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.

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