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Interconnections and Tensions Between Postcolonialism and Feminism in South Asian Women Poets: the Case of Meena Alexander, Suniti Namjoshi and Imtiaz Dharker

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Interconnections and Tensions Between Postcolonialism and Feminism in South Asian Women Poets: the Case of Meena Alexander, Suniti Namjoshi and Imtiaz Dharker Scuola Dottorale di Ateneo Graduate School Dottorato di ricerca in Lingue, Culture e Società Ciclo XXVI° Anno di discussione 2014 Interconnections and Tensions Between Postcolonialism and Feminism in South Asian Women Poets: the case of Meena Alexander, Suniti Namjoshi and Imtiaz Dharker SETTORE SCIENTIFICO DISCIPLINARE DI AFFERENZA: LIN/10 Tesi di Dottorato di Stefania Basset, matricola 955804 Coordinatore del Dottorato Tutore del Dottorando Prof.ssa Enrica Villari Prof. Shaul Bassi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, prof. Shaul Bassi, for the support, advice and encouragement during these three years. He has been an inspiration to give the best that I could. I also wish to thank him for the opportunity to meet Meena Alexander and to attend some of her seminars and lectures. I would also like to thank all the members of the Collegio Docenti del Dottorato, and in particular prof.ssa Enrica Villari, for her zeal in caring for us and for the inspiring passion for literature she passed on to us. Of course this work could have never been done without the help of The British Library and its helpful librarians. During my stay in London, I found in the British Library a peaceful and inspiring place to study. I all wish to thank all the members of AISCLI (Associazione Italiana di Studi sulle Culture e Letterature di Lingua Inglese), who have organized AISCLI Summer School in World Cultures and Literatures, and in particular prof.ssa Carmen Concilio for the organization of the event. I am also grateful to them for the opportunity to participate in the ASICLI conference “Cultures and Imperialisms”, which has been an incredibly enriching experience. Lastly, I would like to thank my family, friends and PhD colleagues for the constant support and understanding. A particular thanks goes to Dr. Sofia Ricottilli, for the endless talks and academic discussions during these three years. CONTENTS PREFACE 1 1. THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORKS 1.1 Why Women Writers? 9 1.2 Why Women Writers of Colour? 14 1.3 Why Transnational Women Writers? 22 1.4 Why South Asian Women Writers? 26 1.5. Why Poetry? 38 2. MEENA ALEXANDER 45 2.1 Biographical Introduction 45 2.2 Stylistic and Thematic Presentation 48 2.3 “Alphabets of Flesh”: Language, Body and Violence 57 2.3.1 Body, Memory and Space 57 2.3.2 Violence and the Body 68 2.3.3 “Alphabets of Flesh” and Stone-eating Girls 75 2.4 Palimpsests of Place 88 2.5 A “Back Against the Wall Aesthetic”: Double Binds and Conflicts 99 2.6 “Brown Skin, What Mask?”: Theoretical Reflections 107 3. SUNITI NAMJOSHI 115 3.1 Biographical Introduction 115 3.2 Stylistic and Thematic Presentation 118 3.3 Early Collections of Poems and Self-censorship 126 3.4 Blue Donkeys and One-eyed Monkeys: Animals and the Politics of Difference 135 3.5 Suniti Namjoshi's Peculiar Brand of Feminist Revisionist Mythmaking 141 3.6 Remembering Shakespeare Differently: “Snapshots of Caliban” and “Sycorax” 159 3.6.1 “Snapshots of Caliban” 159 3.6.2 “Sycorax” 181 4. IMTIAZ DHARKER 203 4.1 Biographical Introduction 203 4.2 Stylistic and Thematic Presentation 206 4.3 Body, Religion and Nation 214 4.4 Layers, Lines and Fingerprints 238 4.5 Movement and Transitions 253 CONCLUSIONS 261 BIBLIOGRAPHY 269 Stefania Basset “Interconnections and Tensions Between Postcolonialism and Feminism in South Asian Women Poets: the Case of Meena Alexander, Suniti Namjoshi and Imtiaz Dharker” PREFACE This work attempts to examine the intersections – or the “contact zones” (Pratt [1992]2008, 8), as Mary Louise Pratt called them – of postcolonialism with a field of study that continually overlaps it, but that has been traditionally studied as if it were in isolation from it: feminism1. While the connection between postcolonial theory and feminist concerns might seem obvious, with many studies tackling from a theoretical point of view what Holst Petersen and Rutherford have called the “double colonization of women” (1986), this study intends to bring into focus the actual outcome in literature of what it means to write from the complex positionalities of postcolonial women by analysing the work of three women writers stemming from the Indian subcontinent. The methodology followed in this work is hybrid by definition, because it makes use of both feminist and postcolonial theory, with a preference for texts and theorists at their junction. Postcolonial feminism, sometimes referred to with the term “Third World feminism”, practised by Indian theorists Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Chandra Talpade Mohanty among others, offers a valid counterpoint to both hegemonic Western feminism, and to the masculinization of some postcolonial theory (Mills 1998)2. Far from discarding postcolonial theory and Western feminism, 1 In Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Mary Louise Pratt speaks of a “contact zone” with regards to the place of colonial encounters between colonizer and colonized. Pratt uses the term to indicate “an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect” ([1992]2008, 8). It needs to be specified that the feminism that I want to deal with in this work is the one produced by Western or Western-influenced theorists, rather than the much-more pragmatic one adopted independently by Indian women like Rita Banerjee or Vandana Shiva. 2 The critique is addressed for instance at Edward Said, Frantz Fanon and Homi Bhabha. Said certainly inspired “Third World” feminists to speak out, but his book Orientalism, not unlike 1 Stefania Basset “Interconnections and Tensions Between Postcolonialism and Feminism in South Asian Women Poets: the Case of Meena Alexander, Suniti Namjoshi and Imtiaz Dharker” to find productive elements in both theories is essential for the postcolonial feminist project, and for every work that attempts to pay attention to what Anne McClintock calls “articulated categories”, which include markers like gender, race, class, sexuality and so on (1995, 5)3. Other reference points in my methodology are black feminism and transnational feminism. The former developed mainly in the United States and its core argument that sexism and racism are intrinsically bound together is considerably close to postcolonial feminists' concerns. Transnational feminism of the kind practised by Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan and Ella Shohat will also come Fanon's work, has been considered guilty of representing a “potentially unified, and paradigmatically male, colonial subject” (Lewis 2004, 3). See Pathak, Sengupta and Purkayastha 1991; Lewis 2004; Mani and Frankenberg 1985; Miller 1990. Frantz Fanon did some work on women, for example in the context of Algerian nationalism, but, according to McClintock (1995), he failed to make of his insights a more specific theory of gender. Furthermore, he emphasized dichotomies such as colonizer/colonized, leaving women in an unclear position. See Fuss 1995; Mowitt 1992; McClintock 1995. Finally, Homi Bhabha's theories have been sometimes considered inapplicable for women. Bhabha's mimicry, for example, seems to essentialize race, eliding gender and class in the process (McClintock 1995; Busia 1989-90, 97-9). Moreover, the gender divide cuts across the colonizer/colonized dichotomy, making the subversive modes of “mimicry” difficult, if not impossible, to practice for women (Weedon 2007). In spite of that, some feminists such as Judith Butler have found in Bhabha an inspiration to form ideas of gender as masquerade. 3 At the same time, one needs to pay attention to the dangers of writing what Susan Gubar defines “depressingly knee-jerk essays rejecting out-of-hand the speculations of a given literary or theoretical work simply because it neglects to discuss x (fill in the blank – bisexual Anglo-Pakistani mothers; the heterosexual, working-class Jew-for-Jesus community of Nashville, and so forth). Too often, each text becomes grist for a mill that proves the same intellectually vapid – though politically appalling – point that racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia reign supreme” (1998, 890-1). Spivak, in her “Translator's Preface” to Imaginary Maps, a collection of stories by Mahasweta Devi, calls the ethical encounter with the singularity of the subaltern an “experience of the impossible” (1995, xxv), because it is constantly at risk of falling prey to some of the hegemonies it is trying to dismantle. 2 Stefania Basset “Interconnections and Tensions Between Postcolonialism and Feminism in South Asian Women Poets: the Case of Meena Alexander, Suniti Namjoshi and Imtiaz Dharker” into the picture. Finally, lesbian and black lesbian feminism, with its challenge of the heteronormativity of most feminist and anti-racist discourse, will also be useful, thanks to the path-breaking work of intellectuals and poets such as Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde. It is this complex and heterogeneous theoretical framework that will be presented in the first section of this work. Coupled with an attention to the evolution of feminist and postcolonial theory, the first section will explain that a focus on the Indian subcontinent offers the possibility of specificity, while at the same time demonstrating the unequivocal heterogeneity and complexity of discussing women writers, even within the same region of the world and the same time frame. This happens also because the Indian subcontinent is in itself a heterogeneous “contact zone”. As a matter of fact, the authors chosen
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