other that Kristeva in her reading of Freud identifies within all of us1. A border-crosser par excellence, Sinha, I contend crosses limits both external and internal and in so doing encounters a scene of poetic richness at the heart of her literary imagination that few authors find or are able to bring into writing.

Student, Translator, Author: From Kolkata to Paris Although a relatively recent immigrant to France, Sinha was by 2017 already the author of four works of fiction in French that have garnered several awards. Since her personal journey and – as we shall see – her literary imagination perform the crossing of multiple boundaries, let me briefly present this author and her works. Lee, Mark D. “Crossing Boundaries External & Internal: The Writing Imaginary of Shumona Sinha.” Crossings in Women’s Writing in French in the Twenty-First Century, Crossways Journal, No3.1 (2019)

Born in Kolkata in 1973, Shumona Sinha grew up in a Bengali, middle-class family. In India she wrote poetry, studied literature at university and in 2001 moved to Paris where she pursued a DEA in French literature at the Sorbonne and worked as an English language assistant in gritty banlieue schools on the periphery of Paris. While establishing herself as a writer in France, Sinha also worked as a translator of poetry and as an interpreter and translator for OFPRA,2 the French administration that deals with refugee claims. In 2008 she brought out her first novel, Fenêtre sur l’abîme, with a smaller publisher, Éditions de la Différence. However it was in 2011 that she truly moved onto the national radar with Assommons les pauvres!, a novel whose vivid prose and topical subject – immigrants and immigration – caught the attention of the public and literary journalists. Published like her subsequent novels by Éditions de L’Olivier, this book went on to win the Prix Valéry Larbaud in France while its popular and critical success continued in translation, especially in German-speaking countries.3 Her next novel, Calcutta, appeared in 2014. This narrative of an Indo-French character who returns to her hometown for her father’s funeral rites was also recognized with literary distinctions, notably the Prix du rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises, and the Grand prix du roman de la Société des gens de lettres. Her most recent work dates from 2017. Apatride is the striking account of three female characters whose lives tangentially overlap yet significantly reverberate with each other as they negotiate public and private space in France and India. An Indian national, next an immigrant and now a French citizen, Shumona Sinha has adopted with remarkable success France and French as the site of her literary creation.4

Assommons les pauvres!: Immigrant, Interpreter… Assailant By borrowing the title of her novel from Baudelaire’s well-known, eponymous prose poem, Sinha, the ostensible foreigner, tacitly announces the inscription of her thoroughly contemporary text about immigrants in an illustrious French tradition of poetic rule-breakers. To understand the boundaries crossed and the issues raised in Sinha’s Assommons les pauvres!, and before probing its intertextual relation to Baudelaire, we first need to investigate the novel’s plot, structure and narrative strategies.

Written from a first-person and essentially a retrospective point of view, Assommons les pauvres! starts in media res with an anonymous female narrator waiting overnight in a damp holding cell. She reflects on how she has ended up here and prepares herself for further questioning about the assault she is accused of committing the previous evening. The ostensible time-frame of the novel is this long, uncomfortable night of incarceration, a night punctuated by furtive dreams and memories that will make up the book’s twenty-two chapters. Written in an often remarkably poetic prose, these chapters – each with its own title and varying in length from three to nine pages – have our protagonist revisit not only moments from her personal life as a single, non-European woman living in a contemporary Western metropolis (France and Paris are not explicitly named in the text), but also Lee, Mark D. “Crossing Boundaries External & Internal: The Writing Imaginary of Shumona Sinha.” Crossings in Women’s Writing in French in the Twenty-First Century, Crossways Journal, No3.1 (2019) and more often scenes of her professional life as an official interpreter for refugee claimants – des requérants. The claimants whose stories she translates are principally men hailing from the same unnamed, southern part of the world from which she legally emigrated in the not too distant past. The narrator’s thoughts may wander through memories of the personal and the professional, however they start, finish and repeatedly, inexorably intersect with the focal moment of assault that led her to incarceration in this cell. As stated in the opening pages, she will try during her narrative to explain to herself and to Monsieur K, the officer charged with investigating her case, why when taking the metro the previous evening on her way to a potentially romantic meeting, suddenly “noire de haine et écumante de mots d’insulte” (Sinha, Assommons les pauvres! 10) she lashes out and strikes a man over the head with a wine bottle. The man we learn is a requérant who had recognized her as an interpreter. He had harassed her in the underground corridors with pleas that, in the metro car, escalate to threats and insults, demanding she give him inside tips on how to improve his chances of making a successful claim.

Jailhouse narratives – from Camus’ L’Étranger to Sow Fall’s Douceurs du bercail – are legion in literature and rich in dramatic possibility. They set a confined space from which a prisoner may recount the events that led her to this place. Here, doubt is never cast as to whether the narrator struck the man or not. The pressing question she, her interrogator and the narrative seek to answer is not merely why she broke the tacit social contract of non-aggression against one’s fellow-man, nor why she crossed the boundary from verbal to physical violence, but rather ‘why did she cross that boundary with such vehemence?’. The quite obvious explanation is that she acted in self-defense : the man had grabbed her by the collar just before she struck him with the wine bottle she was taking to a dinner. No one else in the metro seemed to be intervening to help her. But this simple account does not do justice to the complexity of the odd relationship she finds herself in with respect to her victim. The fact that the narrator and Monsieur K. come back again and again to the attack signals not only its traumatizing impact and disturbing character from a judicial or societal point of view. Its varied repetition and questioning also communicate that this transgressive act and the narrator’s imperative need to reset a physical boundary between herself and her victim resist understanding, defying cognitive apprehension. In order to grasp what here seeks but fails to find direct articulation, yet nevertheless signals its resistant presence through narrative iteration, we will need first to identify the limits abruptly crossed.

This Other/Foreigner Who Is (not) Me: Gender, Truth, Class A fundamental characteristic of the assault is that it reveals an unresolved tension, a blurred boundary of sameness and difference or mêmeté et altérité lying between the two parties. From the perspective of European Monsieur K and in her own eyes, the narrator admits at the start of the novel that “[m]a couleur de peau, couleur d’argile (…) me rapprocherait toujours de l’homme que j’ai agressé” (Sinha, Assommons les pauvres! 13). But she next reflects, “il n’était pas Lee, Mark D. “Crossing Boundaries External & Internal: The Writing Imaginary of Shumona Sinha.” Crossings in Women’s Writing in French in the Twenty-First Century, Crossways Journal, No3.1 (2019) nécessaire d’être perspicace pour repérer les divergences entre lui et moi” (Sinha, Assommons les pauvres! 13-14). While skin-colour and language may bring them together, woven throughout the narrative are the proclaimed divergences that separate them. They will help us understand what boundaries of difference her lashing out pushes her victim across, making him Other, keeping him foreign, étranger, both administratively and ontologically.

A first, significant feature distinguishing the narrator from her victim is gender. In her job as interpreter she sits in an interview room beside an official, most often also a woman, who from behind a computer questions the applicant, most often a man: “Les officiers les interrogeaient, ils répondaient, je traduisais, je faisais le trait-d’union entre eux” (Sinha, Assommons les pauvres! 29). With experience, the narrator learns that while some stories of persecution told by claimants are plausible and will go forward, the majority are untruthful and have been purchased along with their clandestine passage to Europe:

Les récits ressemblaient aux récits. Aucune différence. Sauf quelques détails, de date et de nom, d’accent et de cicatrice. C’était comme si une seule et unique histoire était racontée par des centaines d’hommes, et la mythologie était devenue la vérité (Sinha, Assommons les pauvres! 10-11).

Filled with contradictions, poorly rehearsed, the stories often fall apart when a few follow-up questions are asked of the claimants who at times assume that, as men, they can dominate or even seduce their female interrogators with their supposedly innate charm, wit or authority. When caught out in a lie, these men first blame the narrator-translator for not knowing their language and then use patriarchy to try to put her back in her place:

Ils avaient le droit de critiquer mon travail, puisque aucune femme digne de ce nom ne travaille. Aucune femme qu’ils reconnaissaient de près ou de loin comme une voisine du village ne descendait aussi bas pour s’exposer au monde, s’obliger à gagner sa vie toute seule (…) Et de surcroît n’osait interroger eux, les hommes ! (Sinha, Assommons les pauvres! 27).

Being not only a woman, but educated, possessing legal status in the country, financially independent and wielding authority sets the narrator apart from these claimants who likely see her as a potentially sympathetic compatriot, or someone who in their society of origin they feel entitled to dominate. The narrator states that, faced with their invasive “mots mensongers, mots mesquins, mots tentaculaires”, she could “fracasser un crane” (Sinha, Assommons les pauvres! 27). She wonders as she thinks this if the officer might not be right to see her refusal to believe their lies and to be dominated by a man as the source of her vehemence.

Another important divergence between herself and her victim is social class, at times readable on her body. Asked during her deposition why she immigrated to this country, the narrator answers by speaking of her “amour de la langue”, “le désir né de longues heures passées auprès des livres” (Sinha, Assommons les pauvres! 15). Monsieur K challenges her, asking if her attack does not in fact show her to be “capable de haïr ceux qui ne peuvent pas atteindre votre niveau intellectuel ? Ceux qui sont restés au pied de l’échelle ?” (Sinha, Assommons les pauvres! 16). This thread is picked up again and again during the book. Remembering time spent among claimants at a community center our narrator somewhat proudly sets herself apart, turning to body and clothing as features that separate her from her ethnic compatriots, proclaiming herself to be “[l]’anomalie dans la logique de mort et de misère. Mon corps démentait l’image larmoyante de mon pays (…) Mes robes gaies restaient comme le drapeau d’une vie meilleure” (Sinha, Assommons les pauvres! 124). However, what had initially disconcerted her the evening she encountered this man in the metro was precisely “la ressemblance défigurée de nos corps”. She thus attempts to re-establish a boundary of difference with these remarks : “La même peau d’argile, la sienne moins luisante, en manque de bons repas et de bonne crème sans doute (…) il dégage (…) une odeur de misère, qu’on reconnaît de loin et qui nous arrête” (Sinha, Assommons les pauvres! 134). When the man approaches the narrator in a passageway and addresses her in “la langue de ma mère et de mon père et des amis innombrables que j’ai laissés derrière la barrière en acier de l’aéroport” (Sinha, Assommons les pauvres! 134), she feels embarrassed, shuts him down and hurries away. Finally when he corners her in a metro car and again verbally harasses her, the encounter escalates. He grabs her by the collar and in a violent rage she brandishes the wine bottle bought for her anticipated romantic evening, aiming for the man’s head, saying to herself: “je ne joue pas à la petite bourge bien élevée” (Sinha, Assommons les pauvres! 144).5

Violence, Class, Dignity: Baudelaire The novel’s title, an explicit reference to Baudelaire’s famous prose poem of the same name can now help us read the boundary-crossing assault at the center of Sinha’s novel. In Baudelaire’s “Assommons les pauvres!” a haughty, well-heeled poet-figure beats a beggar in the street. However, to his surprise and perverse pleasure the beggar unexpectedly strikes him back, to which the poet declares: “Monsieur, vous êtes mon égal!” (Baudelaire 359). His somewhat twisted conclusion is that the mendicant reclaims pride and dignity by meeting blows with blows. As Anne-Marie Picard concludes in her analysis of Sinha’s novel, this episode poses “la dignité comme précondition à toute revendication d’égalité” (Picard 8). In a similar fashion, Sinha’s narrator tries to justify her attack in this exchange with the interrogating officer: “Peut-être que j’ai agressé l’homme car (…) [à] mes yeux, leur misère ne justifiait pas leur maladresse et leurs mensonges, leur agressivité et leur mesquinerie” (Sinha, Assommons les pauvres! 51-52). To which Monsieur K counters : “Vous pensez que vous avez le droit de corriger toute seule un système soi-disant mensonger ?” (Sinha, Assommons les pauvres! 52). Lee, Mark D. “Crossing Boundaries External & Internal: The Writing Imaginary of Shumona Sinha.” Crossings in Women’s Writing in French in the Twenty-First Century, Crossways Journal, No3.1 (2019)

Thus, according to the interpretation suggested through the intertext, the blow dealt by the narrator serves a particular goal: to shake-up the foreigner-migrant, to summon him to take back the dignity of a decision made without falsehood. Just as the narrator has ostensibly made the choice to immigrate on the basis of her own, true and lucid story, she enjoins the migrant – admittedly in a very violent manner – to do likewise. Recognition and Misrecognition: The Beggar Strikes Back If, however, everything were so clear, if the narrator did fully master her own story and role in this transgression she would be able to articulate succinctly, lucidly the reasons and the range of her actions. Yet this is not the case at the novel’s end. As dawn breaks the narrator is still in doubt and distress. She wonders whether Monsieur K’s final, somewhat simpler vision of her before her victim might not indeed have a ring of truth to it. According to one of the officer’s final hypotheses, the narrator is a recent immigrant whose “dévouement pour ce pays d’accueil est suspect par son excès” (Sinha, Assommons les pauvres! 145), an educated woman whose “amour pour l’un n’est au fond que la haine de l’autre. Elle prend dans ses bras ceux qu’elle connait le moins, et repousse son peuple pour éviter de se voir en face” (Sinha, Assommons les pauvres! 145). Despite the legitimate argument of self-defense against an imminent threat, and alongside her summons that the migrant take back his dignity and be truthful, the assault is here framed as a displaced act of self-loathing. I wish to suggest that, oddly enough, the narrator has indeed glimpsed herself en face in this encounter. Despite all the proclaimed differences and attempts to make the asylum-seeker ‘not me’, foreign, or ‘Other’, her attack constitutes an ‘acte manqué’, a parapraxis where opposite desires are condensed into a single action. By means of her aggression she lashes out at this man, pushing him across the boundary to make him étranger, Other. And, as she strikes this Other she also deals a blow to a deformed, troubling version of Self-as- Other, but which she cannot fully fathom or articulate. It is this dimly perceived realization that ‘strikes’ her in return. That is to say, it is as if – by a twist not directly stated in the novel but embedded in the density of the Baudelarian intertext – Sinha’s lower-class migrant-foreigner, like Baudelaire’s beggar, metaphorically strikes back at his higher-class wordsmith assailant. He shakes her certainties about herself and suggests there lurks a hint of égalité, of sameness between the two. The boundaries between assailant and assaulted are thoroughly blurred in this crossing and, moreover, the idea of crossing is itself re-inscribed on a meta-level in the intertextual play between twenty-first-century novel and nineteenth-century prose poem.

The Haunted Home: Freud and the Uncanny The end of the novel leaves the narrator in a perplexing confusion of recognition and misrecognition that sends her in a new direction with an as yet unrealized mission. Thinking now of her victim, this familiar yet foreign Other, makes our narrator want to reach for a mirror: “je cherche désespérément un miroir (…). J’ai besoin de me voir. Le miroir a un effet souvenir. (…) Au fond de nous, il y a une maison hantée, un pays déserté” (Sinha, Assommons les pauvres! 148). And her Lee, Mark D. “Crossing Boundaries External & Internal: The Writing Imaginary of Shumona Sinha.” Crossings in Women’s Writing in French in the Twenty-First Century, Crossways Journal, No3.1 (2019) final, enigmatic injunction to herself at the close of the narration is “Il est temps de rentrer” (Sinha 2011: 149). Indeed, this inward turn is announced both at the very start and at the end of her narration where the protagonist of Assommons les pauvres! states that, since the assault and during this night, she is driven by an odd, unfulfilled wish: “je ne cesse de dessiner l’arbre généalogique de ma famille” (Sinha, Assommons les pauvres! 9, 139). She shifts from the outside world to a return home – ‘rentrer’ – to a search for the story of family origins leading to a deeply buried, interior ‘haunted house’. All these elements put us in the discourse of Freud’s uncanny, the unheimlich, or inquiétante étrangeté in French. As Freud tells us, the uncanny – literally the ‘un-homely’ – is not something new or foreign that troubles us, but rather something familiar that, having been censured, repressed, unpredictably returns to consciousness in a form oddly similar yet strange (in French ‘étranger’), familiar but de-familiarized (Freud, “The Uncanny” 241). Among the classic representations of the uncanny in literature and fantasy, Freud notes doll-like doubles of humans, eerie haunted houses but also and especially the fear of being buried alive, which he underscores is a fantasy for a return to that ultimate home, the womb, “the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us has lived once upon a time and in the beginning” (Freud, “The Uncanny” 244). I propose that the project of going home – rentrer – is imaginatively elaborated in Sinha’s 2014 novel, Calcutta, as an unwitting interrogation of the dilemma encountered in Assommons les pauvres!. This inward turn will lead Calcutta’s main character across the border of time, memory and imagination to the foreign yet familiar, to an uncanny double of the scene of public aggression we have been reading in Assommons les pauvres!. Inside, deep within the home – the heim – readers will encounter a defamiliarized, unheimlich scene of intimate, eroticized violence in Calcutta that, when read alongside the assault in the metro, further complicates the border with this Other.

Calcutta: Revolvers and Riddles in the Womb Calcutta starts as the first-person narrative where an unnamed daughter rushes to India from Paris for her father’s funeral rites. His body is cremated shortly after her arrival and she then retreats to the now empty family home to grieve. Having fallen asleep the narrator awakens to wonder that she hasn’t yet seen her mother, saying, “J’avais peur de ma mère, j’avais peur de ce qu’on appelait sa folie” (Sinha, Calcutta 15, original emphasis). This narration stops. The novel starts again but this time in the third person, beginning once more with the arrival from France of a daughter, now named Trisha, for her father’s funeral. Over the following thirteen titled chapters we learn about Trisha’s life as an only child with her father Shankya – a physics professor and communist party militant – and with her mother Urmila – a high school literature teacher subject to severe bouts of depression. They most often also share their home with her father’s bedridden mother, Annapurna, who near the end of the novel transmits a family history to Trisha. The final chapter sees a sudden return to the same first-person point of view with which the novel opened. The mother has arrived at the family house where she and daughter Lee, Mark D. “Crossing Boundaries External & Internal: The Writing Imaginary of Shumona Sinha.” Crossings in Women’s Writing in French in the Twenty-First Century, Crossways Journal, No3.1 (2019) speak the entire day to fill the emptiness left by the deceased father whom they await, in vain, as night falls.

Written in a lusciously imaged prose, the majority of Calcutta is composed of multiple stories, both stark and humorous, ostensibly focalized through Trisha’s point of view. Although it does give glimpses of Shankya’s political involvement across periods of social upheaval and violence in Bengal, both before and after Trisha was born, overall Calcutta is a novel of origins, meaning it deals in great part with Trisha’s account of how her parents met, later wed and struggled to maintain a strained marriage. Indeed it also presents itself, especially in the last quarter of the book, as a roman familial or family romance in the Freudian sense of this designation, which is to say we get here Trisha’s understanding of the perhaps fantasized, imagined origins of Shankya’s genealogy.6 While there may be other organizing principles at work, a key leitmotif of latent violence structures the narration and indeed the narrator’s imaginary: the repeated return of a revolver culminating in a private, violent and erotic exchange, as recounted to Trisha by Annapurna, her paternal grandmother. In tracing her family tree down to the roots of its passionate inception, deep within a womb-like space, the narrator wittingly or unwittingly creates echoes between this encounter and the assault at the center of Assommons les pauvres!, encouraging us to read these transgressive scenes as strange versions of each other, performing an uncanny crossing between these books.

The opening page and the final section of Assommons les pauvres! has this almost identical sentence:

je ne cesse de dessiner l’arbre généalogique de ma famille, les lignes de mes pensées et de mes errances, les combinaisons du temps et de l’espace, pour justifier ma trajectoire, reconstituer la scène, pour qu’on comprenne mon désir enfoui dans le sang, mon désir subit à l’instant où j’ai frappé l’homme, un de ces immigrés (Sinha, Calcutta 139-140).

Trisha’s narration starts with a memory triggered by seeing in her parents’ house a faded “couette rouge” [red comforter] that had belonged to her father: “Elle sait quelle énigme se cache dans son ventre cotonneux” (Sinha, Calcutta 27). She recounts a memory of awakening one night as a child to go to the toilet and spying her father “fouiner désepérément dans les couvertures. (…) Elle comprit qu’il ne cherchait rien mais cachait quelque chose” (Sinha, Calcutta 30). Several days later, she goes back to discover, deep in the couette “[u]n revolver caché dans le pollen de coton” (Sinha, Calcutta 31), and takes the fact of this gun as “un signe de [la] vie secrete” (Sinha, Calcutta 32), of the adults in her life. What is this secret life, this latent agent of violence hidden in the womb-like space of the comforter?

Calcutta and Trisha are fascinated with revolvers, a leitmotif which comes back in shorter and more extended references at least ten more times in the narration. On the one hand, this daughter mourns her father and his life as an intellectual and activist. In this context the gun patently symbolizes the danger that was all around Shankya as an adult, and the mystery of how he managed to escape death when so many others in his entourage were killed during moments of political upheaval. Yet, the descriptions of a revolver buried quite explicitly, like an “énigme” in red bedding, within the “ventre cotonneux” [cottony belly/womb] of this “couette rouge”, all suggest a womb-like site of secret intimacy and origins, perhaps of a forbidden, potentially violent, erotic knowledge. Indeed, this instrument of violence secretly buried in womb-like space and itself deep within the space of home recall Freud’s identification of the fantasy of a return to the womb as a fundamental example of the unheimlich. Moreover, it reverberates with the previous novel’s narrator and her unresolved quest to understand the assault arising from her “désir enfoui dans le sang” (Sinha, Calcutta 140).

Comme un crachat: Going All The Way Heim/Home By far the most dramatic, significant example of a revolver in Calcutta comes as a sudden reappearance in the story of family origins remembered by Trisha as told to her by Annapurna, her paternal grandmother. Annapurna relates it to her fascinated granddaughter, Trisha, as Shankya, Annapurna’s son, overhears the account from the next room. He casts doubt on its veracity and is oddly left “pétrifié d’horreur et de dégoût” (Sinha, Calcutta 154) at its telling. Annapurna, we learn, is a widow who was herself born of a widow named Ashanti. Following her husband’s death, Ashanti, according to family legend, became a dancer, then the preferred sexual partner among a whole harem of women kept by the local “seigneur” [lord] named Bijendramohan Chawdhury, during India’s colonial period. Bijendramohan maintains good relations with the British in India and perhaps collaborates with them. One night, a young man is found lurking in the garden and instead of having him arrested, Bijendramohan dismisses all the women for the night and invites the man to a secret room with a huge “baignoire en cuivre” (Sinha, Calcutta 176). In the morning the man is gone, as is some money. Ashanti, apparently jealous, desires above all else to “pénétrer dans cette chambre énigmatique” (Sinha, Calcutta 161). The surreptitious visits continue over time until one night, we get the story of how the young man, who turns out to be an independence-minded militant named Satya, arrives by riverboat, is guided down a long corridor to the candle-lit, perfumed baignoire where he is later joined by the noble Bijendramohan. With its dark passageway leading to a warm, private bath, we are suggestively led to “the place where each one of us has lived once upon a time and in the beginning” (Freud, “The Uncanny” 244): the heim of an uncanny womb. Abruptly, the narration is ruptured by a bullet-blast from Satya’s revolver: “La balle était partie comme un crachat. Méprisant, sale” (Sinha, Calcutta 185). We understand after the fact that the moment between the two men in the decidedly uterine-like bathwater had turned confusedly erotic. An explicitly described scene of mirroring, doubling and sexually mimetic desire blurs the boundaries between Self and Other, Lee, Mark D. “Crossing Boundaries External & Internal: The Writing Imaginary of Shumona Sinha.” Crossings in Women’s Writing in French in the Twenty-First Century, Crossways Journal, No3.1 (2019) ending in that gunshot, comme un crachat, that re-establishes difference in violence: “Deux hommes étaient face à face. Deux verges tendues l’une vers l’autre. D’égal à égal. […] en débordement de soi, en dédoublement de l’émoi. Deux miroirs se regardaient, fascinés” (Sinha, Calcutta 186). Satya flees. Bijendramohan is wounded but survives and is nursed back to health by Ashanti. Ashamed of his weakness he banishes Ashanti but not before supposedly fathering the child who will be Trisha’s grandmother, Annapurna.

Crossing Every Boundary: The Return Of The Repressed What boundaries are crossed here? Staying first within the logic of Calcutta itself, this sequence lends itself to be read as an overdetermined scène originaire: a fantasized primal scene7 of sexual intercourse between parents, imagined by a child. Indeed, when read carefully it represents a foundational moment of slightly displaced conception, where the bullet, “partie comme un crachat” (repeated three times in the narration), serves as a metaphor for ejaculation and the fecundation both of the family line and the family story. In this way the scene acts as an odd reformulation and expansion of the child-protagonist’s earlier fascination with the riddle of her father hiding a revolver in the womb-like family bedding, “la couette rouge”. What should remain hidden has come back to light through this narrative, provoking horror and disgust in Shankya but rapt fascination in Annapurna and Trisha. In relating these origins awash in homo-eroticism, scorn, violence and a mixing of social class, virtually every prohibition is violated, most every boundary is crossed.

The narrator of Assommons les pauvres!, in her attempt to reconstruct the assault announced her desire to ‘rentrer’, to find family origins and understand her “désir enfoui dans le sang” (Sinha, Calcutta 139-140). Having reached this bloody scene in Sinha’s next novel, if we now read that metro attack together with the violence found deep within the home and memory in Calcutta, we find parallels and crossed boundaries that need articulation. In both cases we have protagonists from a lower social class – the migrant/foreigner, Satya – attempting to obtain something from a person of higher rank, where the higher one has a perhaps strained allegiance to Europeans – Bijendramohan with Britain, the anonymous narrator with France. Each scene is marked by a discourse of mirroring, leading to a scornfully violent rejection of perceived sameness when recognition starts to take place. The repulsive smell of the lower-class migrant, noted by the narrator of Assommons les pauvres! is curiously washed away in Bijendramohan’s perfumed, copper baignoire, and their similarly hued skins are laid bare in the bath water. There is even a strange echo through Assommons les pauvres! all the way back to Baudelaire’s text, where the poet’s declaration of fraternal respect, “Monsieur, vous êtes mon égal!” (Baudelaire 359), returns in the description of the phalluses straining towards each other “[d]’égal à égal” (Sinha, Calcutta 186). In Calcutta sameness is exacerbated before being violently pushed over the border to otherness when Satya refuses sexual desire from his double, his equal. Indeed, the assault in the metro like the gunshot in the bathtub, also interrupts homoerotic Lee, Mark D. “Crossing Boundaries External & Internal: The Writing Imaginary of Shumona Sinha.” Crossings in Women’s Writing in French in the Twenty-First Century, Crossways Journal, No3.1 (2019) desire. We learn that the narrator of Assommons les pauvres! was taking that wine bottle to what she hoped would be a first romantic evening with her female co- worker, Lucia, when she struck the asylum-seeker, effectively interrupting its realization with a violent act.8

If the boundaries blurred in the public assault unwittingly but surely drive the narrator of Assommons les pauvres! to turn inwards, to retrace the pathways of her “arbre généalogique”, then strangely enough her lashing out at the asylum-seeker finds, in many ways, its logical end and uncanny repetition in the fantastical scene between Satya and Bijendramohan. With the injunction at the end of Assommons les pauvres! being, “il est temps de rentrer”, Calcutta in more ways than one does indeed go all the way home: through memories of a revolver hidden in bedding, through Annapurna’s story, down the tunnel-like corridor to a warm womb-like bath, arriving at the very scene of fantasized violent inception/conception. As noted, near the end of Assommons les pauvres! the narrator enigmatically affirmed, “Au fond de nous, il y a une maison hantée” (Sinha, Assommons les pauvres! 144). In Calcutta we have travelled all the way to this heim and deep within have found the unheimlich, the foreign yet familiar face of the assault in the metro car looking back, an uncontrolled return of the repressed from without and from within. Crossing boundaries both external and internal, the scenes suggest that the ‘étranger’, the foreign Other, like the disturbingly familiar of ‘home’ Sinha carries within her literary imaginary is both struck down, rejected, but also desired, and perhaps necessary for self-knowledge and for story. Julia Kristeva, in the wake of Freud, succinctly underscores this tension of the Other being both inside and outside in her book Étrangers à nous-mêmes. In her reading of Freud’s essay on the uncanny Kristeva observes, “Inquiétante, l'étrangeté est en nous : nous sommes nos propres étrangers - nous sommes divisés” (Kristeva 268). And, extending out from Freud’s analysis she raises the ethical question that the narrator of Assommons les pauvres! met with violence, but which all citizens must face one way or another: “Comment pourrait-on tolérer un étranger si l'on ne se sait pas étranger à soi-même?” (Kristeva 269).

In conclusion, we should note the remarkable poetic path Sinha has taken, bringing into writing an uncanny, transgressive and foundational scene of violent creation that nourishes her literary imagination. From Assommons les pauvres! with its scene of public assault to Calcutta with its forbidden representation of private, erotic and violent origins, this author blurs the limits between external and internal. In doing so Sinha encounters and crosses without and within herself boundaries few writers suspect, let alone find: this Other as foreigner who is also herself. Inciting passions of every order, this Other remains contentious, volatile, in literature as in life.

Works Cited

Baudelaire, Charles. “Assommons les pauvres!” Œuvres complètes de Baudelaire I. Gallimard (collection Pléiade), 1971. 357-359.

Freud, Sigmund. “Family Romances.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume IX (1906-1908). Trans. And Ed. James Strachey. Hogarth Press, 1959, pp. 235-242.

___. “The Uncanny.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917-1919). Trans. And Ed. James Strachey. Hogarth Press, 1955, pp. 217-256.

Kristeva, Julia. Étrangers à nous-mêmes. Gallimard (collection Folio Essais), 1991.

Laplanche, J. and J-B Pontalis. The Language of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Norton, 1973.

Picard, Anne-Marie. “L’Autre tel qu’en soi.” L’Autre, le semblable et le différent. Eds. R. Frydman, M. Flis-Trèves. Presses universitaires de France, 2014. www.researchgate.net/publication/259189166, doi : 10.13140/RG.2.1.2867.8240. Accessed 26 September 2016.

Rice, Alison. “Étrangères à elles-mêmes: l’immigration en France chez les nouvelles écrivaines francophones.” Aventures et expériences littéraires : Écritures des femmes en France au début du vingt-et-unième siècle. Eds. Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye. Rodopi, 2014, pp. 213-229.

Robert, Marthe. Roman des origines et origines du roman. Gallimard (collection Tel), 1977.

Sinha, Shumona. Fenêtre sur l’abîme. Éditions de la Différence, 2018. ___. Assommons les pauvres !. Éditions de l’Olivier (collection Points), 2011. ___. Calcutta. Éditions de l’Olivier, 2014. ___. Apatride. Éditions de l’Olivier, 2017.

Notes

1 Kristeva’s Étrangers à nous-mêmes and its relationship to Freud will be discussed at the end of this article. This title is the inspiration for Alison Rice’s examination of immigrants in the writing of three contemporary authors – Fatou Diome, Nathacha Appanah and Shumona Sinha – in her 2014 article “Étrangères à elles-mêmes: l’immigration en France chez les nouvelles écrivaines francophones.”

2 OFPRA is the ‘Office français de protection des réfugiés et apatrides’, the administration charged with applying French and European law in the examination of claims by refugees and stateless individuals. Lee, Mark D. “Crossing Boundaries External & Internal: The Writing Imaginary of Shumona Sinha.” Crossings in Women’s Writing in French in the Twenty-First Century, Crossways Journal, No3.1 (2019)

3 Sinha and her German translator were awarded the 2016 International Literature Prize [Internationaler Literaturpreis] of Berlin’s House of World Cultures.

4 One can hear Sinha speak in her own words about her relationship to France and the French language on Alison Rice’s website of curated interviews: francophonemetronomes.com.

5 In many respects the narrator’s activity as translator reactivates on another level the play across boundaries, repeatedly teasing the limits of their transgression. The narrator takes the questions posed in French by the middle-class civil servant, carries them over the linguistic, legal, gender and social divide into the language of the presumably poor, male and ill-educated claimants being interviewed, only to bring their words and herself back across the border into French territory. Again and again. This “gymnastique des langues” [linguistic gymnastics] (Sinha 2011: 26) performs an incessant play across resemblance and difference.

6 The family romance is a common fantasy addressed by Freud where a child imagines that one or both biological parents are not his/her true genitors, creating a story where they are replaced with someone typically of higher social status. Marthe Robert’s Roman des origines et origines du roman traces the narrative archetype of this fantasy through modern European literature.

7 A primal scene – scène originaire or scène primitive in French, Urszene in German – is defined in Freudian discourse by Jean Laplanche and Jean-Baptiste Pontalis as: “Scene of sexual intercourse between the parents which the child observes, or infers on the basis of certain indications, and phantasies. It is generally interpreted by the child as an act of violence on the part of the father” (Laplanche & Pontalis 335).

8 The narrator of Assommons les pauvres! states her attraction to men and women, and to her co-worker Lucia, in particular, at several points. See Sinha 2011: 36, 83, 91,139, 141.