R.A ADONIS Dissertation

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Space, Voice and Power for the Female Character in the Postcolonial Novel: A Study of The Grass is Singing, Nervous Conditions and The God of Small Things

REZHAAN ANDREA ADONIS

THIS DISSERTATION IS SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH IN FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE AWARD FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH AT THE UNIVERSITY OF JOHANNESBURG

2017

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One: Introduction 1-11

1. Background to the study 2. Purpose of the study 3. A brief theoretical framework for the study: space, voice and power 3.1 The paradoxes of power and voice 4. The organization of the dissertation

Chapter Two: Power and Paradox in The Grass is Singing: 12-40 Reconsidering Mary as the ‘Outsider’ of the Narrative

Chapter Three: Speech and Silence in Nervous Conditions 41-71

Chapter Four: The God of Small Things and the Dissolution 72-96 of Caste and Kinship in Postcolonial India

Chapter Five: Conclusion 97-101

Reference List 102-107

iii

ABSTRACT

‘Space speaks of its histories, identities and conditions’

This study uses the concepts of space, voice, gender, and power to examine, question and, ultimately, challenge fixed notions of feminine identity in postcolonial social and cultural spaces. To this end, the dissertation undertakes a study of Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. It contends that the three novels present the (post)colonial female subject as always gendered and her resistance always curtailed. Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space as ideologically produced, in The Production of Space (1991), is used to investigate the production of gendered spaces in the three novels and of space as relational, that is, as connected to identity. Against this background, I argue that Ammu, in The God of Small Things, figures as the insider-outsider in the spaces that she inhabits, precisely because they are underwritten by the ideology of caste and kinship that seeks to preserve certain orders of purity and impurity, including gender and sexual purity, in the service of social and gender hierarchy. Similarly, Mary, in The Grass is Singing, finds herself co-opted into a racial “espirit de corps” (2007: 3) as a white woman but. as a woman she is an outsider in the farm space presided over by white men. Lastly, Tambudzai, in Nervous Conditions, finds her voice as her primary space, her home, slowly opens out to the contending spaces of her cousin Nyasha’s home and the convent, where, “fitfully, something in [her] mind beg[ins] to assert itself” (2004: 204). At botton, this study concerns itself with forms of containment and resistance, and with gender and sexuality as connecting tissues in the three novels’ conceptions of speech and silence.

I extend my discussion through a consideration of Michel Foucault’s analysis of the economy of power, of how power is distributed in (social) spaces, and its connection to and influence on human agency. Foucault’s study is used to survey Ammu’s character as at once powerful by virtue of class and caste privilege and powerless on account of her gender; Mary Turner as both a vehicle for and a target of white male power; and Tambudzai’s character as caught between competing senses of culture and resistance. This study ultimately discusses how the identity of the (post)colonial female subject is embedded in the social, cultural and historical spaces that she inhabits. iv

Declaration

I, the undersigned, hereby declare that “Space, Voice and Power for the Female Character in the Postcolonial Novel: A Study of The Grass is Singing, Nervous Conditions and The God of Small Things” is my original work; that all sources I have used or quoted have been properly referenced, and that I have not previously submitted this dissertation, in its entirety or in part, at any university for a degree.

______Rezhaan Andrea Adonis

31 0ctober 2017 Date

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To my darling mother, Jacquelin Adonis, my life’s constant and my provider. Thank you for your patience, love and support. I am immeasurably grateful. You embody fortitude, grace and peace. And this peace is my comfort. ‘I see parts of you in myself I never knew existed’.

To my grandparents, Abraham Adonis and Martha Adonis, who raised me. Thank you for showing up when it mattered.

To my sister, Ilonique Adonis, for providing a simple yet priceless happiness – laughter.

To Professor Mngadi, who has contributed immensely towards the completion of this dissertation. I thank you for your guidance.

A special thanks to the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) and the UJ Global Excellence and Stature (GES) Scholarship for funding my research and studies.

Chapter One

Introduction

1. Background to the study

This study focuses on three novels, that is, The Grass is Singing, Nervous Conditions and The God of Small Things, as postcolonial texts that narrate the female experience in a post-colonial social and cultural context. I argue that these novels do this by re-imagining alternative spaces in which the woman will not only exist but also cultivate her own voice. Nervous Conditions and The God of Small Things, in particular, seek to register the voice of the woman in those spaces conventionally marked off as male. The core objective of postcolonial feminist discourse is to account for the female subject’s experience as distinct from that of the male in a society emerging from colonial rule. In Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, for instance, Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose posit that, “Both postcolonialism and feminism are engaged in the conflict between a politics of identity and a politics of difference” (1994: 238). For the purposes of this study, post-colonial theory will be defined in relation to feminist theory’s concerns, in order to propose the ways in which post-colonial theory may address them, and how post-colonial feminist narratives subvert and revise post-colonial theory’s gender bias. As Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (1995: 1) note,

European imperialism took various forms in different times and places and proceeded both through conscious planning and contingent occurences. As a result of this complex development something occurred for which the plan of imperial expansion had not bargained: the immensely prestigious and powerful imperial culture found itself appropriated in projects of counter-colonial resistance which drew upon the many different indigenous local and hybrid processes of self-determination to defy, erode and sometimes supplant the prodigious power of imperial cultural knowledge. Post-colonial literatures are a result of this interaction between imperial culture and the complex of indigenous cultural practices. 2

The erosion of imperial culture in post-colonial discourse is central to the emancipatory movement for the colonised; however, a post-colonial feminism aims at unravelling the layers of colonisation (double colonisation) to which women are subjected, in order to show how the emancipation of women is integral to eroding imperialist culture at its core. Drawing on the ‘double’ oppression faced by women in postcolonial society (colonialism and patriarchy), particular attention will be given to ‘double colonisation’ as the dual challenge that feminist critique faces in its advocacy for the social inclusion of woman across all social and political domains (see Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin’s The Postcolonial Studies Reader (Feminism and Postccolonialism), 1995: 250).

2. Purpose of the study

The purpose of this study is, firstly, to examine the ways in which the three novels under consideration deploy their female protagonists as literary tropes to dislocate the binary structures by which feminine identity is conventionally constructed and apprehended. For instance, in The Grass is Singing, Mary Turner’s character does not conform neatly to the idea of ‘purity’ and ‘success’ on which the white communal (read: male) spirit – the espirit de corps – is founded; Tambudzai, in Nervous Conditions, is silenced into submission by patriarchy but seeks independence from it; and, in The God of Small Things, Ammu is of a caste of Touchables, but her acts of resistance nonetheless reveal crucial fissures in the Indian caste system in which her identity is at once subsumed and to which it poses a significant challenge. With this study, I aim to show how the social binaries used to construct feminine identities – that is, pure/impure, good/bad, normal/deviant – are ostensibly conventional and, as such, not co-extensive with individual or, for that matter, collective feminine identity. Further, I contend that these characters uniquely and individually pose the possibility for the subversion – even the erasure – of these binaries, and that, ultimately, this possibility constitutes the necessary dialectical tension in the narratives between the overdetermination of feminine identity from without and the characters’ resistance thereof. This study, then, aims to open up the space between the either and the or of the conventional binary classifications of feminine identities to which I refer above, the better to consider questions of containment and agency in the three novels.

Lastly, I focus on the connection between space and power in these novels and how gendered spaces in the narratives impact on the presence and the voice of the female characters. And, by extension, how the narratives offer a voice to and provides space for their female characters.

3. A brief theoretical framework for the study: space, voice and power

Writing women into postcolonial spaces will be the primary critical-theoretical focus of this study. Whereas, through its resistance to imperial rule, the anti-colonial movement addressed the desire for independence of the colonised subject, the post-colonial movement has sought to confront the continuity of the colonial legacy. I posit that post-colonial women’s resistance remains an incomplete project and that, for this reason, post-colonial theory needs to account for this resistance. This is because colonial culture not only established racial and class hierarchies but also imported into the colonies traditions of femininity and reinforced existing ones, including, in the case of India, the system of caste. Thus, whilst Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin note that the “political dismantling [of colonialism] did not immediately extend to imperial cultural influences” (1995: 1), but that it was nonetheless “attended by an unprecedented assertion of creative activity in post-colonial societies” (ibid.), I argue that women’s writing not only constitutes the complex post-colonial cultural intertext but, consequently, challenges some of its fundamental assumptions about gender.

One of the primary objectives of my study, then, is to tease out the modes of women’s self- representation within a broad post-colonial conceptual and cultural framework. Here, I trace the claim that, “one never encounters the testimony of the women’s voice consciousness […] there is no space from where the subaltern (sexed) subject can speak [. . .] the subaltern as female cannot be heard or read” (Ashcroft, et al, 1995: 36). Indeed, the doubly-oppressed native woman, who is “caught between the dominations of a native patriarchy and a foreign masculine-imperialist ideology” (1995: 36), has become a familiar trope in post-colonial discourse. I thus begin my discussion by focusing on why the subaltern woman is not simply ‘voiceless’ but ostensibly silenced, and how the character of Tambudzai, in this regard, is crucial in the discussion of space and voice. The God of Small Things opens up another avenue of critique, what Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin call the positioning of the “native woman within multiple social relationships [. . .] as 4

the product of different class, caste and cultural specificities” (1995: 37). Questions of presence and agency become particularly significant here, given Ammu’s positioning in the novel between presence and absence, as it were, between visibility and erasure. It is this precarious position that marks Mary Turner for death, and, in this sense, it is not surprising that the news of her death precedes readers’ encounter with her.

Space and its connection to gender and power forms the basis of my discussion, particularly the impact of space on women’s identities. I use Henri Lefebvre’s study, The Production of Space (1991), to conceptualise space and to investigate space as not merely tangible or physical, but more importantly as a social construct. This is because of its connection to the various social relationships that the individual fosters in society and in which the individual’s identity is organised. Blunt and Rose (1994: 1) remark that “the ‘social map’ of patriarchy created ‘ground rules’ for the behavior of men and women,” and that “the gender roles and relations of patriarchy constructed some spaces as “feminine” and others as “masculine” and thus allocated certain kinds of (gendered) activities to certain (gendered) places. Gender difference was thus seen as inscribing spatial difference.”

Space and its relationship to gender relations will be discussed with the aim to bring to the fore the underlying effects that gendered social spaces have on the woman’s identity and agency. Furthermore, I discuss the relationship that exists between space and power, by considering Michel Foucault’s stance that space cannot be possessed, but rather that it is one of the agents or vehicles through which power is mediated and authority asserted. I extend my argument with Henri Lefebvre’s premise that “space is socially produced; a materialization of ‘social being’” (1991: 101-102). My primary focus in this study, therefore, will be the relationship between space and gender and how feminists have seen space as central both to masculinist power and to feminist resistance (Blunt and Rose 1994: 1).

My examination of Lefebvre’s The Production of Space and Doreen Massey’s Space, Place and Gender to discuss the meaning of space, particularly social space, is to determine what space says about the lived experience of the woman and her dislocated identity. In Nervous Conditions, for instance, different “narrative elements are interwoven into the overarching motif of space” 5

(Okonkwo 2003: 53). Tambudzai has to leave the homestead to live with her uncle on the mission and, thus, is forced to navigate tradition and change as she moves between these two different but related spaces. In The Grass is Singing, the paradox of Mary Turner’s power, the power of her race and the powerlessness of her gender, is crucial to an understanding of her predicament and, consequently, her tragic character. And, in The God of Small Things, Ammu’s double-bind, as both insider within the caste system and outsider as a woman, mirrors much of Mary’s precarious position and paradox. In those spaces into which Ammu is admitted by virtue of her caste privilege, her power is not guaranteed, so that her sexual relationship with Velutha, a man from the caste of Untouchables, reveals the faultlines of a system in which the woman’s body is the boundary around a culture over which she has no say. Here space is not only the marker of caste difference, but of gender difference as well: the woman’s body, unlike that of the man, is tied to the stability of caste and kinship, but she cannot lay any claim to either.

Understood as both a lived and a historical term, then, ‘space’ consists of a multiplicity of meanings and these different meanings correspond to different areas of the history and practices of everyday life. As Massey (1994: 1) puts it:

The terms space and place have long histories and bear with them a multiplicity of meanings and connotations which reverberate with other debates and many aspects of life. ‘Space’ may call to mind the realm of the dead or the chaos of simultaneity and multiplicity. It may be used in reference to the synchronic systems of structuralists or employed to picture the one-dimensional space of identity. Likewise with place, though perhaps with more consistency, it can raise an image of one’s place in the world, of the reputedly (but as we shall see, disputed) deep meanings of ‘a place called home’ or, with much greater intimations of mobility and agility, can be used in the context of a discussion of positionality.

Here Massey emphasises that the individual’s experience within different social spaces will vary, since one’s position within various social spaces in society is to a large extent predetermined by one’s class, race, sexuality and gender. She aims to redirect the reader’s thinking about space and argues that space should no longer be conceptualised as some “absolute independent dimension, 6

but as constructed out of social relations” (1994: 2), these social relations being inherently dynamic. Furthermore, Massey stresses the ways in which discourse cannot include a discussion of social spaces without considering how class and gender relations manifest themselves within these social spaces. On this point, she posits that,

space-time [is] a configuration of social relations within which the specifically spatial may be conceived of as an inherently dynamic simultaneity. Moreover, since social relations are inevitably and everywhere imbued with power and meaning and symbolism, this view of the spatial is an ever-shifting social geometry of power and signification. Such a way of conceptualizing the spatial, moreover, inherently implies the existence in the lived world of a simultaneous multiplicity of spaces: cross-cutting, intersecting, aligning with one another, or existing in relations of paradox or antagonism. Most evidently this is so because the social relations of space are experienced differently, and variously interpreted, by those holding different positions as part of it. (1994: 3)

Here, Massey emphasises that space cannot exist putatively and it cannot be experienced in isolation of the lived experience of it. Rather, it is connected to those who inhabit it, constantly shifting and intersecting with other spaces. Thus space cannot be conceptualised as something absolute and independent because it is not ‘whole’: space is fractured, dislocated, paradoxical. To this end, the meaning of space is tied to the social effects that it provokes. However, the social subject relies on the illusion of a fixed meaning of space and considers it enclosed and endowed with fixed identities, and this results in the perception that space can be ‘claimed’ or possessed. Yet “the spatial organisation of society is integral to the production of the social, and it is not merely its result” (1994: 4). The societal tendency to fix space and enclose its identity is a result of a need to establish boundaries that aid spatial division in order to secure, exercise and retain power. The identities of place are

always unfixed, contested and multiple. And the particularity of any place is, in these terms, constructed not by placing boundaries around it and defining its identity through counterposition to the other which lies beyond, but precisely (in part) through the 7

specificity of the mix of links and interconnections to that ‘beyond’. Places viewed in this way are open and porous. (1994: 5)

Space is fluid, a contested terrain through which power continuously circulates; this organisation of power is exercised in certain, if not all, spaces, in an attempt to fix and regulate the identities within particular spatial parameters. Although the conceptualisation of space in modernity is that of the physical and tangible, Massey nonetheless asserts that such conceptualisation is tied up with gender, with the radical polarisation into two genders, which is typically hegemonic in western societies today (1994: 6). Indeed, as she notes,

the discussion of space in politics and space/time relates the strategy of radically polarizing time and space, and of defining space by the absence of temporality, to the broader western mode of dualistic thinking which has been widely criticized by feminists and linked into the same system of thought which so sharply distinguishes between masculine and feminine, defining them through continuous series of mutual oppositions. Thus this pervasive and influential view of the relationship between space and time sees them as dichotomous and as dichotomous in a particular way. It is a formulation in which time is the privileged signifier in a distinction of the type A/not -A. It is, moreover, time which is typically coded masculine and space, being absence or lack, as feminine. Moreover, the same gendering operates through the series of dualisms which are linked to time and space. It is time which is aligned with history, progress, civilization, politics and transcendence and coded masculine. And it is the opposite of these things which have, in the traditions of western thought, been coded feminine. (1994: 6)

Here, Massey points out that space/time exists as a radical dualism within gender relations. Time is coded as masculine when associated with more positive and culturally significant things like progress, history and politics. And, in opposition to this, the qualities of space are inherently negative and coded feminine. The meaning of space has to transcend this narrow conceptualisation and Massey argues that it is these dualisms that result in its formulation as “stasis, passive and depoliticized” (1994: 6). Furthermore, she points out that “a wider philosophical debate in which gendering and the construction of gender relations are central” (1994: 6 -7) is required to reposition 8

our conceptualisation and discussion of space. The dualism of the space/time politics within gender relations confirms that the imposition of boundaries and the counterposition of one identity against another (1994: 7) is meant to defend and dominate, and this lies at the core of masculinist culture. It is this idea that space = feminine and time = masculine that I argue the three novels seek both to destabilise and to dismantle.

3.1 The paradoxes of power and voice

Another important theoretical concept that this study brings to the discussion of the three novels is power; in particular, as it concerns the relations between the individual and institutions. Following Massey and Lefebvre’s theories of space, that is, their examination of how space is produced in various power relations or mediated through various practices of habitation, I discuss the different ways in which the three novels negotiate the complexities of the exercise of power and the ambiguities of its resistance. For instance, in The Grass is Singing, Mary Turner’s character is a paradox of power and powerlessness, at once possessing power by virtue of her race and lacking it by virtue of her gender and sexuality. Ultimately, the illusion of possessing power and the reality of her powerlessness combine to produce her tragedy at the novel’s conclusion. One of the foremost theorists of the institutional nature of power that my discussion references is the French philosopher, Michel Foucault. In Michel Foucault (2003), Sara Mills notes that,

[Foucault’s] work is very critical of the notion that power is something which a group of people or an institution possess and that power is only concerned with oppressing and constraining. What his work tries to do is move thinking about power beyond this view of power as repression of the powerless by the powerful to an examination of the way that power operates within everyday relations between people and institutions. Rather than simply viewing power in a negative way, as constraining and repressing, he argues, particularly in The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1978), that even at their most constraining, oppressive measures are in fact productive, giving rise to new forms of behavior rather than simply closing down or censoring certain forms of behavior. (2003: 33)

This idea of power is most evident in Lessing’s portrayal of Mary, who, while living in the city, believes herself to be independent, self-governing and self-possessing, but becomes increasingly aware of the illusions of the idea of an independent selfhood the moment she marries Dick and re- locates to the farming district. Here, she finds herself having to negotiate other forms of power, which nevertheless work through her and against her simultaneously. Thus, argues Foucault, power is performed: it is something more like a strategy than a possession and it does something. In short, it is not an inert object “which is or can be held onto” (Mills, 2003: 35). Indeed, when Mary thinks that she has ‘lost’ power that she once ‘possessed’, she turns to aggression and violence towards Dick and the farm labourers, which, paradoxically, only serves to deepen her predicament. As her mental hold on her immediate environment begins to slip, so, too, her hold on her body, which also begins to disintegrate. Mills further remarks that, for Foucault,

Power must be analyzed as something which circulates, or as something which only functions in the form of a chain [. . .] Power is employed and exercised through a netlike organization [. . .] Individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application. (2003: 35)

Drawing on this Foucauldean idea of power as productive of consent, one could argue that locations of power are constantly shifting. However, my view is that, trenchant as this idea of power may be at a philosophical level, power can still be seen to operate through institutions and, thus, still invite resistance. Put differently, my argument is that power has a material dimension and, thus, still circulates within the binaries of oppression and emancipation; power and powerlessness; self and other; man and woman, even though much of this ground has shifted or become more complicated post-modernity. In this sense, while my discussion of the three novels acknowledges Foucault’s idea of power as dispersed, I insist on also seeing power as concentrated. Otherwise, how is one to read a novel such as Nervous Conditions or The God of Small Things, both of which illustrate the simultaneity of the prohibitive and productive dimensions of power?

Mills believes that, read carefully, Foucault does conceive of resistance, but as diffused and ambiguous. She remarks, for instance, that,

perhaps the most productive element in Foucault’s analysis of power is the fact that he sees power relations as largely unsuccessful, as not achieving the goal of total domination. If power is relational rather than emanating from a particular site such as the government or the police; if it is diffused throughout all social relations rather than being imposed from above; if it is unstable and in need of constant repetition to maintain; if it is productive as well as being repressive, then it is difficult to see power relations as simply negative and as constraining. At the same time as downplaying human agency in resisting oppressive power relations, through his concentration on the diffusion of power, Foucault also provides the means to formulate resistance. (2003: 47)

Seen in a dialectical light, which is also the sense in which my discussion conceives of power, as both possessed and elusive, power becomes an ambiguous concept and the three novels illustrate this ambiguity in different but related ways. Given that my discussion of the three novels also raises the issue of voice, that is, that the novels can be read as contesting male representations of women, this dialectical sense of power is particularly significant. Indeed, what Foucault warns against is a blindly positivist, which is to say undialectical, understanding of power and powerlessness. However, the novels that I consider in this study present complex relations of power between men and women, women and women, and between men and men, all underscored by a sharp sense of these power relations as infinitely complex, but also thoroughly material.

4. The organisation of the dissertation

In my Introduction, I set out a broad theoretical framework, looking specifically at the terminology that underpins the study as a whole, that is space, voice and power. In Chapter Two, I focus on the Grass is Singing and discuss how the novel’s main character, Mary Turner, illustrates the central paradox of power in the novel, which is that her racial power is ultimately mediated by both social and gender conventions, even as she believes herself to possess it. In Chapter Three, I examine the multiple implications of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s use of the female narrator and protagonist, Tambudzai, in Nervous Conditions. In particular, I discuss the novel’s appropriation of the bildungsroman to contest its traditional associations with male destiny, and how, in the novel, it is the collective voice of women that is foregrounded, albeit with all the nuances that attend this 11

voice. In Chapter Four, I discuss Arundhati Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things, focusing in particular on its main character, Ammu, and how her character functions to deconstruct the vanishing but persistent structures of caste and kinship in postcolonial India of the 1960s. I conclude by showing how the three novels, notwithstanding their differences in time and space, can be read as literary departures from the cultural essentialisms that have historically constituted women’s identities and experiences in male writing.

Chapter Two:

Power and Paradox in The Grass is Singing: Reconsidering Mary as ‘Outsider’ of the Narrative

Power is everywhere not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.

- Michel Foucault (qtd in Gutting, 1994: 106).

…Whether one attributes to it the form of the prince who formulates rights, of the father who forbids, of the censor who enforces silence, or of the master who states the law, in any case one schematizes power in a juridical form, and one defines its effects as obedience.

- Michel Foucault (qtd in Gutting, 1994: 106).

Introduction

The Grass is Singing begins with a newspaper article that reports Mary’s death, before the narrator introduces the reader to her life, a strategy which might indicate her status in the narrative and in the community in which the novel is set. In this chapter, I aim to examine how Lessing’s strategy of beginning the narrative with Mary’s death serves subtly to suggest that there is no space in which her character may develop, let alone survive. Indeed, one could say that, symbolically, she ‘dies many times before her actual death’: the enduring image of her is of entrapment in a world governed by patriarchal values and, subsequently, in a marriage in which these values take on a devastating character. Even before her marriage to Dick Turner, the possibility of her identity existing outside of marriage cannot be guaranteed. As a single woman, she has limited choices and, thus, agency: for instance, she is trapped in a low-paying job, which offers few prospects for an independent life. However, this discussion also considers her paradoxical status as a white 13 woman, since the power of her race is systematically undercut by her powerlessness as a woman in a white male world of farming. Her gradual mental and psychological disintegration, particularly during her marriage to Dick, and her corresponding attempt to re-assert her racial authority over the black farm labourers, seals this paradox. Seen from this perspective, then, the novel’s beginning is particularly apt.

At its foundation, The Grass is Singing foregrounds the constitutive power of binary classifications – racial and gender, in this instance – and Mary’s life, and death, are deeply implicated in the classificatory system that operates within the text and its world. What the narrator calls the “esprit de corps” (Lessing 2007: 11), by which he means a racial pact according to which whiteness marks the boundary between insider and outsider, and pure and impure, is the foundational myth on which the binary system rests. However, to the extent that this classificatory system is also a white male construct, and thus carries both a class and gender character, to transgress it is not a simple matter of choice or agency but, rather, of resistance. The novel, Lessing’s first, uses its main character, Mary Turner, to critique and subvert socially constructed binaries of the pure/impure or the good/bad woman. Throughout the novel, though in varying degrees, Mary struggles to assert an independent self and to escape the spaces that are designed to trap and confine her. Her silence at the beginning of the narrative already suggests that there is no possibility that her character can develop. Thus one cannot help but be conscious of the limited privilege that she enjoys as a white woman in a society marked by racial and gender categories and hierarcies. In this light, I argue that she represents a paradox of power because, although she is by virtue of her race an insider in this farm community, she is an outsider from it by virtue of her gender. It is because her subjectivity is mediated through her husband’s that she is allowed to live in the district community, but, unlike the other farmers’ wives, she is not considered fully of it. Ultimately, her social exclusion in the communal space and her gradual psychological and physical deterioration as the narrative progresses, set up the trajectory for her tragedy in the text.

Part of my discussion of Mary’s character draws on the critical anthology Women and Writing in South Africa (1989), edited by Cherry Clayton. For instance, in her essay, “Marriage as Death: A Reading of Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing,” Eva Hunter describes Mary’s character as “part of a community that is characterised by dullness, rigidity and intellectual and emotional sterility, 14

in which the range of opportunities for a woman like herself is severely circumscribed” (1989: 140). Mary’s unsuccessful social integration in this farming community leads to her designation as the mad and repulsive outsider, so that who she is outside of her socially constructed persona is invalidated. However, while she cannot escape the historical (settler colonialism) and social conditions (white patriarchy, political unrest) of her existence, her complicity in sustaining these conditions, if paradoxical, remains an important question in the novel. To this end, the two phases of Mary’s life, that is, before and after she marries Dick, mirror each other in crucial ways. Put differently, while it may seem easier to say that her tragedy results from her marriage, the possibility of her life being any different before her marriage to Dick cannot be guaranteed. Indeed, what her marriage to Dick throws into sharp focus are the hidden traps that a white woman in a white male settler colonial milieu must negotiate, as both the cipher and target of racial and gender power respectively. This paradox of her existence comes through quite forcefully in the novel’s portrayal of the farming district as at once a fixed space, governed by a unitary identity and as what Lefebvre calls “a space that is apparently ‘neutral’, ‘objective, . . . transparent, innocent or indifferent” (1991: 94). That, at first, Mary appears not to conform to Dick’s idea of a farm woman and that she appears deliberately detached from Dick’s life, should not obscure the fact that the farm space is not “innocent or indifferent” (Lefebvre, 1991: 94). It is, rather, governed by a white male hierarchy in and to which even Dick cannot be guaranteed automatic prestige and access. The most obvious sign of this is that Dick’s farming failures and Mary’s deliberate detachment from the farm and its norms lead not to Dick’s but to Mary’s tragedy, whose transgression of the racial boundary far outweighs Dick’s failure at farming. Thus the murder itself, as the narrator informs us, is not the actual locus of tragedy for the district but, rather, the source of its deep resentment of Mary. It is “the way people felt about it, the way they pitied Dick Turner with a fine fierce indignation against Mary, as if she were something unpleasant and unclean, and it served her right to get murdered” (2007: 12). In this sense, the politics of the farming space, particularly the hierarchies of class and gender that underwrite this politics, reveal the contests that such a space tends to conceal.

In The Country and the City (1975), Raymond Williams reminds us that the myths associated with the country space, such as “the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue” (9), have no basis in the lived experience of this space. Lessing’s portrayal of this space and of 15

Mary’s experience in it corresponds to Williams’s sense that the country space is capable of the kind of politics that is often associated with the city: class conflict and other forms of exploitation and subjugation. It is, as the city is wont to be, a space of history, identity, alienation and change. Thus, Mary’s character could more trenchantly be read as caught in the same exigencies of power that subtend the character of space generally. In the novel, the connection between the history of the farm and Mary’s identity is explored through the mystique surrounding her life and, subsequently, her death on the farm. The narrative establishes the nature of this connection by means of a set of metaphors relating to the land and the female body, whereby the failure (or success) of the crop mirrors the failure (or success) of possessing and ‘cultivating’ the body of the woman. Furthermore, on the farm the idea of the land as both possession/property and boundary extends to the idea of the white woman’s body as the object to be possessed and a marker of the boundary between insider and outsider or the pure and the impure. In this sense, it is interesting to note that Mary’s marriage to an unsuccessful farmer attracts more guarded contempt than her sexual ‘transgression’ with the black farm labourer, Moses, which, after her murder, “was simply not discussed” (2007: 10). As white male constructs, then, the land and the woman’s body are constituted as bounded, both in sexual and proprietary terms, lacking a mobility and dynamism of their own. Moreover, they are objects to be bought and sold, as it were disposable, as Mary’s body first becomes abject and then an object – a dead thing – like the land that can no longer produce any crop for Dick. The article reporting Mary’s death seals the chain of abject-object relations; however, it is how the narrator surmises what could have been the general reaction of those who knew Mary that is revealing:

[T]he people in ‘the district’ who knew the Turners, either by sight, or from gossiping about them for so many years, did not turn the page so quickly. Many must have snipped out the paragraph, put it among old letters, or between the pages of a book, keeping it perhaps as an omen or a warning, glancing at the yellowing piece of paper with closed, secretive faces. [. . .] The murder was simply not discussed. ‘A bad business,’ someone would remark. (2007: 9)

From this account of what the farming community’s reaction to Mary’s death would have been, particularly the idea that Mary’s death is “‘A bad business’” (9), one can read the quiet disdain for her life. It is almost as though merely by entering the farm space Mary loses her individual identity for one that is neither collective nor communal, or innocent and virtuous, but marked in all sorts of exploitative ways. To be sure, Mary’s death is, in the first instance, “A bad [racial and class] business” and, in the second, because unspoken, a bad gender business. It is in these ways that Mary crosses the line as a white woman who has intimate relations with a black man.

The outsider within: space, gender and power in The Grass is Singing

In State of Peril: Race and Rape in South African Literature (2012), a study of the mythologies of sex and race in South African literature, Lucy Graham traces the history of white fears of contamination through race-mixing and ‘miscegenation’. Her study has many implications for the psychic economy that operates in the farm district, so that Mary’s death can also be seen in this light as a ‘cleansing’ of the white settler body-politic. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s thesis on the “bio-politics” (2012: 8) of the racial cordon sanitaire, Graham provides the foundation for re-reading the plaasroman in its multiple appearances as a supreme text of tragedy. As a meta- fictional critique of the farm novel, The Grass is Singing stages the death of the subject not so much as a consequence of her life on the farm, but rather as a means to open up at least one crucial avenue of critique: that is the coincidence of the female body with the body of a race. The female body as a marker of a collective body is not without antecedents: Anne McClintock, for instance, notes in “‘No Longer in A Future Heaven’: Women and Nationalism in South Africa” that “women are constructed as ‘bearers of the nation,’ its boundary and symbolic limit, but lack a nationality of their own” (1991: 105). In this sense, she continues,

[W]omen serve to represent the limits of national difference between men. Excluded as national citizens, women are subsumed only symbolically into the national body politic. Thus male political power is heavily dependent on a naturalized, and none too “accidental,” ideology of gender difference. Nationalism is constituted from the very beginning as a gendered discourse, and cannot be understood without a theory of gender power. (1991: 105) 17

For the female subject thus located at the boundary of male discourse about place, identity and belonging, which is essentially what national discourse gestures toward, the stakes are high. For Mary, in particular, the white communal spirit is as abstract as nationalism’s claim to an obscure origin could be said to be. Yet her transgression of the boundary, as it were, her “let[ting] the side down” (2007: 29), as Charlie Slatter puts it, marks her for death. Describing Mary’s dead body, the narrator homes in on the interplay between sympathy and contempt for Mary, in the reactions of those who attend to it. For instance, Charlie Slatter’s reaction to the sight of her corpse is important in its symbolic references to biblical Jezebel thrown to her death over the balcony and eaten by dogs. The symbolism of the “soiled white sheet” (2007: 16) covering Mary’s dead body, with the body’s “stiff shape” (2007: 16), is also significant for what it reveals about the binary system of purity and contamination that suffuses the metaphors of the novel as whole. Here is how the narrator describes the moment of Slatter’s encounter with her dead body:

Mary Turner was a stiff shape under a soiled white sheet. At one end of the sheet protruded a mass of pale strawish hair, and at the other a crinkled yellow foot. Now a curious thing happened. The hate and contempt that one would have expected to show on his face when [Charlie] looked at the murderer, twisted his features now, as he stared at Mary. His brows knotted, and for a few seconds his lips curled back over his teeth in a vicious grimace. He had his back to Marston, who would have been astonished to see him. Then, with a hard, angry movement, Charlie turned and left the room, driving the young man before him. Marston said: ‘She was lying on the verandah. I lifted her on to the bed.’ He shuddered at the memory of the touch of the cold body. ‘I thought she shouldn’t be left lying there.’ He hesitated and added, the muscles of his face contracting whitely: The dogs were licking at her.’ Charlie nodded with a keen glance at him. He seemed indifferent as to where she might be lying. At the same time he approved the self-control of the assistant who had performed the unpleasant task. (2007: 16-17)

Mary’s death is thus both an ‘inconvenience’ and a ‘convenience’, and the removal of her now decaying body an “unpleasant task” (2007: 17), but ‘pleasant’ to the extent that, once removed, stability/normality would return to the district. The passage as a whole is built on the ambiguities 18 that underscore the district’s attitude towards the Turners and Mary, as insiders and outsiders, pure and impure, simultaneously. For instance, suspended between its “pale strawish hair” (2007: 16) and “yellow foot” (16), on the one hand, and, on the other, “dogs licking at her” (17), Mary’s body at once serves as the promise of what it might have been and the decay of such promise. Also, suspended between “a vicious grimace” (2007: 16) and what could be a smile, Slatter’s facial expression on seeing the body is a study in the ambiguities of agony and relief that underpin the contradictions of white attitudes towards Mary and the Turners on the farm. The narrator has already signalled this tension in describing the inner workings of the district:

The Turners were disliked, [. . .] They must have had something to be ashamed of; that was that; [. . .] And then it was that someone used the phrase ‘poor whites.’ It caused disquiet. There was no great money-cleavage in those days (that was before the era of the tobacco barons), but there was certainly a race division. The small community of Afrikaners had their own lives, and the Britishers ignored them. ‘Poor whites’ were Afrikaners, never British. But the person who said the Turners were poor whites stuck to it defiantly. What was the difference? What was a poor white? It was the way one lived, a question of standards. All the Turners needed were a drove of children to make them poor whites. (2007: 11)

In this light, “Mary’s body/corpse functions metonymically to reveal what must be cast aside” (Grogan, 2011: 33), an outcast body that articulates with other terms, ‘caste’, ‘castigate’, ‘castaway’. It stands at the limit of difference, a taboo body, obscene and unforgivable: it transgresses the line between black and white. The Turners are disliked precisely because they live in “[t]hat little box of a house” (2007: 11) and “some natives (though not many, thank heavens) had houses as good” (2007: 11). Charlie’s attempt to control Mary’s body in death, which has literally and metaphorically ‘gone to the dogs’, mirrors Dick’s attempts to control her in life. Needless to say, this control is essential to the patriarchal and social ‘stability’ of the white community of the district. Again, her dead body stands between the health of the district’s body politic – the two parts of her body that are still visible under the soiled white sheet – and its putrefaction/decay. However, the presence of her murderer at the scene of the crime is a reminder 19

of the circumstances of her death. Her body thus also “threatens a double pollution to the patriarchal white supremacy of Rhodesian society: the transgressive desire of the unruly female, and the woman befouled by her association with blackness” (Grogan 2011: 36). Her body has become abject, that which cannot be touched because it has been touched by Moses. Here, it is significant that the second epigraph of the Grass Is Singing reads: “It is by the failures and misfits of a civilization that one can best judge its weaknesses” (n. pag), for it speaks of the paradox of the outcast, that is, that those cast out by a society still remain central to it (Grogan, 2011: 36). Deemed a failure and a misfit, and most importantly a white woman who defies the norm, Mary is a threat to the way in which her social group perceives itself (Grogan, 2011: 36). It becomes increasingly evident to Tony Marston, who has yet to learn the ways of the farming district, that “white civilization . . . will never, never admit that a white person, and most particularly, a white woman, can have a human relationship, whether for good or for evil, with a black person” (2007: 30). It is for this reason that, at least for Slatter, Mary is “no longer a problem since she was dead” (2007: 29).

Against this background, then, it is important to re-consider, as Marston does after Mary’s body is taken away, the origins of the tragedy, in its broadest sense. Indeed, as the narrator informs us, Marston “tried desperately to achieve some sort of a vision that would lift the murder above the confusions and complexities of the morning, and make of it, perhaps, a symbol, or a warning. But he failed” (2007: 33). Furthermore, he

wondered how all this had begun, where the tragedy had started. For he clung obstinately to the belief, in spite of Slatter and the Sergeant, that the causes of the murder must be looked for a long way back, and that it was they which were important. What sort of woman had Mary Turner been, before she came to this farm and had been driven slowly off balance by heat and loneliness and poverty? (33)

The narrative could thus be read as the tracing not only of the “causes of [Mary’s] murder” (33) but also significantly, the “sort of woman [she had] been, before she came to [the] farm” (33). The questions of space, voice and power intersect in Marston’s conjectures about Mary’s life before her death, as it were, before her ultimate silence. The trial of Moses is a formality and thus does 20 not answer Marston’s crucial questions above. What does answer these questions, though, is the narrative’s turn away from the limited, though richly suggestive, focus on the circumstances of her death to the wider ones of her life. Here the narrative tracks her upbringing, in particular the formation of her race, class and gender consciousness, in a world governed by conventions of race, class and gender observance and in which selfhood is a struggle for a “niche” (2007: 41) in such a world. At sixteen, she had, the narrator says, “inherited from her mother an arid feminism” and at the age of thirty she “was no different from the Mary of sixteen” (2007: 41; 43), “leading the comfortable carefree existence of a single woman in South Africa” (2007: 41). With a town job, first as a typist and then a “personal secretary of her employer . . . earning good money” (2007: 43), she “could do as she pleased – could marry, if she wished, anyone she wanted” (2007: 41-42). Her body-image is also what she makes of it: “she modelled herself on the more childish-looking film stars” (2007: 42). As a space, then, the city holds the promise of independence and the advantages that accrue to it: “[i]f she wanted, she could have taken a flat and lived the smart sort of life. [. . .] There was nothing to prevent her living by herself, even running her own car, entertaining on a small scale. She could have become a person of her own account” (2007: 43). As it turns out, Mary does not make these choices but, instead, “chose to live in a girl’s club [. . .] because it reminded her of school, and she had hated leaving school” (2007: 43). Needless to say, she hardly grows up: “she led a full and active life. Yet it was a passive one, in some respects, for it depended on other people entirely. She was not the kind of woman who initiates parties, or who is the centre of a crowd. She was still the girl who is ‘taken out’” (2007: 44).

Whereas the narrator puts Mary’s choices down to “instinct” (2007: 43), it remains the task of analysis, indeed of this study, to test this explanation, whose suggestion of the old sense of tragedy as the result of the hero/ine’s ‘tragic flaw’ may prove a deliberate red herring. What my analysis shows, instead, is that “it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence” (Baudrillard, Simulations, 1983: 25) that shapes Mary’s choices. And this is the more trenchant explanation for Mary’s tragic death that the narrative sustains. It is to this idea of the social in its entirety as “carceral” (Baudrillard, 1983: 25) that I now turn, for it is in this sense that I contend Lessing asks us to understand Mary’s predicament.

In “Marriage as Death: A Reading of Dorris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing,” Eva Hunter suggests that, “while Mary is, at her worst, a protagonist who is difficult not to dislike, she is not depicted by Lessing as the inhuman, monstrously ‘feminine’” (1989: 141) for those for whom her death provides a relief. Rather, it is within the tortuous logic of the patriarchs of the farming community that she is seen as deeply repulsive. Otherwise, her childhood and early adulthood, while tormented by the disharmony of her home and the limited choices with which she is faced, are of the ordinary nature. What Lessing is at pains to point out, instead, is that, “within the white community, which sees itself as a vanguard of civilisation, the pressure on women to fulfil the role of moral guardians is particularly heavy” (Hunter, 1989: 141). In her death and, to some extent, in her life, Mary serves as a reminder that the white moral and communal standard is, in fact, a white male standard. The limitations of trying to assert an individual identity as a white woman living in a society dominated by a racial patriarchy and group identity, are emphasised in the novel through the portrayal of Mary as someone who, upon arriving on the farm after marrying Dick, is alienated from the other women in the district. Unused to being part of a group, Mary does not find easy accord with the solidarity that one seeks to obtain within the farm space, a solidarity which is won by the men at the expense of their womenfolk. The farm space is homogenous, rationalised and admits no individuality: It constrains Mary’s choices to the point of pathological solitude. Within its tight parameters, which correspond to a group identity, an identity regulated by the abstract white communal spirit, Mary’s tragedy is virtually guaranteed. To gloss the title of Eva Hunter’s essay, then, for Mary “marriage [is] death” (1989: 141), a double death to be sure, for merely entering the farm space marks her for death.

Hunter (1989: 140) further argues that,

[T]he main literary image of women which Lessing attacks in her portrayal of a ‘mad’ woman is the modern middle-class feminine ideal, the maternal Angel in the House. Mary tries to be this version of the Good woman by, among other things, marrying – in response to the ‘steel strong’ pressure her friends impose on her to be like other women, including her own mother. Yet marriage to Dick Turner destroys her.

Mary’s marriage to Dick provides arguably the best opportunity for Lessing to explore the intersections of space, voice and power that underscore the novel’s treatment of the paradoxes that attend Mary’s character. For what her marriage lays bare are the contradictions of her identity as white and female in a world in which each of these categories marks both her proximity to and distance from power. What her marriage also reveals are the patterns of authority and subordination that mirror those of her mother’s marriage to her father: like her mother’s, hers becomes a gradual descent from the promise of an independent womanhood to a situation in which she is a kept woman in a house in which she cannot even be guaranteed a domestic role. Her recollections of her mother’s marriage to her father and the poverty of her upbringing that is only relieved by moving to a boarding school, deepen the sense of her entrapment and accentuate the institutional nature of marriage. In this light, Hunter remarks that,

Mary Turner is, precisely, a woman unable to ‘kill’ the internalised rules that govern the behaviour of the selfless woman. An even stronger inducement than the attractions of martyrdom must lie behind Mary’s ‘willingness to suffer’, however, since her very instinct for self-preservation has been neutralised. The dreams recounted on pages 172-75 reveal that she is unable to protect herself against pain and punishment because she has been taught that resistance is useless – to be a woman is to be powerless, at least in relation to a man. (1989: 148)

Further, regarding Mary’s first encounter with an intimate moment involving her parents, Hunter suggests that, “perhaps all erotic relationships involve a measure of domination and submission” (1989: 148):

At the bedroom door she stopped, sickened. There was her father, the little man with the plump juicy stomach, beer smelling and jocular, whom she hated, holding her mother in his arms as they stood by the window. Her mother was struggling in mock protest, playfully expostulating. Her father bent over her mother, and at the sight, Mary ran away. ( 2007: 172-173)

And, in a dream in which her father playfully holds her head, which mirrors the above scene with her mother:

Her father caught her head and held it in his lap with his small hairy hands, to cover up her eyes, laughing and joking loudly about her mother hiding [. . .] She struggled to get her head free, for she was half-suffocating and her father held it down, laughing at her panic. And her brother and sister laughed too. Screaming in her sleep she half-woke [. . .]. ( 2007: 173)

Both these acts, remembered in a single moment, draw an important association between sexual intimacy and the father-daughter relationship, on the one hand, and male dominance and female submission, on the other. Here, Mary’s perceptions of sexual intimacy and authority intersect: as Hunter remarks, “[h]er mother, her model for her understanding of what it is to be a woman, indicates to her an alternative destiny, inside the house, inside the bedroom. Such a destiny is not ‘natural’ to the child at all” (1989: 149). The interplay between intimacy, authority and submission “teaches complicity with the man who overpowers her” (1989: 149). Her father half-suffocating her in the dream metaphorically mirrors her marriage to Dick, which is similarly suffocating. The image created in Mary’s dream is that of

a child that is isolated by the disappearance of the mother and the cruel laughter of the father and siblings. Psychologically, there is no alternative to complicity for Mary, any critical intelligence or instinctive revulsion will be suppressed through fear that rebellion will bring even greater pain. The mother delivers the child over to the father by pointing the way to passive domesticity. She constructs for her daughter the ‘box’ Mary feels she has inhabited both in childhood and as a married woman. (Hunter, 1989: 150)

After Mary marries Dick, she is put in a ‘box’, literally and metaphorically, into a space that she is socially and domestically already expected to inhabit and maintain, and her married life on the farm becomes her only option. At the beginning of the second chapter, her life in the city, before her marriage to Dick and her subsequent life on the farm, is explored. It is in the difference between these two lives that the novel locates its investigation of her tragedy. Readers are introduced to a 24

Mary who has agency and who is able to make her own decisions regarding her space and voice. We read, for instance, that:

At sixteen she left school and took a job in an office in town: one of those sleepy little towns scattered like raisins in a dry cake over the body of South Africa. Again, she was very happy. She seemed born for typing and shorthand and book-keeping and the comfortable routine of an office. She liked things to happen safely one after another in a pattern, and she liked, particularly, the friendly impersonality of it. By the time she was twenty she had a good job, her own friends, a niche in the town. Then her mother died and she was virtually alone in the world, for her father was five hundred miles away, having been transferred to yet another station. She hardly saw him: he was proud of her, but (which was more to the point) left her alone. They did not even write; they were not the writing sort. Mary was pleased to be rid of him. Being alone in the world had no terrors for her at all, she liked it. And by dropping her father she seemed in some way to be avenging her mother’s sufferings. It had never occurred to her that her father, too, might have suffered. ‘About what? she would have retorted, had anyone suggested it. ‘He’s a man, isn’t he? He can do as he likes. She had inherited from her mother an arid feminism, which had no meaning in her life at all. (2007: 35)

However, this portrayal of Mary starkly contrasts with the Mary she becomes at a later stage in the narrative. She is initially introduced to the reader as a woman who has options, both economically and socially; she eases into the routine of her office job and pursues a life outside the bounds of her parental home. The seemingly hopeful nature that she displays at this stage in her life shows a woman who has not yet been constricted to domestic life. Her life changes drastically when she moves to the farm to live with Dick, however, and the space on the farm is described as cruel, dry and hard after Mary’s arrival. Lefebvre notes that, “space indeed ‘speaks’ – but it does not tell all. Above all, it prohibits” (1991: 142). Describing the city space where Mary begins her independent life, the narrator remarks that,

She seemed impersonal, above the little worries. The stiffness of her manner, her shyness, protected her from many spites and jealousies. She seemed immune. This was her strength, 25

but also a weakness that she would not have considered a weakness: she felt disinclined, almost repelled, by the thought of intimacies and scenes and contacts. She moved among all those young women with a faint aloofness that said as clear as words: I will not be drawn in. And she was quite unconscious of it. She was very happy in the Club. (2007: 37)

The city is a space that offers her some level of autonomy and agency, as opposed to the farm space, which strips her of both. However, escaping the traps (and trappings) of convention proves at best difficult and, as it turns out, impossible at worst. The scrutiny that she receives from the women and the comments about her that she overhears are telling, as the narrator notes:

But all women become conscious, sooner or later, of that impalpable but steel-strong pressure to get married, and Mary, who was not at all susceptible to atmosphere, or the things people imply, was brought face to face with it suddenly, and most unpleasantly. She was in the house of a married friend, sitting on the verandah, with a lighted room behind her. She was alone; and heard people talking in low voices, and caught her own name. She rose to go inside and declare herself: it was typical of her that her first thought was, how unpleasant it would be for her friends to know she overheard. Then she sank down again, and waited for a suitable moment to pretend she had just come in from the garden. This was the conversation she listened to, while her face burned and her hands went clammy. “She’s not fifteen any longer: it is ridiculous! Someone should tell her about her clothes.’ ‘How old is she?’ ‘Must be well over thirty. She has been going strong for years. She was working long before I began working, and that was a good twelve years ago.’ ‘Why doesn’t she marry? She must have had plenty of chances.’ There was a dry chuckle. ‘I don’t think so. My husband was keen on her himself once, but he thinks she will never marry. She just isn’t like that, isn’t like that at all. Something missing somewhere.’ ‘But she’s such a nice girl.’ ‘She’ll never set the rivers on fire, though.’ ‘She’d make someone a good wife. She’s a good sort, Mary.’ (2007: 40-41).

This, of course, is despite the narrator’s comment that, “South Africa is a wonderful place: for the unmarried white woman” and, sardonically, that “she was not playing her part, for she did not get married” (2007: 38). The double-bind here points to the patriarchal framework that governs Mary’s and white women’s lives generally, which overdetermines the choices that they are able to make. Mary is, “after all, . . . nothing if not a social being” (42). Throughout the novel, Lessing portrays Mary’s character as a construct, a product of a white patriarchal social order and the norms that govern it: in this sense, her agency is limited. However, another crucial dimension of the narrator’s sardonic comment is its paradoxical import: what it implies, to be sure, is the paradox of race privilege and gender marginality. In the racial economy of the farm, Mary’s freedom is as tenuous as her ability to make choices in the city is. We read, for instance, that after she overhears the conversation about her not having married, “Mary’s idea of herself was destroyed and she was not fitted to recreate herself” (2007: 43). And that,

There seemed no connection between the distorted mirror of the screen and her own life; it was impossible to fit together what she wanted for herself, and what she was offered. At the age of thirty, this woman who had had a ‘good’ State education, a thoroughly comfortable life enjoying herself in a civilized way, and access to all knowledge of her time (only she read nothing but bad novels) knew so little about herself that she was thrown completely off her balance. (2007: 44)

Mary’s decision to leave the city space, marry Dick and move to the farm may account for her death, but it is clear that it does not constitute the tragic sense that the novel as a whole registers. Rather, the novel’s idea of tragedy extends beyond Mary’s character, to the structure of power that unites both the city and the country in a relation of co-implication. And this brings my discussion to the concept of power that Lessing works into the text’s fabric; in particular, I draw on Foucault’s idea of power as distributive, rather than prohibitive. For, while Mary may on one level appear to be at the receiving end of white male power, she is, on another, the channel through which it manifests and reproduces itself. She is, in short, both its target and its agent. As Sara Mills notes, ccording to Foucault (1994: 105), “power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away . . . power is employed through a net-like organization.” Moreover, as Nancy Fraser puts it in Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and 27

Gender in Contemporary Social Theory, for Foucault power “gets at its objects at the deepest level – in their gestures, habits, bodies, and desires” (1989: 24). Mary may not, in the ordinary sense, possess any power on the farm, but in many ways she is complicit with some of its practices: as a white woman on a farm where labourers are black and poor, she enjoys some of the privileges of its exercise, however paradoxical her exercise of it may be. Indeed, it is partly because of this paradox that the balance of power in all the spaces that she traverses – the home, the city and the farm – precarious as this balance may be, is maintained. Yet it is also partly because of the self- same paradox that its locations may shift. Power, argues Foucault, is “dispersed across complicated and heterogeneous social networks marked by ongoing struggle. Power is not something present at specific locations within those networks, but is instead always at issue in ongoing attempts to (re)produce effective social alignments, and conversely to avoid or erode their effects, often by producing various counteralignments” (Mills, 1994: 109).

Thus, when Mary’s marriage to Dick begins to unravel, the precarious balance between the force of convention and individual agency becomes particularly evident. In tracking her inner turmoil, the narrator notes that,

there was nothing to prevent her from running away and going back to her old life. Here the memory of her friends checked her: what would they say, breaking up a marriage like that? The conventionality of her ethics, which had nothing to do with her real life, was restored by the thought of those friends, and the memory of their judgements on other people. [. . .] But her desire to escape the misery had become so insupportable, that she pushed out of her mind the idea of her friends. She thought, now, of nothing but getting away, of becoming again what she had been. But then, there was such a gulf between what she now was, and that shy, aloof, yet adaptable girl with the crowds of acquaintances. [...] She felt, rather, as if she had been lifted from the part fitted to her, in a play she understood, and made suddenly to act one unfamiliar to her. It was a feeling of being out of character that chilled her, not knowledge that she had changed. (2007: 97)

There is another, even more precarious balance on the farm that Mary has to hold in place, that is, one between her race, which is governed by the mystical racial spirit, and the other, the ‘native’ 28

labour force on the farm, that she has hitherto ignored. In this case, Moses stands at the tipping point of the scale, as it becomes increasingly apparent to her that,

She was unable to treat this boy [Moses] as she had treated all the others, for always, at the back of her mind, was that moment of fear she had known just after she had hit him and thought he would attack her. She felt uneasy in his presence. Yet his demeanour was the same as in all the others; there was nothing in his attitude to suggest that he remembered the incident. He was silent, dogged and patient under her stream of explanations and orders. His eyes he always kept lowered, as if afraid to look at her. But she could not forget it, even if he had; and there was a subtle difference in the way she spoke to him. She was as impersonal as she knew how to be; so impersonal that her voice was free, for a while, even of the usual undertone of irritation. (2007: 142)

When her marriage to Dick comes unstuck, the farm begins to take on a sinister character of its own, forcing her to draw on the inner resources of her soul, rather than those of her race given in advance by the espirit de corps from which she is at any rate an outsider.

In “Postcolonialism, Female Portrayal, and Self-understanding in Selected Novels of Doris Lessing and Bessie Head,” Adamu Pangmeshi argues that Lessing concentrates on the personal lives of her protagonists but puts them in relationship with their society. Through her marriage, Mary actually “evades responsibility for her own life” (2014: 9). Following her decision, a great conflict arises in her concerning “the gap between what one is and what one aspires to be” (2014: 10). Mary’s loss of a sense of who she ‘thought’ she is, is a critical moment for her because “her idea of herself was destroyed and she cannot recreate herself” (2014: 11). It is essential to take into account the fact that she is “split into two selves, the one who feels totally without power, and the other whose power is ‘borrowed’ from the system which enforces her own oppression” (2014: 12). The “constant struggle between these two selves is also the cause of her nervous breakdown” (2014: 193), and her death is embedded within this struggle. However, Mary as a paradoxical character reveals what it means to be an Englishwoman (an outsider in the district) who has power as a white woman but is powerless as a woman. Her racial authority gives her power over the black 29 labourers on the farm, but her role as a wife and her socially constructed role as a woman leave her powerless. Thus, at one time when

Dick had gone to bed early, as he always did, she remained alone in the little front room. After a while, feeling caged, she went out into the dark outside the house, and walked up and down the path between the borders of white stones which gleamed faintly through the dark, trying to catch a breath of cool air to soothe her hot cheeks [. . .] She was tense with hatred. Then she began to picture herself walking up and down in the darkness, with the hated bush all around her, outside that pigsty he called a house, having to do all her own work – while only a few months ago she had been living her own life in town, surrounded by friends who loved her and needed her. She began to cry, weakening into self-pity. She cried for hours, till she could walk no more. She staggered back into bed, feeling bruised and beaten. (2007: 80)

In An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993), Luce Irigaray deals with, amongst other topics, the politics of the self, what the self is, and the relation between the feminine and masculine selves. Irigaray’s study confronts complex questions regarding what the self is. She remarks, for instance, that “[t]he expression ‘love of self’ raises certain possibilities, poses many questions: problems of envelopes, of the doubling of the self and within the self, of the positioning of the self and within the self” (1993: 59). In her “Love of Self: The Female Version,” the difficulties around the feminine self and how it is historically constituted against the masculine self are addressed. She remarks that constituting an identity for oneself

involves nostalgia, faith and hope, returning to the past, suspending the beyond, the inaccessible transcendent, a recourse to the existence of the soul, labor, creation of work, and, primarily, of one particular work, the family: home, wife, and children, extensions of the self. All of the aforementioned is needed to achieve a love of self that was always threatened, always in danger, always unstable, often wounded or ridiculously inflated. (Irigaray 1993: 62)

What brings about Mary’s predicament, that is, what brings her to the farm as a wife to Dick, may be said to be this convention of self-extension that Irigaray describes: to fulfil at some stage a role that, given the nature of the farm space, inevitably leads to domestication. Indeed, as Dick takes domestic duties away from her and places Moses in charge of the kitchen, she begins to crave more authority over the domestic space. But this form of authority is ironic, for it is the kind that does not disturb the gender hierarchy in the household and on the farm but, rather, simply shifts the contest onto the terrain of race. In other words, the more Mary resists her confinement within the domestic space, and demands more autonomy, the easier Dick is able to deflect her resistance to him onto a contest with Moses over domestic duties. Paradoxically, then, she is forced to fight on the conventional white patriarchal front and to maintain the racial hierarchy of the farm simultaneously. Throughout the narrative, the farm symbolically constitutes her confinement and forces her to confront her failure in particular. When Dick notices her gradual dissociation and inability to do chores, and appoints Moses as the new kitchen keeper in her place, Mary is unable to separate herself from the increasingly distorted reality into which she has been thrust. The ‘darkness’ she continuously describes and tries to escape from, becomes her: trapped between the racial and class economy of the farm, she becomes, ironically, the agent of her own decline. The complexity with which her character is drawn ultimately places her on the boundary between power and powerlessness. The more she becomes isolated from her own house, the more she fears that it may well be the last space she can secure. At a later stage in the narrative, when it falls on Moses to maintain the house, Mary feels the need to maintain her position as the authority of the domestic affairs in the home, against her prior resistance. She had, indeed, marked certain spaces on the farm as her own, and when Dick systematically takes her authority and agency in these spaces away from her, she feels fearsome and isolated.

Space is thus central to the intersection of power/powerlessness and voice/voicelessness in the constitution of Mary’s character in the narrative. The spaces that Mary inhabits in the narrative both reflect and institute the binary structure in which her character is caught up: as mentioned previously, her status as insider is contradictory. The espirit de corps of the farming district may be a racial identifier, but the geography of its gender is not only exclusive but also exclusionary. Mary exists on its boundaries, as an outsider who merely lives on the inside. She is excluded from certain spaces on the farm and, subsequently, from the narrative. As she runs out of options and 31 thus becomes reduced to a minimal space on the old sofa, where she tries to recollect her past in an attempt temporarily to escape her reality, her tragedy seems almost secured. Whereas, according to Pangmeshi, the woman can and is still able to carve her own space in spite of male domination, Mary cannot transcend her torment on the farm. What remains, indeed, are her fantasies about moving back to the city, which merely deepen her loss of‘the imaginative power she had before leaving the city. This is besides the mediatory power that she possesses as a white woman in a white male district. The classificatory forces that govern her life implicate her in the system that governs the white farming community, but place her firmly on the outside of the self-same classification. The paradox of power that her character embodies is brought home to her when she realises that her only source of power is by proxy: it is the power she has over Moses and the black farm labourers. And even this form of power is tenuous, always mediated and deferred. The narrator mentions that Mary was “as impersonal as she knew how to be” towards Moses; yet she needs him to the point of intimacy with him, to regain sexual agency that she loses as Dick becomes detached from her. But both Mary and Dick, as “poor whites” in a district in which they are held in sympathy and contempt, function as ciphers in a more insidious power structure over which neither can claim control. In this sense, Mary’s verbal abuse of Dick to try and attain authority in their marriage, and Dick “apologizing, abasing and her forgiving him” (75), become meaningless performances. The fragile nature of Mary’s power, however, is more pronounced: in the house, after Dick replaces her with Moses, this becomes more evident at one moment when she observes Moses going about his domestic routines:

She heard a strange angry muttering, and realized she was talking to herself, out aloud, as she walked. She clapped her hand over her mouth, and shook her head to clear it; but by the time Moses had come back into the kitchen, and she heard his footsteps, she was sitting in the front room rigid with an hysterical emotion; when she remembered the dark resentful look of the native as he stood waiting for her to leave, she felt as if she had put her hand on a snake. Impelled by a violent nervous reaction she went to the kitchen, where he stood in clean clothes, putting away his washing things. Remembering that thick black neck with the lather frothing whitely on it, the powerful back stooping over the bucket, was like a goad to her. And she was beyond reflecting that her anger, her hysteria, was over nothing, nothing that she could explain. What had happened was that the formal pattern of black- 32

and-white, mistress-and-servant, had been broken by the personal relation; and when a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is his chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip. She felt that she must do something, and at once, to restore her poise. (2007: 144)

The imagery in this passage reveals Mary’s inner turmoil, paranoia and fear, which arise from the threat that “the formal pattern of black-and-white, mistress-and-servant, had been broken by the personal relation” (2007: 144).

The feminisation of Moses within the white settler masculine power structure is itself a critical area in which power intersects race and gender, in this case masculinity. As a postcolonial text, The Grass is Singing interrogates what Pangmeshi argues lies at the core of colonial power. She notes, for instance, that,

Patriarchal subjugation of women is analogous to colonial subjugation of indigenous populations. And the resultant devaluation of women and colonized peoples poses very similar problems for both groups in terms of achieving independent personal and group identities; gaining access to political power and economic opportunities; and finding ways to think, speak and create spaces that are not dominated by the ideology of the oppressor. (2014: 197)

What Pangmeshi posits here, is that the subjugation of women parallels that of the colonised. Mary, as both the coloniser and the colonised in the novel, embodies this ambiguity of power. Suspended between her exercise of colonial power by proxy, which gurantees her mobility within white spaces, and her subjection under the same power, Mary sees Moses as presenting a chance for her momentarily to resolve this ambiguity. But Moses cannot offer this relief, given that his own location in the colonial relation is overdetermined by the sliding scale of colonial power – white man, then white woman, then black man, and, at the invisible end of the scale, black woman. According to Blunt and Rose (1994: 8), “spatial imagery has been influential both in feminist theory and in critiques of imperialist history, and these perspectives can inform each other in 33

attempts to make women visible as colonizers and colonized”. Mary, as the coloniser in the novel, and the spaces she occupies are navigated on negotiated terms, which raises the important question of the nature of her complicity in the colonial framework and, indeed, her agency within it. Does her tragedy come about because of her actions or despite them? It would seem that, despite her efforts to assert her authority on the farm, her tragedy is, so to speak, foretold. In a poignant moment, when her power in the home space begins to fade, we read that,

Faded, tousled, her lips narrowed in anger, her eyes hot, her face puffed and blotched with red, she hardly recognized herself. She gazed, shocked and pitiful; and then she cried, weeping hysterically in great shuddering gasps, trying to smother the sound for fear the native at the back might hear her. She cried for some time; then, as she lifted her eyes to dry them, saw the clock. Dick would be home soon. Fear of his seeing her in this state stilled her convulsing muscles. She bathed her face, combed her hair, powdered the dark creased skin round the eyes. (2007: 146)

As the narrative progresses, one becomes increasingly aware of Mary’s psychological disintegration. She gradually detaches from the outside world, for she no longer has an interest in the farm affairs, loses all sense of time and her appetite, and fears thoughts of leaving the house. The old sofa in her home now becomes her “refuge” (160) and she gradually takes to spending hours on the sofa with nothing but her thoughts. This disintegration is mirrored in her surroundings:

She was letting everything slide, except what was forced on her attention. Her horizon had been narrowed to the house. The chickens began to die; she murmured something about disease; and then understood that she had forgotten to feed them for a week. Yet she had wandered, as usual, through the runs, with a basket of grains in her hand [. . .] Her mind, nine-tenths of the time, was a soft aching blank. She would begin a sentence and forget to finish it [. . .] But as far as the native was concerned, she was still responsive. This was the small part of her mind that was awake. (2007: 149)

Abjection, desire and death in The Grass is Singing

In her essay, “White Postcolonial Guilt,” Joy Wang argues that, in the novel, “the warped interracial relationship between Mary and Moses becomes the vehicle for a cathartic and redemptive alleviation of white postcolonial guilt” (2009: 37). Mary, being the white female protagonist, becomes consumed by guilt and resentment, resenting herself more so than she does Moses, and ultimately resents the fact that she fears him. Wang further posits that,

Mary’s experience of guilt can be thought through Judith Butler’s argument that subject formation relies paradoxically upon the twin experiences of both abjection and agency. Even as Mary’s sense of historical guilt becomes a debilitating form of abjection, it encodes and bolsters powerful forms of agency. (2009: 37)

On the colonial power scale, then, Mary’s character is not quite fixed: its embodiment of guilt and desire reiterates the novel’s central point about the white woman’s sexuality as the threat at the boundaries of white settler masculinity. Indeed, as the novel progresses, and she is forced to tend to farm affairs when Dick falls ill, her interactions with her black servants, specifically her ill- treatment of them, becomes more complex when read as a displaced resistance against the patriarchal norms of her society (Wang, 2009: 40). Wang further emphasizes that her “belligerence [becomes] a clear projection of her anger against an unsatisfactory marriage and the oppressive, gendered social norms that led to its existence” (2009: 40). The inverse of this resistance is, as Tony Marston, the newly-arrived British farm manager, is to discover, an acquiescence to desire for the ‘other’ who, like herself, exists on the margins of white male power:

He [Tony Marston] was struck motionless by surprise. Mary was sitting on an upended candlebox before the square of mirror nailed on the wall. She was in a garish pink petticoat, and her bony yellow shoulders stuck sharply out of it. Beside her stood Moses, and, as Tony watched, she stood up and held out her arms while the native slipped her dress over them from behind. When she sat down again she shook out her hair from her neck with both hands, with the gesture of a beautiful woman adoring her beauty. Moses was buttoning up the dress; she was looking in the mirror. The attitude of the native was of an indulgent 35

uxoriousness [. . .] ’Thank you, Moses’, she said in a high commanding voice. Then she turned, and said intimately: ‘You had better go now. It is time for the boss to come.’ The native came out of the room. When he saw the white man standing there, staring at him incredulously, he hesitated for a moment and then came straight on, passing him on silent feet, but with a malevolent glare [. . .] When the native had gone, Tony sat down on a chair, mopped his face which was streaming with the heat, and shook his head to clear it. For his thoughts were conflicting. He had been in the country long enough to be shocked; at the same time his ‘progressiveness’ was deliciously flattered by this evidence of white ruling- class hypocrisy . . . he had read enough about psychology to understand the sexual aspect of the colour bar, one of whose foundations is the jealousy of the white man for the superior sexual potency of the native; and he was surprised at one of the guarded, a white woman, so easily evading this barrier. (2007: 185 – 186)

This moment of heightened complexity has been read in various ways. However, what the scene brings to the argument that I have advanced thus far about the ambiguities of colonial power is the underlying sense that this power is negotiated through a complex set of competing desires. In Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (1995), Robert Young places colonial sexual intimacies at the core of colonial relations of power, so that in his study colonial power emerges as less certain than it is conventionally given credit for. Indeed, for Young, speaking of British power at home, “the fixity of identity for which Englishness developed such a reputation arose because it was in fact continually being contested, and was rather designed to mask its uncertainty, its sense of being estranged from itself, sick with desire for the other” (1995: 2). Similarly, in related vein, Blunt and Rose argue that, “studying white, colonizing women can disrupt imperial claims of transparent space and mimetic representation by revealing the fluidity of rather than the fixity of space” (11). In the above scene, the novel does not seek to mask Mary’s role as the coloniser – indeed, even though the scene is rich in sexual suggestion, Moses is still the servant – but exposes the faultlines of a narrow understanding of colonial power as prohibitive and certain. It is also, as Marston suggests, layered over by “the sexual aspect of the colour bar” (186), which reaches deeper into the psychology of power – of domination and submission. Wang remarks that,

Mary’s intimacy to Moses develops only through the course of insanity, [so that] one might consider Lessing’s juxtaposition of madness alongside interracial romance as a method of rendering the extent to which such interracial attachments were so implausible within the context of apartheid, that to feel anything at all was to court insanity. (2009: 42)

Moreover, “[a]t the time of Lessing’s novel, . . . one might speculate that apartheid’s simultaneous reliance on patriarchy and class oppression was at such an extreme, that a white woman’s critique of her own racial privilege could only mean placing her sanity and entire sense of bodily integrity at the brink of a precarious lifeline” (2009: 45).

Mary and Moses’s sexual relationship signals the breakdown of the psychic structure of colonial relations, transplanted unproblematically onto another land. Yet, paradoxically, it also leads to the breakdown of her own psyche, which is ultimately embedded in the colonial one that sustains it. In “An Abject Land? Remembering Women Differently in Doris Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing and Chenjerai Hove’s Bones,” James Graham explores the complexities of the relationships between the settler colonialists and natives. He notes that, “[i]f the male settler was defined in relation to his mastery of the land, the female settler was defined in relation to the house, and that house was defined in relation to the body. This house-body was, however, not just gendered; it was also racialized and nationalized’ (73). However, because this structure of colonial relations depended on “a paternal mastery over the land” and over the body of the white woman, it remained at best tenuous. Thus, Graham remarks, “[o]n the settler farm this patriarchal and fiercely racist projection of a national subjectivity demanded a fastidious regime of self-discipline” (2007: 60), which, as the example of Mary makes evident, could not be guaranteed.

Drawing on Graham’s statement about the racialised and nationalised body of the white settler woman, one could argue that Mary’s death results from this body’s transgression of the racial and national lines. She is an outsider on three counts: as poor, as a woman, and as a stranger in the black native land. While it seems that the spaces she inhabits are more racialised than they are gendered, in the total scheme of the narrative and of her life, these categories merge to produce her tragedy. As Graham further posits, while a spatial division existed between the settlers and the natives, and “the white farmer could cross this boundary at will, . . . as the vulnerable custodian of 37

racial purity, middle-class manners and, above all, domesticity, his wife could not” (60). In this light, “Lessing introduces this boundary and the complex taboo it represents” (Graham 2007: 60). As the narrative draws to a close, Mary’s world is described as tranquil; thus more natural imagery comes to the fore, which perhaps indicates that she might have regained a sort of sensory presence and is now more aware of her surroundings. But this is also the moment of her death, so that her consciousness of a world beyond the constructed one of her race frees her from the abjection of her existence as a mere body of exchange; a body, that is, which, like the land to the white male farmer exists as exchange value. Early in the narrative we read that Charlie Slatter

[F]armed [the land] as if he were turning the handle of a machine which would produce pound notes at the other end. He was hard with his wife, making her bear unnecessary hardships at the beginning; he was hard with his children, until he made money, when they got everything they wanted; and above all he was hard with his farm labourers. (2007: 15)

The link between husband, husbandry, wife, offspring and money reinforces the chain between the male settler’s mastery of both the land and the female settler’s body, so that making the land pay becomes equivalent to making the woman’s body a link in this chain. Yet, as Graham observes, it is Mary who breaks this chain at the end of the novel, by the force of her ambiguous position between authority, its loss and desire. He states that,

by having Mary break the spatial and gender taboo by envisioning an emasculating female husbandry of the land, Lessing begins to play out the Oedipal nightmare of patriarchal settler culture, leading to a catastrophic denouement. The breakdown of taboos and boundaries leads to her erotically charged murder at the hands of Moses. In a dream-fantasy just prior to her murder, the fecund land and its strange creatures seem to repossess the farm in fulfilment of paranoid white fears of the ‘black peril’. (2007: 60-61)

Furthermore, as Wang points out,

Mary’s dream allegory of the farm being reclaimed by the ‘bush’ – by the land, by Africa – is not just abstract symbolism; rather, it represents her gradual awakening to the 38

contradictory, messy reality of everyday life on the Rhodesian farm. She encounters abjection whenever she experiences that which her culture defines as external to her own gendered, spatialized and insular identity: the African landscape and African bodies.

That it is her death that opens and closes the narrative is significant in this regard. Her transcendence of this spatial imprisonment, even if in death, restores to her and to the narrative the symbolic power, and, in turn, the land reclaims its power. About Mary’s death, Wang remarks:

Mary’s murder, portrayed from her own point of view, is thus presented as an act of liberating fulfilment. Her last thought – that the bush had avenged itself – provides the climax that releases all the unbearable tensions of her emergent conscience. Mary’s redemption is cast as necessarily dependent on her death, after which she is released from the impossible struggle to live according to a conscience that allows her to feel something for a black man other than sheer distaste. In the broader social context, the implication is that to feel outside the boundaries of apartheid is to struggle for an emotional survival that can come only at the expense of sanity, or life itself. By the time of her death, Mary is the epitome of what would be considered the ‘abject’: she is impoverished, excluded from all social contact, insane, sexually terrorized, and waiting only for death. Yet this absolute state of abjection allows her to come into being in a way that at last gives her a sense of escape. In the grips of mortality, Mary is granted a moment of lucid understanding and genuine feeling that is not a mere inheritance of her history and station. The shadow of regret, followed by the desire to explain and to be absolved of guilt, marks the first and only moment in the novel in which Mary is conceived as a self-possessed agent of her own destiny. (2009: 42 -43)

Conclusion

In The Grass is Singing, the ambiguities of power and powerlessness intersect those of gender, race, class and place in ways that reveal the manner in which the psychic structure of a society is often reflected and refracted in that of its members and vice versa. Not only does Doris Lessing 39 explore the dialectical tensions between the personal and the political, she also shows how each of these terms, that is the personal and political, can be examined from within its own histories and practices. What I have shown in my discussion of Mary’s tragic character are the ways in which, from the point of view of the novel’s critique of bounded identities, her tragedy is the necessary outcome of the novel’s examination of the limits of social categories. I have argued that, viewed in this light, Mary’s death is not tragic in the conventional sense of a character unable to alter her fate, but rather in the sense in which the novel’s critique of the categories of race and class depends on her death. By situating the novel in the older form of the plaasroman, with its romanticisation of land and community, I have argued that Lessing deconstructs this form, particularly by complicating its romanticism with a complex historical or dialectical materialism.

Whereas most readings of The Grass is Singing have focused on its critique of racism, with gender serving as the vehicle for this critique, what my analysis has tried to bring to bear on the study of the novel are the complex strands of gender, race, class, place, power, desire and death. By means of this approach, I have situated Mary’s life and death in both the psychic and social environments which help illuminate the layers of complicity and resistance that structure her character. For instance, by training its narrative focus on her psychological disintegration – that is, on the disintegration of the structure of her psyche – the novel simultaneously throws light on the internal fragmentation in the structure of race and class on the farm. Thus, even though, from the point of view of a gender analysis, it may seem that by beginning and ending with Mary’s death the novel simultaneously pre-empts and terminates its critique, this narrative strategy, in fact, throws into sharp focus the internal dynamics of the farming community that would otherwise have remained hidden. The announcement of Mary’s death at the beginning of the novel therefore serves as the catalyst to draw our attention more sharply to the circumstances of her life. As readers, we are primed by the novel’s strategy to begin with her death to investigate the social frameworks within which it occurs.

In the conventional plaasroman – here I could think of early twentieth-century novels by Pauline Smith, such as The Little Karoo or The Beadle – it is the white male subject who interrupts the harmony of the farm, and often by corrupting a good Christian family’s daughter’s morals. In this way, the conventional plaasroman reinforces ideas of male adventure and female domesticity and 40 of the farm as a place of harmony. What I have shown in my discussion is that Lessing deconstructs this sense of the Southern African farm and, in its place, substitutes a female for a male character and an internally fragmented community for a harmonious one. As I have endeavoured to show, it is in these substitutions that the novel’s critical power lies.

Chapter Three

Speech and Silence in Nervous Conditions

We are no longer pleading for the right to speak: we have spoken; space has changed; we are living in a matrix of our own sounds; our words resonate, by our echoes we chart a new geography; we recognize this new landscape as our birthplace, where we invented names for ourselves; here language does not contradict what we know; by what we hear we are moved again and again to speak.

- Susan Griffin (1978: 195)

Black women must not merely be talked about, we must be in a position to speak for ourselves. - Jackie Roy (1990: 53)

Introduction: narrative space, voice and power

Nervous Conditions is a novel that deals with the (post)colonial gender and cultural politics within an extended African family in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, in the 1960s, through the experiences of a young female narrator and protagonist by the name of Tambudzai. The narrative begins with a startling, provocative statement, “I was not sorry when my brother died” (Dangarembga 2004: 1), which immediately draws the reader’s attention not only to its apparent callousness but, more importantly, to the interpretive possibilities that it avails to the reader. Above all, it is a statement that announces Tambudzai’s presence, calls upon the reader to reckon with it, and situates her voice firmly at the centre of the narrative. In this sense, the reader is compelled to listen and observe. Indeed, the sense that the reader gets from the opening of Tambudzai’s narrative is of catharsis, which, as the narrative unfolds, becomes the signature of the narrative as a whole. Her brother’s death, in other words, opens up avenues that have been closed to her as a young girl 42

growing up in a village and in a time when tradition, particularly its gender aspect, holds sway. Growing up female and poor, Tambudzai has, up to the point that her narrative begins, lived in the shadow of her younger brother, Nhamo, who, on account of his male gender, has had more privileges than her. It is against this background that her provocative statement should be read. In this chapter, I aim to argue that Tambudzai’s narrative places an important emphasis on the constitutive dimension of power in the making of feminine and masculine identities. To this end, my discussion goes further than the more conventional sense of power as an inert instrument that can simply be ‘possessed’ and ‘used’. I argue, instead, that the various ways in which gender and other categories define and, in turn, are defined by practices of power should help complicate our understanding of how power is exercised. Here I have in mind Tambudzai’s narrative as a terrain on which various kinds of power are contested – social, cultural, literary, political, gender, spatial, and those concerning authorship – in ways that alter some of the older power relations within her own extended family and in the social and cultural spaces more broadly. Furthermore, my focus in this chapter will be on space, in particular the practices of inhabiting space and the impact that gender spatial politics has on Tambudzai’s mobility, agency and voice. I shall examine the spaces that Tambudzai occupies in the world of the novel and how colonial spaces intersect with traditional ones in the making of a postcolony. Given that Tambudzai grows in critical consciousness throughout the narrative, my discussion will also examine the ways in which her narrative subverts and transcends these spaces. From this perspective, her closing assertion, that is, that her narrative is an opening up of alternative ways of writing and reading women’s lives, is significant.

Like The Grass is Singing and The God of Small Things, Nervous Conditions deals with how material and symbolic spaces are gendered and how in their conventional forms they institute certain limits for women and grant certain privileges to men. In the novel, space and how it is ultimately inhabited by men and women, is tied to hegemony and exclusion, speech and silence. For instance, at the beginning of the narrative, Tambudzai is introduced as a young girl who lives in poverty, silenced by both her brother’s power and privilege and by the cultural expectations in her home and village. Whereas her brother is able to navigate various spaces inside and outside the homestead and the village, her spatial horizons are mostly limited to the homestead. For this reason, her power and voice, and by extension her identity, have to be negotiated through the 43

spatial framework made available to her by tradition. Who she is in the early stages of her development is thus fixed in the material spaces that she inhabits, which is not to suggest that her identity is thus predermined by the physical spaces of the homestead and village. Rather, what her spatial location brings to light are the conditions of her socialisation, which the political thrust of her narrative seeks to lay bare. It is in this light that the subversive imperative of her voice needs to be read. My discussion of space also takes into account the fact that the spaces that Tambudzai’s character inhabits in the narrative – physical, symbolic, colonial and domestic – are indicative of a complicated and contradictory history of colonial and local forms of patriarchy. Whereas, historically, colonial forms of patriarchy operated through local ones in parternalistic ways, they did not share with them the same ideas about the place of women in a modernising milieu. In part, Tambudzai’s narrative explores these contradictions, especially with regard to the delineation of private and public spaces in her home and the extended environment of her extended family. For instance, while her younger brother has more freedom to move freely within and between various spaces inside and outside the home and village, Tambudzai’s movements are severely limited. In fact, Nhamo’s spatial freedom is linked directly to Tambudzai’s lack of it, as this view by her great uncle, Babamukuru, clearly indicates. Here, Babamukuru explains why he believes it makes sense to educate Nhamo:

Nhamo, if given the chance [ . . .] would distinguish himself academically, at least sufficiently to enter a decent profession. With the money earned in this way, my uncle said, Nhamo would lift our branch of the family out of the squalor in which we were living. (Dangarembga 2004: 4)

Given that Tambudzai is older and, even without the benefit of Nhamo’s privileges, considers herself as capable of “distinguish[ing] [herself] academically” and of “lift[ing] [her] branch of the family out of the squalor” (4), there is no sense in this and other parts of the novel that this is the case. Her relief at her brother’s death, then, is not a simple issue of a resentful sibling but is, crucially, a statement of political subjectivity. Indeed, as she points out,

[M]y story is not after all about death, but about my escape and Lucia’s; about my mother’s and Maiguru’s entrapment; and about Nyasha’s rebellion – Nyasha, far-minded and isolated, my uncle’s daughter, whose rebellion may not in the end have been successful. (2004:1)

Another related issue that my discussion takes up is one of voice; that is, of the ways in which Tambudzai’s lack of spatial mobility and agency may be linked to her lack of voice. In this connection, I argue that Nervous Conditions is more than an instance of self-writing; rather, it is about the broader issue of authorship and posterity, of who possesses the means of representation. To paraphrase Pauline Ada Uwakweh’s point about the spatial politics of voice and writing, patriarchal subordination of women is reflected in the male domination of the literary arena, a situation that has always put into question the realism of female characterisation in male fiction. Uwakweh further notes that the imbalance is now being redressed by an outpouring of female voices in the literary sphere in many parts of Africa (1995: 75). In her essay, entitled “Debunking Patriarchy: The Liberational Quality of Voicing in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions,” Uwakweh argues that,

silencing comprises all imposed restrictions on women’s social being, thinking and expressions that are religiously or culturally sanctioned. As a patriarchal weapon of control, it is used by the dominant male structure on the subordinate or ‘muted’ female structure. (1995: 75)

In the light of this view, I posit that the narrative as a whole is built on the turn towards speech and thought: for instance, at the close of her narrative, Tambudzai remarks that, “something in my mind began to assert itself, to question things and refuse to be brainwashed, bringing me to this time when I can set down this story” (2004: 209). Again, Tambudzai’s comment on the connection between her story and her life – that is, between writing and experience – brings up a broader philosophical question about women and writing, which Uwakweh above regards as the problem of the realism of female characterisation in male fiction. About the process of telling her story, Tambudzai remarks: “[i]t was a long and painful process for me, that process of expansion. It was a process whose events stretched over many years and would fill another volume, but the story I 45 have told here, is my own story, the story of four women whom I loved, and our men, this story is how it all began” (2004: 209). These meta-narrative incursions amplify the novel’s preoccupation with the dialectical tensions between presence and absence, and between speech and silence in the constitution of Tambudzai’s subjectivity.

The last term that I introduce here, a term around which both space and voice intersect, is power. As my brief introduction of the concepts of space and voice above indicates, there is both a material and symbolic dimension to the terms on which Nervous Conditions is grounded, and the same can be said of the novel’s conception of power. Among the many examples of the gendered nature of power and its exercise within her family structure, Tambudzai remembers Nhamo’s homecomings from the mission school, and how he would leave his luggage at the shops at the bus terminus for Netsai, his younger sister, to fetch:

Nhamo’s baggage was never too cumbersome for him to carry. All the same, he would not carry it all himself. Instead, he would leave something, a few books, a plastic bag, anything as long as there was something, at the shops at the bus terminus, for he was on friendly terms with everybody, so he could send Netsai to fetch them as soon as he arrived home. When he was feeling gracious he would offer to mind Rambanai, who was still toddling, while Netsai ran the errand. When he was being himself he would smirk that minding children was not a man’s duty and Netsai, who was young although big for her age, would strap the baby to her back in order to fetch the luggage. Once or twice, because there was too much for her to manage on her own, I went with her. Knowing that he did not need help, that he only wanted to demonstrate to us and himself that he had the power, the authority to make us do things for him, I hated fetching my brother’s luggage. (Dangarembga 2004: 10)

Tambudzai recalls, too, the words that her father would use to reassure her that she did not need an education:

My father thought I should not mind. ‘Is that anything to worry about? Ha-a-a, it’s nothing,’ he reassured me, with his usual ability to jump whichever way was easiest. ‘Can you cook 46

books and feed them to your husband? Stay at home with your mother. Learn to cook and clean. Grow vegetables. (2004: 15-16)

About her mother, she recalls her passive acceptance of the “heavy burden” of what she referred to as “[t]his business of womanhood” (2004: 16).

All three examples above, as many others in Tambudzai’s narrative will show, illustrate the spatial and discursive character of power; that is, that power manifests itself in the conventions associated with who has the authority to speak and where. However, it is not simply what these examples show that, in my view, makes them deeply resonant but, crucially, how what they show are the ways in which power insinuates itself in ‘ordinary’ or commonsensical assumptions about what is proper for a boy, girl, man or woman. In the novel, it is because Tambudzai has learnt to “refuse to be brainwashed” (2004: 209) that she is able to unmask the façade of ordinariness with which masculine power is often imbued and presents itself. Thus, she can read her brother’s power-play, her father’s ‘reasonableness’ and her mother’s domesticity as part of the same means by which power manifests itself. It is against the background of the three terms, that is space, voice and power, and how they are deployed in Tambudzai’s narrative that I turn to a discussion of the novel as a whole.

Speech and silence in Nervous Conditions

In her essay, entitled “You Had A Daughter, But I am Becoming A Woman: Sexuality, Feminism and Postcoloniality in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and She no Longer Weeps, Caroline Shaw says the following about speech and silence in Nervous Conditions:

while speaking up may confirm agency by its very intonement, Dangarembga . . . reveals both the vulnerabilities of speaking up as well as its power. Silence will not protect you; but speaking, in and of itself, does not redress gender inequality. Yet despite persistent obstacles, Dangarembga’s protagonists work with personal integrity toward the transformation of silence into language and action. (2007: 16)

In Tambudzai’s narrative, one finds none of the naivety and hyperbole that has come to be associated with “speaking up”, nor does Tambudzai conceive of silence in simple terms as saying nothing. Rather, both speech and silence figure in her narrative dialectically as complex devices for reading the structures of power that shape her world and the worlds of the women around her. In other words, whereas her narrative – her voice, that is – has political consequences, its power nevertheless lies in the deconstructive imperative, which I consider to be the signature of its politics. In this sense, the novel forms part of a longer history of writing by women about women – and about men – which brings women’s experiences to the foreground of literary and cultural experience. Read in this way, that is, as a novel that speaks to and with others of its kind, one begins to see a pattern of meta-narrative beneath the story of one young woman’s experience. Moreover, Dangarembga’s choice of the bildungsroman to frame Tambudzai’s narrative, a form most readily identified with the Victorian novel, with its predominantly male protagonists as narrators or focalisers, adds to the novel’s deconstructive gesture. By contesting this form, Dangarembga simultaneously displaces its historical associations with male speech. Nhamo’s death and Tambudzai’s remark that “our home was healthier when he [Nhamo] was away” (2004: 10), could be read in this broader context as the symbolic ‘death’ of the traditional locus of representational power and authority. To return to Shaw’s point about “the vulnerabilities of speaking up as well as its power”, it must be quite evident that my discussion of the novel proposes an alternative view of the nature of the interplay of speech and silence in Tambudzai’s narrative. In this view, Tambudzai’s voice is not singular and personal but, rather, collective and historical, implicitly drawing, as it does, on other autobiographical voices in writing by women.

How, then, does Nervous Conditions ‘break the silence’, to use a common expression, around questions of representation and women’s self-representation? Taking into account the narrative perspective from which the story is told, that is, retrospectively, is perhaps the best way to approach this question. This form offers Tambudzai and the reader a strategic distance from the immediacy of experience, which makes possible the separation of the story from the lived events, while bringing these events under the critical scrutiny of a more mature Tambudzai. Whereas in the event Tambudzai admits to having not always understood the systemic forms in which women’s lives in her family were organised, outside the event, that is, in her retrospective narrative, she provides salutary pointers to the constructedness of her social and cultural world. She says, for instance, 48

about her father’s “theories” (2004: 16) about the woman’s place and function, after her father tries to reassure her about the uselessness of education for a woman:

His intention was to soothe me with comforting, sensible words, but I could not see the sense. This was often the case when my father spoke, but there had not been such concrete cause to question his theories. This time, though, I had evidence. Maiguru [her great aunt] was educated, and did she serve Babamukuru books for dinner? I discovered to my unhappy relief that my father was not sensible. (2004: 16)

While this discovery of the lie behind her father’s theories provides a glimpse into the young Tambudzai’s nascent critical consciousness, her naivety is nonetheless evident. This is, of course, because she recalls this detail from within the event in which it occurred, which contrasts in important ways with the terminology that she deploys when she speaks outside the events of her childhood, that is, as an adult. Here, she speaks retrospectively and with more authority of “[her] escape and Lucia’s; . . . [ of her] mother’s and Maiguru’s entrapment; and . . . [of] Nyasha’s rebellion” (2004: 1; emphasis added). Moreover, whereas in the event she speaks of Maiguru in individualist terms, as “a better wife than [her mother]” (2004: 16), because she is educated, can cook and is “well looked after by Babamukuru” (2004: 16), at those moments when she steps back from the lived experience of the event, she begins to understand the collective experience of women in terms of entrapment, rebellion and escape, both as women and black in a patriarchal and colonial structure. Her mother’s insight about the “the poverty of blackness on one side and the weight of motherhood on the other” (2004: 16), which she initially doubts on account of her surface impressions of Babamukuru’s wealth, begins to make sense, as she develops critically. Consider, for instance, her reaction to her mother’s view of what it means to be black and a woman in a colonial and patriarchal milieu:

I thought about this for several days, during which I began to fear that I was not as intelligent as my Sub A performance had led me to believe, because, as with my father, I could not follow the sense of my mother’s words. My mother said being black was a burden because it made you poor, but Babamukuru was not poor. My mother said being a woman was a burden because you had to bear children and look after them and the husband. But I 49

did not think this was true. Maiguru was well looked after by Babamukuru, in a big house on the mission [. . .] Maiguru was driven about in a car, looked well-kempt and fresh, clean all the time. She was altogether a different kind of woman from my mother. I decided it was better to be like Maiguru, who was not poor and had not been crushed by the weight of womanhood. (2004: 16-17)

Needless to say, when, after the death of her brother, she leaves her homestead to live with Babamukuru and Maiguru’s family, so that she can enter Sacred Heart college, she becomes increasingly aware of the ubiquity of structural forms of colonial and patriarchal oppression. Her first impressions of Maiguru begin to change, the more she observes her suffering and that of her cousin Nyasha, as women, under Babamukuru’s patriarchal regime. This is revealed in one of the conversations that Tambudzai has with Maiguru about her status as an educated woman. This conversation is crucial for multiple reasons, but especially for what it reveals about what has been hidden to her by the lived experience of her childhood:

‘Is it true, Maiguru?’ I asked later that afternoon when I went to the verandah to read and found my aunt marking her books there. ‘Do you really have a Master’s degree?’ Maiguru was flattered. ‘Didn’t you know?’ she smiled at me over the top of her glasses. How could I have known? No one had ever mentioned it to me. ‘But Maiguru,’ I answered immediately, emboldened by the thought of my aunt obtaining a Master’s degree, ‘did you ever say?’ ‘Did you ever ask?’ she countered, and continued, ‘Yes, we both studied, your uncle and I, in South Africa for our Bachelor’s Degrees and in England for our Master’s.’ ‘I thought you went to look after Babamukuru,’ I said. ‘That’s all people ever say.’ [. . .] ‘That’s what they like to think I did,’ she continued sourly. The lower half of her face, and only the lower half, because it did not quite reach the eyes, set itself into sullen lines of discontent. (2004: 102-103)

And then,

‘You must earn a lot of money,’ I breathed in awe. My aunt laughed and said she never received her salary. I was aghast. ‘What happens to your money?’ I asked. ‘The money that you earn. Does the Government take it?’ For I was beginning to understand that our Government was not a good one. ‘You could say that,’ my aunt laughed, forcing herself to be merry again but not succeeding. She gave up, took off her glasses and leaned back in her seat, staring wistfully through the verandah’s arches to the mountains and beyond. ‘What it is,’ she sighed, ‘to have to choose between self and security. When I was in England I glimpsed for a little while the things I could have been, the things I could have done if – if – if things were – different – But there was Babawa Chido and the children and the family. And does anyone realise, does anyone appreciate, what sacrifices were made? As for me, no one ever thinks about the things I gave up.’ She collected herself. ‘But that’s how it goes, Sisi Tambu! And when you have a good man and lovely children, it makes it all worth while.’ (2004: 103)

A number of critical issues come up in this conversation, which, as Tambudzai gains more distance from the experience of her childhood in her family household, begin to broaden her mental horizon. Not least of these issues is her consciousness of something unjust about Maiguru’s situation, which she does not yet have the sophisticated language to explain. As she says after this conversation: “Personally, I thought it was a great shame that Maiguru had been deprived of the opportunity to make the most of herself, even if she had accepted that deprivation. I was all for people being given opportunities” (2004: 103). However, let me analyse the substance and meaning of this conversation against the backdrop of what it means in the context of the dialectic of speech and silence in the novel as a whole.

What is most evident is that the conversation brings home to Tambudzai what she had hitherto not countenanced from the distance of her home and from within the narrow ambit of her lived experience, that is, the real meaning of her mother’s words about “the weight of womanhood” and about “learn[ing] to carry your burdens with strength” (2004: 16). Notwithstanding the shock- effect of Maiguru’s situation and Tambudzai’s still undeveloped critical sense, the conversation poses crucial questions for Tambudzai that she is only able to answer at a later stage of her 51

development. And, because Maiguru speaks of her suffering in subtle and ironic terms, Tambudzai only half-grasps the full meaning of her situation. Let me recall what to me is the point on which the whole conversation turns, the part where Tambudzai asks Maiguru about what happens to the money that she earns;

‘What happens to your money?’ I asked. ‘The money that you earn. Does the Government take it?’ For I was beginning to understand that our Government was not a good one. ‘You could say that,’ my aunt laughed, forcing herself to be merry again but not succeeding. (2004: 103)

The subtle link that Maiguru makes between the colonial government and the patriarchal one of Babamukuru is obviously lost on Tambudzai at this stage of her development. However, what the conversation reveals to Tambudzai, albeit not clearly at this juncture, is that her critical facilities are still tied to the innocence of her upbringing and, most importantly, to her idea of what a woman’s place should be. Her hesitation to explore the full meaning of Maiguru’s situation, indebtedness to Babamukuru and decision to take the safe path of reasonableness all suggest a still nascent critical consciousness struggling with the reality before it. Indeed, as she says,

I did not tell Nyasha about this conversation because I guessed she had heard it herself many times and would say irritatingly, ‘I told you so.’ Besides, the things Maiguru had talked of were reasonable ; they did not mean she was always complaining. I felt sorry for Maiguru because she could not use the money she earned for her own purposes and had been prevented by marriage from doing things she wanted to do. But it was not so simple, because she had been married by my Babamukuru, which defined the situation as good. (2004: 104)

Tambudzai’s rationalisation of Maiguru’s “situation” – particularly in the riders that she uses, such as “besides” and “but” – obviously signals her inability to transcend the structures that limit her voice and Maiguru’s and, more importantly, her inability to separate her identity from that of “my Babamukuru” (2004: 104, emphasis added). Because of this, she cannot fully register the subtle ironies in Maiguru’s voice, except partially to sympathise with her “reasonable” personal 52

sacrifices. That she thought Maiguru went with Babamukuru to South Africa and England “to look after [him]” as that was “all people ever sa[id]” (2004: 102), further reinforces her critical limits. The conversation itself speaks of Maiguru’s long-standing silence. The fact that it takes place out of earshot of Babamukuru, but that its contents may have been discussed between Tambudzai and Nyasha, suggests an ongoing conversation between women in the household to which Babamukuru is not privy. As an outsider to this conversation, or as someone who solely comes to it as a poor relative who is thankful to have been adopted by Babamukuru after Nhamo’s death, Tambudzai views the conversation as carrying all the taboos of a subversive plot. This is despite her nagging sense that Babamukuru, like the noble and benevolent patriarch of her childhood imagination, may conceal a ruthless persona like the other men in her family. Indeed, about Babamukuru, she remarks, after she moves in with his family:

My uncle’s identity was elusive. At first I was disappointed when I came to the mission. I had thought it would be like the good old days, the days before England, with Babamukuru throwing us into the air and catching us and giving us sweets, metaphorically speaking, but I hardly ever saw him, because he was so busy. We hardly ever laughed when Babamukuru was within earshot, because, Maiguru said, his nerves were bad. His nerves were bad because he was so busy. For the same reason we did not talk much when he was around either. (2004: 104)

The difference between Babamukuru and Tambudzai’s own father is perhaps one of means and the appearances they put up publicly, rather than the difference in the nature of their masculine power and preeminence in their respective households. For, poor as Tambudzai’s father may be by comparison to his brother, Tambudzai recalls his reaction to her request for seeds to start a vegetable garden from the proceeds of which she would pay for her schooling. Her father

was greatly tickled by this. He annoyed me tremendously by laughing and laughing in an unpleasantly adult way. ‘Just enough for the fees! Can you see her there?’ he chuckled to my mother. ‘Such a little shrub, but already making ripe plans! Can you tell your daughter, Ma’Shingayi, that there is no money. There is no money. That’s all.’ (2004: 16)

As I have already pointed out, what Tambudzai lacks at this stage of her development is sufficient distance from the events that she recalls to form a meaningful critical opinion about their context and wider significance. However, her acute sense of injustice is able to sustain both her voice and the trajectory of her intellectual development to the point when, at the close of her narrative, she “no longer could . . . accept [even] Sacred Heart and what it represented as a sunrise on [her] horizon” (2004: 209).

What, then, is the horizon of Tambudzai’s narrative? I began this section of the chapter with a quotation from an essay by Caroline Shaw concerning speech and silence, and what she calls the “vulnerabilities” and the “power” of “speaking up” (2007: 16). I suggested that it might perhaps be more analytically productive to speak not of speaking up or remaining silent as alternate choices but, rather, of speech and silence in Tambudzai’s narrative as complex devices for reading the structures of power that shape her world and the worlds of the women around her. To this end, I have argued that the power of Tambudzai’s narrative is to be found in what it reveals about the structures that make both speech and silence possible. It is with this in mind that I now turn to what is arguably the most important shift in the novel, that is, the shift in narrative voice as Tambudzai moves from her parental home to the mission home of her great uncle and aunt, Babamukuru and Maiguru. I have already introduced this shift, which is also a transition, through the conversation that Tambudzai has with Maiguru. However, it is the totality of the new spaces – the tensions between speech and silence that constitute them – that is of particular critical interest. In Space, Place and Gender, Doreen Massey reminds us that, “[m]any women have had to leave home precisely in order to forge their own version of their identities [. . .] moreover, in certain quarters, the mobility of women does indeed seem to pose a threat to a settled patriarchal order” (Massey 1994: 11). Thus, the critical distance that results from Tambudzai’s change of place, albeit fortuitously following her brother’s death, could be seen in this light as the beginning of a process of contesting “the masculine desire to fix woman in a stable and stabilizing identity” (1994: 11).

Writing women into space: colonial modernity, patriarchy and the space of writing

When Tambudzai’s mother, Ma’Shingayi, speaks of “the poverty of blackness on one side and the weight of motherhood on the other” (2004: 16) as her lot and that of women in the villages, Tambudzai cannot fully grasp what she means; and it will take some years, and a shift in location and perspective, before she does. I have shown that, while Tambudzai shows a developed sense of injustice, particularly that which is done to herself, she often lacks the adequate critical facility and insight to situate it in its historical and structural frameworks, largely on account of her age. As her horizons expand, however, she is able to see that what she “had believed with childish confidence” were random acts of arrogance or cruelty by the males in her family, were, in fact, “serious consequences of the same general laws that had almost brought [her] education to an abrupt, predictable end” (2004: 38). In other words, her conviction that “burdens were only burdens in so far as you chose to bear them” (2004: 38) begins to change, as her awareness of patterns of exclusion grows. I have also argued that part of the achievement of the novel lies in its choice of the bildungsroman, particularly in wresting this form from its historical associations with male authorship, self-possession, private/individual suffering and auto-redemption, and opening it up to a collective voice. In this sense, the novel as a whole constitutes a symbolic space and its narrative a political act of writing women back into the spaces from which they are excluded as active subjects. Nyasha, Tambudzai’s cousin, increasingly becomes the interlocutor in the process of Tambudzai’s expanding critical horizons. However, on meeting Nyasha for the first time, Tambudzai notes that,

There was something about her that was too intangible for me to be comfortable with, so intangible that I could not decide whether it was intangibly good or intangibly bad. There was a certain glamour to the idea of sharing a room with my Anglicised cousin. Nyasha herself was glamorous in an irreverent way that made me feel, if not exactly inadequate at least uneducated in some vital aspect of teenage womanliness. But for all the glamour, the thought persisted that Nyasha would not be good for me. Everything about her spoke of alternatives and possibilities that if considered too deeply would wreak havoc with the neat plan I had laid out for my life. The sense of being alien and inadequate that had departed 55

while I drank tea under Maiguru’s maternal surveillance reasserted itself. Needing a scapegoat I blamed Nyasha, who had not been cordial enough to say a single word to me in all the time that I had been standing in her room. (2004: 75-76)

A number of important issues come up in this brief first impression of Nyasha, which mark a decisive shift in Tambudzai’s understanding of “womanliness,” “alternatives and possibilities” beyond her experience, and, indeed, the complexities of her world beyond the narrow boundaries of village life. Nyasha brings to her experience something worldly and, though Tambudzai cannot quite grasp it at this moment of their first meeting, “irreverent” (2004: 75). Having spent her childhood away from the extended family and the traditional structures of authority, Nyasha also brings to the narrative a certain distance. Whereas at first Tambudzai reads this distance as Nyasha’s alienation from her culture and language, in the broader scheme of the novel it also functions textually as a device, shifting the narrative from the singular locus of Tambudzai’s consciousness and experience to the more diffuse arena of competing realities. Nyasha is, as Tambudzai remarks, “my Anglicised cousin” who makes her “feel, if not exactly inadequate at least uneducated in some vital aspect of teenage womanliness” (2004: 75). However, it is at the welcoming party for Babamukuru, on his return from his studies in England with his family, that the ease with which the traditional structures of patriarchal authority re-assert themselves is dramatised. It is also at this party, which takes place before Tambudzai moves to the mission, that the marginal position of women is evident. The fact that Maiguru has also returned from England with a Master’s degree is not acknowledged. Her place at the party is with her children, while Babamukuru presides over a meeting about the future of the extended family. At the washing of the hands, before the food is served, Tambudzai recalls:

I had a special task. I had to carry the water-dish in which people would wash their hands. I did not like doing this because you had to be very sure of the relative status of everybody present or else it was easy to make mistakes, especially when there were so many people. Today it was doubly tricky because although Babamukuru was the guest of honour, there were male relatives present of higher status than he. Making a considered and perhaps biased decision, I knelt first in front of Babamukuru, which was a mistake because he wanted me to let his uncle Isaiah, our eldest surviving grandfather, wash first. I knelt and 56

rose and knelt and rose in front of my male relatives in descending order of seniority, and lastly in front of grandmothers and aunts, offering them the water-dish and towel. (2004: 40)

It is only later, after Tambudzai moves to the mission to stay with Babamukuru and Maiguru’s family, that the tensions within Babamukuru’s household come to the surface. At the mission, the clash between the traditional patriarchal structures of authority and those of colonial modernity in which traditional structures now exist, pushes Tambudzai’s intellectual horizons much further than her experience thus far has been able to countenance. It is also after she moves to the mission that Tambudzai’s ideas of a good daughter, mother and, generally, a good woman begin to change. Nyasha increasingly becomes the catalyst in plotting the new trajectory for Tambudzai’s re- socialisation, so to speak. On this dimention of the novel, Okonkwo remarks in “Space Matters: Form and Narrative in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions”, that,

Nervous Conditions explores the following premise: It asserts that its female characters’ plight is codified in various and public spatial structures, ideologies, and experiences that differently impede the women’s lives under (post) colonization, which itself is an unfinished tale of history and identity – a work in process, in progress, in motion. (2003:54)

And, similarly, Uwakweh writes of the “nervous conditions” that result from the shifting traditional values, particularly as they afflict the female characters. She notes that, Dangarembga seems to suggest that patriarchy, as is expressed in all forms of male domination of the female, heightened by the contradictions of colonial experience, creates the nervous state or psychological condition which afflicts the female characters in varying degrees of intensity. As a metaphor, “nervous conditions” appropriately expresses the double predicament of the woman in African societies (1995: 78).

Uwakweh further posits that “Dangarembga’s approach to the task of debunking patriarchy is couched in Tambudzai’s story of the four women closely related to her and in their various responses to male power. She explores not only the sources of the ‘silence’ surrounding the women, but also their muted challenges to the dual burden” (1995: 78). It is this dual burden of 57

patriarchy and colonial modernity that is brought to the fore when Tambudzai is sent to live with Babamukuru on the mission. What she discovers in her uncle’s household is the mirror of what she had experienced in her own, that is, that “the needs and sensibilities of women . . . [are] not considered a priority, or even legitimate” (2004: 12). Indeed, about her own situation at home, she says she had

felt the injustice of [her] situation every time [she] thought about it, which [she] could not help but do often since children [were] always talking about their age. Thinking about it, feeling the injustice of it, this is how [she] came to dislike her brother, and not only [her] brother: [her] father, [her] mother – in fact everybody. (2004: 12)

At this stage in her narrative, it is quite evident that her sense of the broader context in which the injustice occurs is not yet developed; hence the cynicism of her conclusion, that is, that she “came to dislike . . . everybody” (2004: 12), including her mother. Yet, as Uwakweh points out, “Tambudzai [is the] narrator or ‘implied author’ of Nervous Conditions. [She] occupies an interpretive position, a perspective that is necessary for our appreciation of the new insights she acquires about her experience as female in a patriarchal and colonial society” (1995: 75). As the implied author, however, Tambudzai is trapped in three different yet interconnected ways in the narrative; firstly through poverty, secondly, in a male-centred culture and, thirdly, between the paradoxes of tradition and change in the Anglicising milieu of the mission. At the mission, she is entirely dependent on Babamukuru to provide her the space and financial means to attend the mission school and, later, Sacred Heart College. Her family’s dependence on Babamukuru’s generosity means that her position at the mission is as mediator of masculine power. After all, she goes to live with Babamukuru’s family after her brother, who has been the heir to her family’s inheritance, dies. Although she admires her educated uncle, she is also conscious of the absolute authority that he exercises over his household. This is the contradiction of her journey, which she bears in silence, until the last stage of her narrative.

The day of her departure from home for the mission is a moment of rupture, with all the tensions and pathos of such a moment laid bare in a taut but poignant description, which warrants quoting in full: 58

What I experienced that day was a shortcut, a rerouting of everything I had ever defined as me into fast lanes that would speedily lead me to my destination. My horizons were saturated with me, my leaving, my going. There was no room for what I left behind [. . .] When I stepped into Babamukuru’s car I was a peasant. You could see that at a glance in my tight, faded frock that immodestly defined my budding breasts, and in my broad-toed feet that had grown thick-skinned through daily contact with the grounds in all weathers. [. . .] At Babamukuru’s I expected to find another self, a clean, well-groomed, genteel self who could not have been bred, could not have survived, on the homestead. At Babamukuru’s I would have the leisure, be encouraged to consider questions that had to do with survival of the spirit, the creation of consciousness, rather than mere sustenance of the body. This new me would not be enervated by smoky kitchens that left eyes smarting and chests permanently bronchitic [. . .] Of course, my emancipation from these aspects of my existence was, for the foreseeable future, temporary and not continuous, but that was not the point. The point was this: I was going to be developed in the way that Babamukuru saw fit, which in the language I understood at the time meant well [. . .] Without so much going on inside me I would have enjoyed that ride to the mission . . . ( 2004: 58-59)

By their very nature as inbetween, moments of rupture are given to utopia and reification rather than to clear analysis. Such is the moment that Tambudzai describes here, which is defined more by the pessimism of what she leaves behind and the optimism of what lies ahead, than by the possibility that both might amount to the same thing. What is worth remarking about this description is the simple contrast that it establishes between appearances: the physical and the spiritual, the body and the soul, the village and the mission, entrapment and emancipation, the past and the future, the rough and the genteel. The mission homestead and its colonial life, however, admits no such simple contrasts; instead, Tambudzai finds out that the glamour that has characterised it from a distance, in no small measure embellished by Nhamo’s exaggerations, hides the more unflattering reality of Babamukuru’s male aggression. Tambudzai recalls how Nhamo “had had a refrain with which he had punctuated his enthusiastic and reverent descriptions of the luxury and comfort of Babamukuru’s house. ‘Not even the Whites,’ he had used to carol in an impressionistic descant, ‘not even the Whites themselves could afford it!’” (61). However, from 59

the conversation that Tambudzai has with Maiguru, cited above, and Nyasha’s resistance to Babamukuru’s authority, the reality beneath the glamour reveals a pattern that Tambudzai’s narrative is yet to unmask.

I noted above that Nyasha becomes the catalyst for what Tambudzai comes to learn about masculine power, that is, that it is not random but structural, articulating with other forms of power, including colonial paternalism. It is this character of power that plays itself out inside the mission homestead: here, Babamukuru governs the spaces of his mission home with absolute authority. And, although Tambudzai is aware of her uncle’s authority and that she is obliged by this authority to obey him, she initially hopes to negotiate a space for herself in his house. Nyasha, on the other hand, does not feel this obligation, nor does she think that her father’s authority should remain uncontested. Thus her resistance is vocal and as aggressive as Babamukuru’s aggression towards her is open and crude. Maiguru has cultivated an ironic voice to make her silent suffering bearable. In a very real sense, then, Tambudzai enters a household in which speech and silence alternate as forms of resistance, leading to her conclusion at the beginning of her retrospective narrative, that Maiguru’s silence and Nyasha’s rebellion constitute, respectively, two extremes: “entrapment” and a form of resistance, that is, rebellion, that, in her view, “may not in the end have been successful” (2004: 1). Thus, one could say that Tambudzai’s re-location to the mission and to Babamukuru’s household begins the novel’s own shift in perspective, from the strictly personal to the political dimension of the personal. She recalls, for instance, that after her move to the mission,

I was meeting, outside myself, things that I had always known existed in other worlds although the knowledge was vague; things that had made my mother wonder whether I was quite myself, or whether I was carrying some other presence in me. (2004: 94)

At any rate, what constitutes entrapment in and escape from patriarchy, or the question of whether or not a certain kind of resistance to patriarchy is successful, depends on how the novel frames these terms. Tambudzai’s journey from the village to the mission is, as the passage above illustrates, one that bears all the marks of an escape from the physical to the spiritual, from the body to the soul, and from the past to the future. However, as she reminds readers, her story is 60

retrospective and is, thus, more tempered than the experience that it narrates. Stepping back from the immediacy of experience and reflecting on the time that has passed between her “first impression” (2004: 62) of the mission house and her writing of her story, for instance, she notes that,

[H]ad I been writing these things at the time that they happened, there would have been many references to ‘palace’ and ‘mansion’ and ‘castle’ in this section. Their absence is not to say that I have forgotten what it was like. That first impression of grandeur was too exotic ever to fade, but I have learnt, in the years that have passed since then, to curb excesses and flights of fancy. The point has been made: I can now refer to my uncle’s house as no more than that – a house. (2004: 62)

And about the story of the history of the rise of the mission station told to her by Nyasha, she recalls that,

Nyasha taught me this history with a mischievous glint in her eye. I was like a vaucum then, taking in everything, storing it all in its original state for future inspection. Today I am content that this little paragraph of history as written by Nyasha makes a good story, as likely if not more so than the chapters those very same missionaries were dishing out to us in those mission schools. At the time that I arrived at the mission, missionaries were living in white houses, but not in the red brick ones. My uncle was the only African living in a white house. We were all very proud of this fact. No, that is not quite right. We were all proud, except Nyasha, who had an egalitarian nature and had taken seriously the lessons about oppression and discrimination that she had learnt first-hand in England. (2004: 64)

The two passages above are significant, not so much for what they say about the events that they recall as the way in which these events are recalled at the moment of writing them. Put differently, Tambudzai brings to the readers’ attention the idea of the supplementary nature of writing, as it were, the strategic distance that writing has allowed her from the events making up her first impressions. In this sense, then, writing figures in her story as the device through which her 61

experience is mediated, a new way of looking back at the experience, so to speak, and a space for a new sense of her own part in a much broader and older history of power relations: between women and women, men and men, men and women, coloniser and colonised. And again, the fact that Nyasha is central to the process of turning her experience into something deeply critical and political, is significant for what Tambudzai says about the women whose lives came to shape her experience and for whom her narrative is a record for posterity. With this idea in mind, let me then turn to the ways in which Nervous Conditions writes women into the spaces from which tradition excludes them, while simultaneously instituting the space of writing as a supplement for lived experience.

Two details are worth remarking on regarding Tambudzai’s arrival at the mission house, besides that the house itself has been handed down to Babamukuru by the missionaries: one is that Tambudzai spends a fair amount of time “inspecting the kitchen” (2004: 67) and describing its maintenance. As it turns out, the kitchen is her point of entry into the house, “[s]ince [she] had entered [her] uncle’s house through the back door” (67). The other is Maiguru’s complaint about the draught coming into the kitchen through a “missing [window] pane” (67), when she exclaims, ‘It surprises me!’ [. . .] ‘You’d think people would find time to fix windows in their own homes. Yet they don’t” (67). By “people” Maiguru is referring to Babamukuru. One can draw from these first impressions two ways in which Tambudzai and Maiguru conceive of what is and what is not properly ‘their place’ in the house. Tambudzai’s detailed description of the kitchen and how it is maintained bears all the marks of domesticity, while Maiguru’s comment about “people [who] would not find time to fix windows in their own homes” reveals her own alienation from a house that she partly finances and, by extension, partly owns. Needless to say, Tambudzai’s first impressions of the organisation of the mission homestead reflect the foundation of the organisation of power relations within the household as well. To recall Okonkwo’s remark about why an analysis of space in Nervous Conditions matters: it is because the one who owns the house, in this case Babamukuru, “delineates and polices the domestic space – the familial (house)hold – as a territory of inviolable and unnegotiable male/God-like power, both physical and ideological” (2003: 56). Indeed, awed by the opulence of the mission house, Tambudzai concludes: “Babamukuru was God, therefore I had arrived in Heaven” (2004: 70). However, since in the largely colonial world in which the mission house exists Babamukuru governs his household by 62

proxy, the colonial factor that Tambudzai brings into her narrative becomes particularly significant. In this connection, it is important to recall her remark that Nyasha was not proud of Babamukuru being the “only African living in a white house” after “the lessons about oppression and discrimination that she had learnt first-hand in England” (2004: 64). Writing women into space thus occurs on this fraught and contested terrain, so that our assessment of Tambudzai’s conclusions, particularly regarding Nyasha’s “rebellion” (2004: 1), needs necessarily bear this in mind. Tambudzai is able to step back from the romanticism of appearances, after “the novelty wore off” and is able to

see that the antiseptic sterility that my aunt and uncle strove for could not be attained beyond an illusory level because the buses that passed through the mission, according to an almost regular schedule, rolled up a storm of fine red dust which perversely settled in corners and on surfaces of rooms and armchairs and bookshelves. (2004: 71)

The metaphorical possibilities in this passage are multiple, not least of which is the implicit warning that the appearance of tranquility within the household cannot keep at bay the turmoil that lurks just under the surface of the “illusory” peace. And that, in fact, Tambudzai may have traded her grubby childhood ‘prison’ for a more glamorous one; as she remarks, “I became confident that I would not go the same way as my brother” (2004: 71).

Nyasha brings to Tambudzai’s experience a different kind of complexity: recalling their first conversation, Tambudzai remembers seeing her as someone who “for the first time . . . I grew to be fond of . . . of whom I did not approve” (2004: 79). Nyasha’s influence on her also comes in the form of reading; as she recalls,

It was good to be validated in this way. Most of it did not come from the lessons they taught at school but from Nyasha’s various and extensive library. I read everything from Enid Blyton to the Bronte sisters, and responded to them all. Plunging into these books I knew I was being educated and I was filled with gratitude to the authors for introducing me to places where reason and inclination were not at odds. It was a centripetal time, with me at 63

the centre, everything gravitating towards me. It was a time of sublimation with me as the sublimate. (2004: 94)

And, speaking of her dual cultural inheritance, both at home and in England, and how her parents struggle with it, Nyasha thinks that it is too late to revert to the ‘good girl’ they expect her to be. As she says of her parents, “‘they’re stuck with hybrids for children. And they don’t like it. [. . .] It offends them. [. . .] I can’t help having been there and grown into the me that has been there’” (2004: 79). Her mother, on the other hand, reverts to the role of the dutiful wife to Babamukuru, and hides her suffering behind exaggerated entreaties of her husband. For her part, operating with a “moral obligation” to “[m]y Maiguru” and “my Babamukuru”, as she refers to them, Tambudzai, unlike Nyasha, cannot yet separate her identity from that which others have conferred upon her. Babamukuru maintains an aloofness that hides an authoritarian character:

He was a rigid, imposing perfectionist, steely enough in character to function in the puritanical way that he expected, or rather insisted, that the rest of the world should function. [. . .] [H]e had found himself – as the eldest child and son, as an early educated African, as headmaster, as husband and father, as provider to many – in positions that enabled him to organise his immediate world and its contents as he wished. [. . .] Thus he had been insulated from the necessity of considering alternatives unless they were his own. Stoically he accepted his divinity. Filled with awe, we accepted it too. [. . .] Babamukuru was good. We all agreed on this. More significantly still, Babamukuru was right. (2004: 88)

However, it is precisely the idea that because Babamukuru is good he must therefore be right that Nyasha rejects. Indeed, the contests over space and over who has the right to speak in the household arise from this tension between tacit agreement that Babamukuru is good and Nyasha’s rejection of the notion that, by extension, he is right. And, as the narrative begins to shift from Tambudzai’s singular experience to the broader one of the mission, the novel itself begins to frame its questions about gender, space and voice more broadly. One of the consequences of this shift is that the women’s voices begin to assert themselves, and, as they do so, the faultlines in the edifice of male primacy and authority begin to show. Nyasha’s consistent challenge to Babamukuru’s 64 authority, for instance, results in him invoking his masculine privilege, warning her at one time that, “We cannot have two men in this house” (115). Writing women into space, then, begins from such contests over space and voice, and, as a result, the novel provides such a space and voice for its female characters. It is how Tambudzai comes to the conclusion that the five women with whom her narrative is concerned find themselves at different ends of traditional and colonial spectra of power that I now turn to examine. The five women that I am referring to are Tambudzai herself and Lucia, who escape, her mother and Maiguru, who remain trapped, and Nyasha, whose rebellion Tambudzai says may in the end not have been successful.

Tambudzai’s earliest impressions of Maiguru come from brief visits of her family to the village, and Tambudzai uses her as an example of an educated and married woman when her father thinks it is unnecessary to educate a woman. Let me recall this point in the narrative, for it also establishes the important link that Tambudzai ultimately draws between Maiguru and her own mother, Ma’Shingayi. When Tambudzai could not continue with her schooling, on account of her family’s lack of money to pay the fees, she recalls her father reassuring her that she did not need to worry:

My father thought I should not mind. ‘Is that anything to worry about? Ha-a-a, it’s nothing,’ he reassured me, with his usual ability to jump whichever way was easiest. ‘Can you cook books and feed them to your husband? Stay at home with your mother. Learn to cook and clean. Grow vegetables. His intention was to soothe me with comforting, sensible words, but I could not see the sense. This was often the case when my father spoke, but there had not before been such concrete cause to question his theories. This time, though, I had evidence. Maiguru was educated, and did she serve Babamukuru books for dinner? I discovered to my unhappy relief that my father was not sensible. I complained to my mother. ‘Baba says I do not need to be educated,’ I told her scornfully. ‘He says I must learn to be a good wife. Look at Maiguru,’ I continued, unaware how viciously. ‘She is a better wife than you!’ (2004: 16)

At the mission,

Maiguru, always smiling, always happy, was another puzzle. True, she had good reason to be content. She was Babamukuru’s wife. She lived in a comfortable home and was a teacher. Unlike her daughter, she was grateful for all these blessings, but I thought even the saints in heaven must grow disgruntled sometimes and let the lower angels know. I thought Maiguru deserved to be beatified. She was occasionally upset but never angry. She might be disappointed at times but she was never discouraged. I was concerned that she did not have many people to talk to, but I supposed it was the consequence of her being so educated since none of the other married women at the mission with whom she might have been friendly had degrees. (2004: 98-99)

By its very nature, as an overarching, subsuming narrative form built around the single consciousness of a single experience, the bildungsroman is given to suppositions and conjectures about others around the narrative voice. Yet, because the bildungsroman is also a form that shows the growth of this consciousness, both in breadth and depth, these suppositions and conjectures often change into more profound self-knowledge, that is, into the narrator’s awareness of the limits and limitations of her/his self-knowledge, as well as that of others. Thus it should not be surprising that Tambudzai’s first impression of Maiguru is couched in terms of her own needs and aspirations, without a corresponding sense of what Maiguru’s might be. To her, Maiguru is content by virtue of being Babamukuru’s wife and, from her limited experience of how power operates, she puts Maiguru’s isolation from the women of the mission down to her education. Otherwise, she is a saint deserving of beatification. That it might be precisely because of her marriage to Babamukuru that she is isolated only becomes clearer to Tambudzai as she begins to unravel the “puzzle” (2004: 98) of Maiguru’s apparent lack of “disgruntle[ment]” (99). I have already cited one instance in this connection, in which Tambudzai discovers that Maiguru’s salary goes to Babamukuru and that, despite her private suffering as a result of this, she has cultivated an ironic language to hide her discontent and to rationalise her entrapment within what is effectively a glamorous ‘prison’. There are hints, of course, that by being “content,” “grateful for all [the] blessings” of “liv[ing] in a comfortable home and [being] a teacher” (2004: 98-99), Maiguru might be compensating for what she cannot have. In the conversation I refer to above, Tambudzai informs us that,

Maiguru was more serious than she had ever been before. Her seriousness changed her from a sweet, soft dove to something more like a wasp. [. . .] The lower half of her face, and only the lower half, because it did not quite reach the eyes, set itself into sullen lines of discontent. She bent over her books to hide them, and to prove that she was not unhappy at all she made a chuckling sound, I think she thought gaily, but sounding pained. [. . .] I still studied for that degree and got it in spite of them – your uncle, your grandparents and the rest of your family. Can you tell me now that they aren’t pleased that I did, even if they don’t admit it? No! Your uncle wouldn’t be able to do half the things he does if I didn’t work as well!’ (2004: 102-103)

And it is Nyasha, whom Tambudzai initially thinks is ungrateful for her comforts, who also provides some hints about Maiguru’s discontent, hints which Tambudzai often hopelessly misreads. On one occasion, Maiguru complains about the time she spends cooking, which becomes a telling sign of what lies beneath the apparent ‘saintly’ character that Tambudzai sees in her:

Maiguru sometimes observed, ‘I do waste a lot of time cooking. You know, cooking food that isn’t eaten.’ ‘Then stop cooking,’ Nyasha would snap. Or else Maiguru would apologise at table for not having brought us cream to go with our jelly. ‘I tried to find some,’ she would flutter, ‘but we got there so late everything was gone. As usual!’ Nyasha would not compromise. She told Maiguru to learn how to drive. ‘And where do you think I would get the car from?’ her mother retorted. ‘Do you think I can afford to buy one?’.(2004: 104)

Food occupies a central part in Tambudzai’s recollection of her childhood and takes on a sinister significance once she moves to the mission. It functions variously as a marker of poverty or affluence, domesticity or freedom and, importantly in the case of my analysis, as a means of control and resistance. It is not only that Maiguru finds cooking a waste of time but, also significantly, the spending on “too much” (2004: 125) food a waste of money, including hers, by Babamukuru, who does not seem to consult her. This becomes even more evident when the family travels to the village for Christmas, the first after Tambudzai has moved to the mission. Tambudzai recalls that,

The back of the car and the boot was packed with food and necessities – a side of an ox chopped into limbs to make it fit, pounds of mealie-meal, dozens of loaves of bread and buns, much margarine, sugar and tea. There were packets of powdered milk, bottles of cooking oil and orange juice and peanut butter, tins of jam, cans of paraffin, soap and detergent. In fact, there was everything we needed for two weeks’ stay and more besides, because Babamukuru always provided not only the Christmas meal but Christmas itself for as many of the clan that gathered for as long as they gathered. We did not have Father Christmas but we had Babamukuru. (2004: 124-125)

Tambudzai recalls, too, that “Maiguru was grumbling that a side of an ox was too much meat, and I thought she must have disagreed with Babamukuru about some serious matter, because it was unusual for her to grumble” (2004: 125). At the time, Tambudzai had put Maiguru’s grumbling down to “Babamukuru’s ignorance of such wifely tasks [which] had really caused him to buy too much meat” (125). However, the subtle suggestion is that Maiguru’s discontent might have been about Babamukuru spending too much of their money on his relatives, disregarding her objections. This is despite the objection that Maiguru actually voices, that is, “‘what I object to is the way everybody expects me to spend all my time cooking for them. When you provide so much food, then I end up slaving for everybody,’ she continued obstinately and tried to atone for her obstinacy by sounding tired and weak” (2004: 125). It is clear that Maiguru is trapped in her own silence and by her kindness.

Maiguru’s situation sheds significant light on Tambudzai’s mother’s own entrapment and, indeed, on the larger issues that begin to displace Tambudzai’s childhood naivety and tightly personal narrative. Perhaps the most poignant moment in the narrative follows her witnessing of the fight between Babamukuru and Nyasha over Nyasha’s coming into the house later than her brother, Chido, and Tambudzai. Babamukuru accuses her of “behav[ing] like a whore” (2004: 116), and Tambudzai recalls

[H]ow dreadfully familiar that scene had been, with Babamukuru condemning Nyasha to whoredom, making her a victim of her femaleness, just as I had felt victimised at home in the days when Nhamo went to school and I grew my maize. The victimisation, I saw, was 68

universal. It didn’t depend on any of the things I had thought it depended on. Men took it everywhere with them. Even heroes like Babamukuru did it. And that was the problem. You had to admit that Nyasha had no tact. You had to admit she was altogether too volatile and strong-willed. You couldn’t ignore the fact that she had no respect for Babamukuru when she ought to have had lots of it. But what I didn’t like was the way all the conflicts came back to this question of femaleness. Femaleness as opposed and inferior to maleness.(2004: 118)

This, needless to say, puts into wider perspective the many puzzles that Tambudzai ponders throughout her childhood: among others, the privilege that Nhamo enjoyed over her; her mother’s statement about the burden of womanhood; and Nyasha’s point that,

[W]hen you’ve seen different things you want to be sure you’re adjusting to the right thing. You can’t go on all the time being whatever’s necessary. You’ve got to have some conviction, and I’m convinced I don’t want to be anyone’s underdog. It’s not right for anyone to be that. But once you get used to it, well, it just seems natural and you just carry on. And that’s the end of you. You’re trapped. They control everything you do. (2004: 119)

To understand Tambudzai’s escape and, indeed, that of her mother’s younger sister, Lucia, it is important to take account of this sense of entrapment. The narrative as a whole develops towards a different type of re-adjustment, whereby Tambudzai seeks to acquire her own convictions, despite her limited sense of what these might be. Operating with a limited, largely moral, vocabulary to articulate what such an escape could mean for someone growing up poor and female in a masculinist traditional and colonial milieu, she faces more complex odds than Nyasha. Her mother’s marriage to her father and how Lucia came to live with them testifies to the power of tradition and of the precarious place of women in it. She recalls that,

[M]y father, visiting a distant relative, saw my mother, impregnated her and was obliged to take her home with him. It was unfortunate that it happened this way because, under these circumstances, my grandfather could not claim a very high bride-price for his daughters and so my mother’s marriage did not improve her family’s condition very much. 69

That was when my grandfather’s daughters gained a reputation for being loose women. ‘At least the elder one did the respectable thing and went with her man,’ the villagers said. And then they clapped their hands in horror and shook their heads. ‘But look at Lucia! Ha! There is nothing of a woman there. She sleeps with anybody and everybody, but she hasn’t borne a single child yet. She’s been bewitched. More likely she’s a witch herself.’ Thus poor Lucia was indicted for both her barrenness and her witchery: and so, when after nineteen years my mother sent word that she had lost her first surviving child and was going through a difficult pregnancy, my grandparents were only too happy to pack my aunt Lucia off to look after her sister. (2004: 129)

Lucia’s escape is possible precisely because she does not live according to these values of conventional womanhood and thus creates unease within the masculine edifice. She will not leave the Sigauke family, despite Babamukuru’s demand that she does so. A gathering of family patriarchs fails to bring her under the authority of Babamukuru, and only helps to raise the consciousness of the women in the family about the partiality of patriarchal justice. It is also on the margins of this gathering that the nature of Maiguru’s entrapment becomes further apparent to Tambudzai. When the women, including Tambudzai’s mother, begin to question the legitimacy of a gathering by men to decide on Lucia’s place in the family, Maiguru refuses to take part, on account that “it is not [her] concern” and that “Lucia is no business of [hers]” (2004: 142). It is here that Tambudzai begins to see a deeper layer of complicity between class and patriarchy, and that Maiguru is the necessary link in this complicity.

As I have shown in my discussion, Tambudzai’s own escape takes a more complex and profound form. The narrative as a whole is at once personal and political, opening out from the narrow vision of a single consciouseness to the broader consciousness of the “universal” forms which the “victimisation” of women takes (2004: 118). As she says at the conclusion of her narrative, her story only begins where the events that she recalls end. In this sense, the novel can be read as a means of opening up a space for women’s self-representation, but, more importantly, for grappling with the nuances of women’s experiences.

Conclusion

Nervous Conditions raises a number of issues pertaining to space, voice and power as these issues structure the relationships between women and women, men and men and women and men. At the centre of Tambudzai’s narrative, besides the events that shape it, is a critique of the collusion between traditional forms of gender oppression and colonial systems of patronage and paternalism. Tambudzai grows to understand that her predicament as a young girl and woman growing up poor in a masculinist social milieu is a historical one, driven as much by the day-to-day practices of authority and control as by the more complex and universal ones of masculine pre-eminence. This is the lesson that Nyasha teaches Tambudzai, so that by the end of her narrative the “seeds” of a broader critical consciousness have “grow[n]” (2004: 209). Initially operating within a moral framework, in terms of which the injustice done to her has a bearing only on her as an individual, Tambudzai registers a romantic idea of education as pure enlightenment and a means of escape. Hence her romanticisation of Maiguru’s education and outward appearance of success and well- being. I have argued that, in the context of the novel’s ideology and form, this is a narrative strategy, by means of which the novel reveals the raw materials that constitute its conceptual framework. Through Tambudzai’s naivety, I have argued, readers are able to observe, in the actual drama of lived experience, the formative socialisation of men and women.

What my discussion has also drawn attention to, are the various ways in which gender intersects class, race and place, so that, while the experiences of women are shared, there are also complicities with male power that occur at some levels of gender relations. These are complicities that Nyasha brings Tambudzai’s attention to, but which she is only able to understand once she has grown in critical consciousness and her intellectual framework has significantly shifted. Thus I have argued that, by adopting and adapting the bildungsroman, Nervous Conditions is able to take advantage of a conventionally male form to write back to both traditional and colonial patriarchy and paternalism. By claiming the literary space traditionally marked off for the representation of male experience, the novel performs an act of subterfuge, so to speak, in much the same way that The Grass is Singing appropriates the plaasroman and adapts it to a critique of the form’s collusion with a settler masculine ethos.

Lastly, by examining the central characters around whom Tambudzai constitutes her idea of freedom and entrapment – in particular her mother, her aunt Maiguru and her cousin Nyasha – I have argued, a complex picture emerges. In this picture, the novel’s own sense of what constitutes freedom is negotiated through a process of shifting terms. For instance, whereas the narrative appears to ground itself in the terms and metaphors denoting immediate experience and the demands of living, at strategic points it offers Tambudzai a chance to step back from the immediacy of experience to reflect on its meanings. It is in this sense that I have argued that Nervous Conditions is both a story and a story about the story that it tells; in short, a highly self- conscious novel.

Chapter Four

The God of Small Things and the Dissolution of Caste and Kinship in Postcolonial India

The outcaste is a bye-product of the caste system. There will be outcastes as long as there are castes. Nothing can emancipate the outcaste except the destruction of the caste system.

- Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (2014: 26)

There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.

- Arundhati Roy (2004: 1)

Introduction

The God of Small Things (1997), a novel by Arundhati Roy, deals with issues of caste, gender, power and the ‘unwritten love laws’ of postcolonial India. Set in the small village of Ayemenem, Kerala, its narrative depicts a form of resistance against and a destabilisation of the caste system and its prohibitions, through one of its main characters, Ammu, who has a romantic relationship with Velutha, a member of the Untouchable caste. As a member of the lowest caste, Velutha occupies a marginal position in a society primarily governed by normative principles of caste and kinship. For her part, Ammu, who is from the Touchable caste of Syrian Christians, leaves a world of familiarity for an unfamiliar one and, indeed, one that is largely unknown to her. In a sense, through her choice of Velutha she enters the twilight zone of the ‘Untouchable Touchables’, so to speak, and I argue that it is this paradoxical position between two worlds that marks her as both an insider and outsider in the spaces that she inhabits. My discussion begins with an introduction of the concept of space and its link to power and caste kinship. I then extend my discussion to a focus on how the caste system works, its relevance in a postcolonial India, and how it plays a significant 73

part in Ammu’s tragedy in the novel. To this end, I discuss the social dynamics of Ammu’s relationship with Velutha and how, when she becomes a part of his world, she becomes an outsider from her own. Here, my primary focus is on the issues of space, power, gender and voice, and how these concepts are interrelated and, consequently, linked to Ammu’s exclusion within those spaces reserved for the Touchables. Separation of spaces in caste society is not only a means to maintain the ‘purity’ of each caste but also functions within castes to mark certain spaces as male and others female. In this sense, like all human forms of categorisation, the spatial configurations within the caste system are as much about kinship as they are about gender. Not only do caste privileges accrue to the Brahmins, the Kshatriyas, the Vaishyas and the Shudras, down the scale of privilege, which excludes the Untouchables altogether, but they also accrue to men. Futher, I look at power, specifically its link to space and how Ammu’s paradoxical position in relation to power is complicated in the novel: as I noted previously, she is an insider by virtue of class privilege but an outsider because of her womanhood. As an insider, she must observe the laws and conditions that govern the purity of her space, including the “Love Laws [. . .] that lay down who should be loved, and how” (1997: 33). As an outsider who has broken these ‘laws’, she is almost voiceless and unseen, by association untouchable and powerless within a family of Touchables. Ammu’s paradoxical character underwrites the novel’s treatment of gender within a vanishing but persistent caste and kinship structure.

In the above connection, this chapter examines the question of power and powerlessness as one of the central preoccupations of the novel and of postcolonial studies more broadly. Particular attention will be paid to Ammu’s fragmented identity under a caste system that is founded on the idea of kinship, particularly male kinship, and in which women function as exchange value, with no identities of their own. My focus on Ammu aims at probing the contradictions inherent in the Indian postcolony, in particular those that relate to the woman’s voice and agency. Simultaneously, I focus on the irony of her status as a member of a privileged caste, relative to Velutha’s; for, as a woman, and a divorced woman for that matter, her caste status does not provide her any protection from the choices she makes. On one occasion, when she goes to the police station to see Velutha, after his arrest on suspicion of having had a hand in the death of her niece, Sophie Mol, we read that,

Ammu asked for the Station House Officer and when she was shown into his office, she told him that there had been a terrible mistake and that she wanted to make a statement. She asked to see Velutha. Inspector Thomas Mathew’s moustaches bustled like the friendly Air India Maharajah’s, but his eyes were sly and greedy. ‘It’s a little too late for all this, don’t you think?’ he said. He spoke the coarse Kottayam dialect of Malayalam. He stared at Ammu’s breasts as he spoke. He said the police knew all they needed to know and that the Kottayam Police didn’t take statements fom veshyas or their illegitimate children. [. . .] ‘If I were you,’ he said, ‘I’d go home quietly.’ Then he tapped her breasts with his baton. Gently. Tap, tap. As though he was choosing mangoes from a basket. (2004: 8)

In Hindi, a veshya is a harlot or prostitute and the account of Ammu’s encounter with Inspector Thomas Mathew is saturated with images of her sexual objectification. It is in this light, then, that I argue that Ammu’s caste status does not protect her from the masculinism of her broader social milieu. Like Velutha, who is innocent of the crime for which he has been accused, but has been singled out anyway as a scapegoat because of his lower caste status, Ammu’s gender marks her for the same treatment. Indeed, “Inspector Thomas Mathew seemed to know whom he could pick on and whom he couldn’t” (8). And, although Ammu’s children, the twins Esthappen and Rahel, are born of marriage and, thus, legitimate, Inspector Mathew can deligitimise them at will, simply by saying so. For his job is not only to uphold conventional law, in the judicial sense, but also, and more importantly for the novel, the law of caste.

However, not only is Ammu an outsider as a woman in the wider social environment of Ayemenem, but, as the narrative progresses, the reader is also made increasingly more aware of her exclusion from her own family. The Ayemenem House and the family pickle factory, Paradise Pickle & Preserves, for instance, are spaces owned by her parents and managed by her brother, Chacko, respectively. Her marginal position in them is accentuated by the masculine hierarchy that they institute, which, when it is convenient for Chacko, cuts across other forms of hierarchy, 75

including caste. We read, for instance, that when Chacko takes over the management of the family business, Ammu loses her place in it, and that,

Though [she] did as much work in the factory as Chacko, whenever he was dealing with food inspectors or sanitary engineers, he always referred to it as my factory, my pineapples, my pickles. Legally, this was the case because Ammu, as a daughter, had no claim to the property. (1997: 57)

In addition, his mother, Mammachi,

was aware of his libertine relationships with the women in the factory, but had ceased to be hurt by them. When Baby Kochamma brought up the subject, Mammachi became tense and tight-lipped. ‘He can’t help having a Man’s Need’s, she said primly. Surprisingly, Baby Kochamma accepted this explanation, and the enigmatic, secretly thrilling notion of Men’s Needs gained implicit sanction in the Ayemenem House. Neither Mammachi nor Baby Kochamma saw any contradiction between Chacko’s Marxist mind and feudal libido. (1997: 168)

Thus, in my discussion I focus on these public and private spaces in particular, to probe the terms of Ammu’s marginal position in them and how her resistance disrupts a caste ideology that is already fragmented from within. Furthermore, I investigate the nature of Ammu’s resistance and, with it, her voice.

Space, power and voice in The God of Small Things

Concepts of space, power and gender are interconnected in The God of Small Things. The novel shows how the displacement and marginalisation of women in Kerala society is not just a by- product of the caste system but, more importantly, the historical and social foundation on which it is built. Thus, Ammu’s sexual relationship with Velutha threatens this foundation: we read that Velutha, who is employed by Ammu’s family as a carpenter, was not “encouraged . . . to enter the 76

house (except when [Mammachi] needed something mended or installed). She thought that he ought to be grateful that he was allowed on the factory premises at all, and allowed to touch things that Touchables touched. She said that it was a big step for a Paravan” (1997: 77). So, when Velutha’s father, Vellya Paapen, suspects that his son might be having a relationship with Ammu, after he “saw, night after night, a little boat being rowed across the river [and] saw it return at dawn”, the “Terror took hold of him” (1997: 78). Vellya Paapen “told Mammachi what he had seen. He asked God’s forgiveness for having spawned a monster. He offered to kill his son with his own bare hands. To destroy what he had created” (1997: 78). Needless to say, this speaks as much to Velutha’s place in the caste system as it does to Ammu’s in the metaphysical one in which, like Mary Turner in The Grass is Singing, she functions as the boundary between what is pure and impure, and what is inside and outside. The God of Small Things thus deals in fundamental ways with the social meanings of space, but, significantly, with the sedimented historical meanings that attach to the organisation of space within a caste system. Indeed, as Henri Lefebvre (1991: 46) notes,

If space is produced, if there is a productive process, then we are dealing with history; the history of space, of its production qua ‘reality’, and of its forms and representations, is not to be confused either with the causal chain of ‘historical’ (i.e dated) events, or with a sequence, whether teleological or not, of customs and laws, ideals and ideology, and socio- economic structures or institutions (superstructures).

As a social and political product of its history, then, the caste system is examined alongside other historical and social systems in the novel. About communism, for instance, the narrator remarks that it

crept into Kerala insidiously. As a reformist movement that never overtly questioned the traditional values of a caste-ridden, extremely traditional community. The Marxists worked from within the communal divides, never challenging them, never appearing not to. They offered a cocktail revolution. A heady mix of Eastern Marxism and orthodox Hinduism, spiked with a shot of democracy. (1997: 66-67)

As a transcendental system, the caste system is encoded in identity, and in the novel its impact on the lives of women and the Untouchables that occupy its margins is emphasised both through Ammu’s relationship with her family and the latters’ treatment of the poor, in this case Velutha. In “The Doctor and the Saint,” Roy’s comparative assessment of Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the Untouchable who rose to prominence through his critique of the caste system, among other issues, and Mahatma Gandhi, she notes that, “Caste was implied in people’s names, in the way people referred to each other, in the work they did, in the clothes they wore, in the marriages that were arranged, in the language they spoke” (2014: 17). One could add, in the spaces in which they lived, worked and, in the case of the Untouchables, were allowed to inhabit. In the novel, spaces such as the Ayemenem house and the Malayalam police station, for instance, serve to reinforce the power relations that subsist in the organisation of identity and place. Velutha’s death at the hands of the police and Ammu’s guilt at having “killed him” (1997: 8) through her relationship with him, testify to the tragic consequences of crossing forbidden boundaries. The understanding of space as imbued with history is, in this sense, significant to an understanding of how Ammu’s tragedy unfolds in the narrative. Ammu, her children and Velutha are caught up in a historical moment that has changed only in form but retained its substance: the story of the arrest of Velutha, particularly its grotesque understatement, is perhaps one of the most profound examples of this fact. The narrator describes the police as “history’s henchmen [. . .] [s]ent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws” (1997: 308). About the arrest scene itself, the narrator says,

What Esthappen and Rahel witnessed that morning, though they didn’t know it then, was a clinical demonstration in controlled conditions (this was not war after all, or genocide) of human nature’s pursuit of ascendancy. Structure. Order. Complete monopoly. It was human history, masquerading as God’s Purpose, revealing herself to an under-age audience. There was nothing accidental about what happened that morning. Nothing incidental. It was no stray mugging or personal settling of scores. This was an era imprinting on those who lived in it. History in live performance. (1997: 308-309)

And, about the significance of the brutality of the arrest:

If they hurt Velutha more than they intended to, it was only because any kinship, any connection between themselves and him, any implication that if nothing else, at least biologically he was a fellow creature – had been severed long ago. They were not arresting a man, they were exorcizing fear. They had no instrument to calibrate how much punishment he could take. No means of gauging how much or how permanently they had damaged him. Unlike the custom of rampaging religious mobs or conquering armies running riot, that morning in the Heart of Darkness the posse of Touchable Policemen acted with economy, not frenzy. Efficiency, not anarchy. Responsibility, not hysteria. They didn’t tear out his hair or burn him alive. They didn’t hack off his genitals and stuff them in his mouth. They didn’t rape him. Or behead him. After all, they were not battling an epidemic. They were merely inoculating a community against an outbreak. (1997: 308-309)

The impersonal tenor of the arrest conceals a personal outrage, a “subliminal urge to destroy what they could neither subdue nor deify” or what the narrator calls “contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear – civilization’s fear of human nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of powerlessness” (1997: 309). Velutha’s arrest and beating is thus a “demonstration” (308), as it were an object lesson about the perils of crossing historical, which is to say religiously sanctioned, boundaries. Its understated, methodical violence is not so much on the body of the condemned as it is about the restoration of the body politic – an “inoculati[on] [of] a community against an outbreak” (309). In the immediate sense, what is also important is that the violence visited on Velutha is visited on Ammu too. Seen in this connection, it is both historical and, by virtue of its institution of caste and kinship, complex beyond its enactment. However, what runs through the narrative is the fear that the course of this history is in danger of being altered. In this sense, the violence enacts a wish fulfilment of a sort, a hope that the more dramatic it is, the more it can guarantee this history’s transcendence.

Yet the Untouchables are rising to challenge this history’s transcendence, so that on one occasion when Ammu’s family is on the road to Cochin to see The Sound of Music, they come across a protest march. We read that,

The marchers that day were [Communist] party workers, students, and the labourers themselves. Touchables and Untouchables. On their shoulders they carried a keg of ancient anger, lit with a recent fuse. There was an edge to this anger that was Naxalite, and new. [. . .] Baby Kochamma’s fear lay rolled up on the car floor like a damp, clammy cheroot. This was just the beginning of it. The fear that over the years would grow to consume her. That would make her lock her doors and windows. That would give her two hairlines and both her mouths. Hers, too, was an ancient, age-old fear. The fear of being dispossessed.(1997: 69-70)

That Velutha is part of the march causes another layer of unease inside the car in which the family is travelling. When Rahel spots him in the crowd, she calls out to him, much to Ammu’s discomfort:

‘Velutha! Ividay! Velutha!’ [. . .] Inside the car Ammu whirled around, and her eyes were angry. She slapped at Rahel’s calves, which were the only part of her left in the car to clap. Calves and brown feet in Bata sandals. ‘Behave yourself!’ Ammu said. Baby Kochamma [Rahel’s great aunt] pulled Rahel down, and she landed on the seat with a surprised thump. She thought there’d been a misunderstanding. ‘It was Velutha!’ she explained with a smile. ‘And he had a flag!’ The flag had seemed to her a most impressive piece of equipment. The right thing for a friend to have. ‘You’re a stupid silly little girl!’ Ammu said. Her sudden, fierce anger pinned Rahel against the car seat. Rahel was puzzled. Why was Ammu so angry? About what? 80

‘But it was him!’ Rahel said. ‘Shut up!’ Ammu said. Rahel saw that Ammu had a film of perspiration on her forehead and upper lip, and that her eyes had become hard, like marbles. (1997: 71)

I have quoted at length the evidence above of what is to me one of the central tensions in the narrative, that is between fear and anger, both ancient/historical: fear that bubbling under the surface of the physical and symbolic spaces marked historically according to the laws of caste is an anger that could no longer be contained. Intersecting in the two passages are the three terms that I have assembled in this section - space, power and voice - and the shifting modalities of apprehending them in the ensuing struggle by the Untouchables. Ammu becomes the essential link in this intersection, perhaps more because of her unease as opposed to Baby Kochamma’s fear. Indeed, unlike fear, unease speaks of transitions, of things, including historical time itself, being “out of joint” (Hamlet, 1.5: 195-196). Baby Kochamma’s fear, on the other hand, is fear of change, of losing caste privilege – “of being dispossessed” (1997: 70). Unease has a longer life-span and is capable of eroding, over time, the bounds of history. Moreso, unease demands to be read and figures in the narrative as a puzzle to be unravelled. Ammu may command Rahel to “Shut up!” under the conditions of fear engendered by the encounter with that which threatens the edifice of caste power, but in the broad scheme of the novel, it is this silence that runs through as subterfuge. We read, for instance, that,

Years later, on a crisp fall morning in upstate New York, on a Sunday train from Grand Central to Croton Harmon, it suddenly came back to Rahel. That expression on Ammu’s face. Like a rogue piece in a puzzle. Like a question mark that drifted through the pages of a book and never settled at the end of a sentence. That hard marble look in Ammu’s eyes. The glisten of perspiration on her upper lip. And the chill of that sudden, hurt silence. What had it all meant? (1997: 72)

The marchers’ demands also speak to the shifting ground on which old forms of power have stood: “That women’s wages be increased [and that] Untouchables no longer be addressed by their caste names” (1997: 69).

At bottom, The God of Small Things probes the logic of classification – of marking spaces off according to their sanctioned historical meanings – and the impossibility of maintaining the ancient forms of classification in India’s postcolonial modernity. Through various but related metaphors, the novel portrays a system of classification that has broken down from within: the Ipe family factory, Paradise Pickles & Preserves, provides one such metaphor by which the novel foreshadows this internal breakdown in the old caste structures. Returning to Ayemenem after years in America, Rahel sees what remains of what used to be their grandmother’s pickle factory:

Paradise Pickles & Preserves. It lay between the house and the river. They used to make pickles, squashes, jams, curry powders and canned pineapples. And banana jam (illegally) after the FPO (Food Products Organization) banned it because according to their specifications it was neither jam nor jelly. Too thin for jelly and too thick for jam. An ambiguous, unclassifiable consistency, they said. [. . .] Looking back now, to Rahel it seemed as though this difficulty that their family had with classification ran much deeper than the jam-jelly question. Perhaps, Ammu, Estha and she were the worst transgressors. But it wasn’t just them. It was the others too. They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins, jam jam, and jelly jelly. (1997: 30-31)

This metaphor speaks directly and importantly to the problem of classification within the Ipe household itself, despite Mammachi and Pappachi’s efforts to keep Untouchables out of the house or only letting them in through the back door. More broadly, however, it speaks to the novel’s status as a historical record of the breakdown in the logic of caste and kinship, a record, to be sure, 82

which rivals the official one of which the police who arrest Velutha are “henchmen” (1997: 308). Besides Ammu’s secret relationship with Velutha, there is also the incident of incest between her twins, Rahel and Esthappen, who are in any case not only “two-egg twins” (1997: 2) but also of no pure origins: “Half-Hindu Hybrids whom no self-respecting Syrian Christian would ever marry” (1997: 45), according to their great aunt, Baby Kochamma. For her part, Ammu is an “unmixable mix [. . .] le[ading] her to love by night the man [Velutha] her children loved by day. To use by night the boat that her children used by day” (1997: 44). Roy writes again, in “The Doctor and the Saint”, that the “organizing principles of caste are based on a hierarchal, sliding scale of entitlements and duties, of purity and pollution” (2014: 23). This is the foundation of the novel’s critique.

Chacko, Ammu’s brother who returns from England after his divorce from an English wife, is another interesting character in the novel, particularly as regards the complex postcolonial historical moment in which the novel is set. He is an Indian nationalist, self-styled Marxist and, as the narrator describes him, a “contradiction between [a] Marxist mind and feudal libido” (1997: 168). He tells the twins that,

[T]hough he hated to admit it, they were all Anglophiles. They were a family of Anglophiles. Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history, and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away. He explained to them that history was like an old house at night. With all the lamps lit. And ancestors whispering inside. ‘To understand history,’ Chacko said, ‘we have to go inside and listen to what they’re saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells. Estha and Rahel had no doubt that the house Chacko meant was the house on the other side of the river, in the middle of the abandoned rubber estate where they had never been. Kari Saipu’s house. The Black Sahib. The Englishman who had ‘gone native’. (1997: 52)

This romantic idea of history as a closed text locked away in a history house waiting to be rediscovered, is set against the postcolonial present of shifting alliances. What is more revealing 83 about the idea of history that Chacko metaphorises here is its universalism, when its particularities are what the novel deconstructs. Within this history house, for instance, Ammu does not have a place and voice; indeed, after she “finished her schooling the same year that her father retired from his job in Delhi and moved to Ayemenem,”

Pappachi insisted that a college education was an unnecessary expense for a girl, so Ammu had no choice but to leave Delhi and move with them. There was very little for a young girl to do in Ayemenem other than to wait for marriage proposals while she helped her mother with housework. Since her father did not have enough money to raise a suitable dowry, no proposals came Ammu’s way. Two years went by. Her eighteenth birthday came and went. Unnoticed, or at least unremarked upon by her parents. Ammu grew desperate. All day she dreamed of escaping Ayemenem and the clutches of her ill-tempered father and bitter, long-suffering mother. (1997: 38-39)

Clearly, the material conditions of the idea of history that Chacko espouses are not universal but, in fact, gender specific or, to be sure, masculinist. In Readings in Indian Government and Politics: Class, Caste, Gender, Manoranjan Mohanty argues that,

Gender too is related to class and caste [. . .] Over centuries of evolution of class and caste society, along with power relations, men performed crucial roles in the production system and acquired greater power in the society. The status of women as dependent on men, their mainly performing household work, producing children and nurturing them was the outcome of a long period of feudal and capitalist social history. Religious and caste ideology reinforced the evolution of this trend, and Hindu scriptures enormously contributed to this image of women [. . .] It was realized that the notion of women as a weaker entity was essentially a cultural and ideological statement rather than an empirical fact as patriliny was a practice in many parts of India. (2004: 21)

The gender economy of history and historical relations can be mapped onto the ideas of marriage as exchange, that is, the exchanging of dowry, gender training, that is, helping with housework, 84 and what the narrator says about Ammu’s eventual marriage and divorce. About her wedding the narrator comments,

Ammu had an elaborate Calcutta wedding. Later, looking back on the day, Ammu realized that the slightly feverish glitter in her bridegroom’s eyes had not been love, or even excitement at the prospect of carnal bliss, but approximately eight large pegs of whisky. Straight. Neat. (1997: 39)

And about the aftermath of her divorce,

When she looked at herself in her wedding photographs, Ammu felt the woman that looked back at her was someone else. A foolish jeweled bride. Her silk sunset-coloured sari shot with gold. Rings on every finger. White dots of sandalwood paste over her arched eyebrows. Looking at herself like this, Ammu’s soft mouth would twist into a small, bitter smile at the memory – not of the wedding itself so much as the fact that she had permitted herself to be so painstakingly decorated before being led to the gallows. It seemed so absurd. So futile. Like polishing firewood. (1997: 43-44)

Ammu remembers too that when her husband, an alchoholic, was sacked from his job at the tea plantation in Assam, his English manager, Mr Hollick, suggested an option to help him keep his job:

Mr Hollick proposed that Baba go away for a while. For a holiday. To a clinic perhaps, for treatment. For as long as it took him to get better. And for the period of time that he was away, Mr Hollick suggested that Ammu be sent to his bungalow to be ‘looked after’. (1997: 42)

When Ammu decides to leave her husband, she “return[s], unwelcomed, to her parents in Ayemenem. To everything that she had fled from only a few years ago. Except that now she had two children. And no more dreams” (42). 85

Mapping a different historical trajectory to Chacko’s nationalist one, The God of Small Things establishes its credentials very early on, as a novel about an ancient injustice haunting the present. It is not the spectacle of Velutha’s arrest that the narrative proposes as the scene of the crime, so to speak, but something much more entrenched in the mysticism of Hindu scriptures. The death by drowning of Sophie Mol, Chacko’s daughter, simply invokes this mysticism by securing a historical scapegoat to teach those who transgress historical boundaries that this history has a long memory. Thus, the narrator notes early in the story that the events on which the novel centres are, in a deeper sense, symptoms of an older condition. We read that,

In a purely practical sense it would probably be correct to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem. Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. [. . .] Still, to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem is only one way of looking at it. Equally, it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago. Long before the Marxists came. Before the British took Malabar, before the Dutch Ascendancy, before Vasco da Gama arrived, before the Zamorin’s conquest of Calicut. Before three purple-robed Syrian Bishops murdered by the Portuguese were found floating in the sea, with coiled sea serpents riding on their chests and oysters knotted in their tangled beards. It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag. That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much. (1997: 32-33)

Returning to Chacko’s metaphor of history as romance, as it were, as “like an old house at night. With all the lamps lit. And ancestors whispering inside” (1997: 52), by way of the above sense of history as tragedy, let me examine the ironic use to which Rahel and Estha put Chacko’s metaphor. They transform, literally and imaginatively, the abandoned house that they think Chacko is 86 referring to when he says “history was like an old house” into what they call the History House. However, unlike Chacko’s, their History House is one

With cool stone floors and dim walls and billowing ship-shaped shadows. Plump translucent lizards lived behind old pictures, and waxy, crumbling ancestors with tough toe-nails and breath that smelled of yellow maps gossiped in sibilant, papery whispers. (1997: 53)

The History House functions in the narrative as a symbolic space, embodying a dead or dying colonial history, on the one hand, and, on the other, a space where Rahel and Estha’s world and Velutha’s meet. The ancestors inside it are not the ancient ones of Chacko’s house of history but “waxy, crumbling ancestors with tough toe-nails and breath that smelled of yellow maps” (1997: 53). There are no “books and pictures on the wall” (1997: 52) but fantastical “billowing, ship- shaped shadows” (1997: 53) and the whispers are not solemn but “papery whispers” (1997: 53). The History House is a symbol of a possible imaginative world at the end of colonial history, as opposed to Chacko’s idea of history as a return to the pre-colonial. Rahel and Estha would eventually enter the old house, “cross the river and be where they weren’t supposed to be, with a man [Velutha] they weren’t supposed to love [and] would watch with dinner-plate eyes as history revealed itself to them in the back verandah [where Velutha is arrested, tortured and killed]” (1997: 55). This re-imagined house of history, however, is fragile at best; it is Chacko’s that ‘kills’ Velutha, and with the capture, torture and murder of Velutha, “Estha and Rahel learned how history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws. They heard its sickening thud. They smelled its smell and never forgot it” (55). But Velutha’s death points to a problem with the tragic sense of history from within which Chacko operates, rather than undermines the possible one that Rahel and Estha imagine. In this sense, Velutha’s life, like his death, serves to reveal, but also to unsettle, a contradictory and inherently fragmented society, and a caste system held together by what it is able to destroy. In “Unsettling Race, Coloniality, and Caste in Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/ La Frontera, Martinez’s Parrot in the Oven, and Roy’s The God of Small Things,” Jose Saldivar remarks that,

The complexities of South Asian identities and kinship are at the heart of Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things (1997). Central to the novel is a vision of the continuity between knowing the world through experience and struggle and changing the central relations of the coloniality of power which sustain and make the world what it is. Additionally, subalternized characters in the novel, especially children, divorced women, and peasants defy bloodlines of kinship and caste to condemn the bloodsheds of their everyday world in Kerala. In doing so, they defy both the gods of dominance and of kinship to remember what they experienced and shared with the god of small things. (2007: 358)

Ammu’s reaction to Velutha’s death, after she visits the police and is denied access to him, is particularly significant in connection with the above: “He’s dead,’ Ammu whispered . . . ‘I’ve killed him” (1997: 8). The “god of small things” in the novel is Velutha.

In The God of Small Things, the tragic consequences of systems of classification are not only filtered through history and historical relations, but also through other, more modern classificatory systems that intersect the historical one of caste. In this regard, it is important to recall Mohanty’s point above, that is, that “[g]ender too is related to class and caste [. . .] Over centuries of evolution of class and caste society [. . .] [t]he status of women as dependent on men, their mainly performing household work, producing children and nurturing them was the outcome of a long period of feudal and capitalist social history” (2004: 21). Also, that “[r]eligious and caste ideology reinforced the evolution of this trend, and Hindu scriptures enormously contributed to this image of women” (2004: 21). Lastly, the novel’s own sense of these intersections, which I have analysed above, is important to recall here. The narrator remarks that, in Kerala, “[t]he Marxists worked from within the communal divides, never challenging them, never appearing not to. They offered a cocktail revolution. A heady mix of Eastern Marxism and orthodox Hinduism, spiked with a shot of democracy” (1997: 66-67). The leader of the Communist Party in Ayemenem, Comrade K.N.M. Pillai, is a duplicitous bigot who, on one occasion, advises Chacko to fire Velutha, a member of his Party, on account of his caste status. To Chacko’s puzzlement, since he expects Pillai to be on Velutha’s side, Pillai says about Velutha:

‘But see, Comrade, any benefits that you give him, naturally others are resenting it. They see it as a partiality. After all, whatever job he does, carpenter or electrician or whateverits [sic], for them he is just a Paravan. It is a conditioning they have from birth. This I myself have told them is wrong. But frankly speaking, Comrade, Change is one thing. Acceptance is another. You should be cautious. Better for him you send him off . . .’ (1997: 279)

Pillai also speaks about the Workers’ revolution not being “a dinner party [but] an insurrection, an act of violence in which one class overthrows another” (1997: 280), but within his own household he maintains a feudal system of caste and gender classifications. He says to Chacko within earshot of his wife, Kaylani: ‘See her, for example. Mistress of this house. Even she will never allow Paravans and all that into her house. Never. Even I cannot persuade her. My own wife. Of course inside the house she is Boss.’ He turned to her with an affectionate, naughty smile. ‘Allay edi, Kaylani?’ Kaylani looked down and smiled, coyly acknowledging her bigotry. (1997: 278)

Ammu’s place in the novel and in the postcolonial world in which it is set provides an essential link between history, caste, class and gender, as these relate to the novel’s time and place. The gender and sexual landscape that Ammu negotiates and seeks to transform, at least within the limits of her personal life, is one that, like the landscape of caste and kinship, is strictly policed. At best, as the above illustrates, it is a landscape in which women’s consent to and complicity in their own domestication is sought by means of disarming and infantialising entreaties. It is this seductive psychology of power, the type that Foucault argues produces docile bodies, that Ammu resists most keenly. About how this form of power has guaranteed the continuity of caste in postcolonial India, Mamta Rajawat posits, in History of Dalits that, “[a]n exploitative which has the capacity to enrol the best of whatever origin in its own service is far more pernicious and long lasting than one that is closed and static” (2005: 15).

I began this chapter by proposing a discussion of the social dynamics of Ammu’s relationship with Velutha and how, when she becomes a part of his world, she becomes an outsider to her own. However, in order fully to appreciate Ammu’s predicament and struggle, one also needs to step 89

back from the tension between the inside and outside, the better to examine what each of these spatial terms mean. I have examined closely Ammu’s transgression of the boundaries of caste and kinship, through her relationship with Velutha, and, to some extent, what propels her towards this transgression in a religious and social milieu still steeped in these categories. What I examine in the next few pages is what I mean by ‘inside’ caste and kinship – that is, what it means to say that Ammu is an insider – and how the novel develops the tension between this place within the boundary and another one, outside.

As with Nervous Conditions, The God of Small Things examines, at the microcosmic level of the family and familial relations, the ways in which the individual fits or does not fit into the structure of the society more broadly. Thus, the Ipe family, like the Sigauke family in Nervous Conditions, is organised around a tight system of norms which are then enforced, sometimes arbitrarily, according to gender, caste and kinship. Pappachi and Mammachi are the family patriarch and matriarch, respectively, and their two children, their son Chacko and daughter Ammu, are already adults when the novel begins, and both have experienced failed marriages. At twenty-seven, Ammu carries “in the pit of her stomach . . . the cold knowledge that for her, life had been lived. She had had one chance. She made a mistake. She married the wrong man” (1997: 38). Chacko has come back to Ayemenem from Oxford, where he has studied, lived, married, had a daughter, Sophie Mol, and divorced. Ammu has returned from Assam with two children after a failed marriage to an alchoholic husband who abused her. Also living with them is their father’s sister, Navomi Ipe, known as Baby Kochamma, who never marries but, like Ammu before her marriage, lives in the shadow of gender conventions and expectations. However, unlike Ammu, Baby Kochamma actively embraces convention; Ammu had accepted her marriage proposal not out of love: “[s]he just weighed the odds and accepted. She thought that anything, anyone at all, would be better than returning to Ayemenem” (1997: 39). After she returns to Ayemenem however, she

set[s] aside the morality of motherhood and divorceehood. Even her walk changed from a safe mother-walk to another wilder sort of walk. She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank with her little plastic transistor shaped like a tangerine. She smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims. (1997: 44) 90

For her part, Baby Kochamma tries but fails to win the love of a young Irish monk, Father Mulligan, so that by the age of eighty, and long after his death, she still keeps diary after diary in which she expresses her love for him. And she

resented Ammu, because she saw her quarelling with a fate that she, . . . herself, felt she had graciously accepted. The fate of the wretched Man-less woman. [. . .] She had managed to persuade herself over the years that her unconsummated love for Father Mulligan had been entirely due to her restraint and her determination to do the right thing. She subscribed wholeheartedly to the commonly held view that a married daughter had no position in her parents’ home. As for a divorced daughter – according to Baby Kochamma, she had no position anywhere at all and for a divorced daughter from a love marriage, well, words could not describe Baby Kochamma’s outrage. As for a divorced daughter from an intercommunity love marriage – Baby Kochamma chose to remain quaveringly silent on the subject. (1997: 45)

As for Mammachi,

Every night [Pappachi] beat her with a brass flower vase. The beatings weren’t new. What was new was only the frequency with which they took place. One night Pappachi broke the bow of Mammachi’s violin and threw it in the river. Then Chacko came home for a summer vacation from Oxford. He had grown to be a big man, and was, in those days, strong from rowing for Balliol. A week after he arrived he found Pappachi beating Mammachi in the study. Chacko strode into the room, caught Pappachi’s vase-hand and twisted it around his back. [. . .] He never touched Mammachi again. But he never spoke to her either as long as he lived. When he needed anything he used Kochu Maria [the maid] or Baby Kochamma as intermediaries. (1997: 47-48)

This is despite the fact that the family business had been started by Mammachi and, as a result, Pappachi lived on her money. He

would not help her with the pickle-making, because he did not consider pickle-making a suitable job for a high-ranking ex-Government official. He had always been a jealous man, so he greatly resented the attention his wife was suddenly getting. He slouched around the compound in his immaculately tailored suits, weaving sullen circles around mounds of red chillies and freshly powdered yellow turmeric, watching Mammachi supervise the buying, the weighing, the salting and drying, of limes and tender mangoes. (1997: 47)

This, then, is the broad outline of the structure of the Ipe family, together with its internal dynamics and tensions. What holds it together, it appears from the fragments relating to its members, are the mutual antipathies that characterise its gender and, as I have shown in my discussion above, caste and kinship laws and affiliations. Besides the antipathies within the family, there are those outside in the immediate world of Ayemenem and, beyond the village, in the society at large. About these,

Mammachi told Estha and Rahel that she could remember a time, in her girlhood, when Paravans were expected to crawl backwards with a broom, sweeping away their footprints so that Brahmins or Syrian Christians would not defile themselves by accidentally stepping into a Paravan’s footprint. In Mammachi’s time, Paravans, like other Untouchables, were not allowed to walk on public roads, not allowed to cover their upper bodies, not allowed to carry umbrellas. They had to put their hands over their mouths when they spoke, to divert their polluted breath away from those whom they addressed. (1997: 73-74)

It is now commonplace to talk about a border or boundary, in Martin Heidegger’s words, as “not that at which something stops but . . . that from which something begins its presencing” (qtd in Bhabha 1994: 1). What all the above quotations about the Ipe family illustrate is precisely this point; more importantly, however, they raise the question of ambiguity: between insider and outsider; self and other; home and world; us and them; pure and impure; and Touchable and Untouchable, so that the first term only acquires its meaning from the second. Otherwise it cannot lay claim to anything substantive: those who, like Baby Kochamma, feel themselves to be insiders 92

in the Ipe household are able to make such a claim by setting up another space, which they can call an outside. Baby Kochamma’s claim that a daughter loses her place in her parents’ home once she gets married, for instance, is a logical absurdity. However, what sustains it, which is what sustains the boundaries between the other terms, is convention, as it were, a “commonly held view” (1997: 45), underwritten by what the novel calls “Laws”: the laws governing gender and sexuality, caste and kinship, and space and voice. Like Kaylani, Comrade Pillai’s wife, Baby Kochamma enforces by her logic what is ostensibly the law of the father: the house patriarch, the father of the nation, and other fathers without whom Baby Kochamma believes a woman has no identity. As the narrator remarks, she “resented Ammu, because she saw her quarelling with a fate that she, . . . herself, felt she had graciously accepted. The fate of the wretched Man-less woman” (45). In The Scandal of the State: Women, Law, and Citizenship in Postcolonial India, Rajeswari Rajan posits that; as “difference” theorists have been insisting, women are divided by caste, religion, class, race, and nationality, and so their interests cannot be identical; they are so deeply embedded in structures of family, neighbourhood, religion, and community, which offer them their primary identity, that these would claim their loyalties in a situation of competing rights. (2003: 167)

It is in the context of the tenuous meanings of these terms, that is, insider/outsider; self/other; home/world; us/them; pure/impure; and Touchable/Untouchable, that Ammu’s transgressions and the violence they are dealt with must be understood. In the lived social experience of both Ammu and Velutha, these terms do not hold material and symbolic meaning, however. Though born of a family of Untouchables, Velutha grows up to finish high school and qualifies as a carpenter. He develops an independence of mind, much to his father Vellya Paapen’s unease. Vellya Paapen, “an old World Paravan [who] had seen the Crawling Backwards Days [and was full of] gratitude to Mammachi and her family for all that they had done for him,”

feared for his younger son. He couldn’t say what it was that frightened him. It was nothing that he had said. Or done. It was not what he said, but the way he said it. Not what he did, but the way he did it. Perhaps it was just a lack of hesitation. An unwarranted assurance. In the way he walked. 93

The way he held his head. The quiet way he offered suggestions without being asked. Or the quiet way in which he disregarded suggestions without appearing to rebel. (1997: 76)

Vellya Pappen’s fear is the kind that drives the police to kill Velutha. Recall, for instance, what the narrator says about his arrest by the police: “They were not arresting a man, they were exorcizing fear” (1997: 308). And about his murder at their hands: “They were merely inoculating a community against an outbreak” (309). Velutha’s grandfather Kelan, we read, had “converted to Christianity and joined the Anglican Church to escape the scourge of Untouchability,” when “the British came to Malabar” (1997: 74). But “[i]t didn’t take them long to realize that they had jumped from the frying pan into the fire. They were made to have separate churches, with separate services, and separate priests” (74). Thus Velutha could be said to introduce a more decisive, though tragic, break from the caste kinship of his grandfather’s and father’s generations, by his refusal to be a ‘good’ Paravan. That both Ammu and Velutha find themselves in a space between the spaces of caste, kinship and conventional gender and sexual mores, signals the shifts in the forms of identification and affiliation in the India of their time. There is a moment during Velutha’s visit to Comrade Pillai to report his sacking by Mammachi, after she discovers his ‘illicit’ relationship with Ammu, which is unremarkable because it is never extended beyond Pillai’s mentioning it to his wife. After Velutha leaves, Pillai tells Kaylani:

‘They’ve found out. Someone must have told them. They’ve sacked him.’ ‘Is that all? He’s lucky they haven’t had him strung up from the nearest tree.’ ‘I noticed something strange . . .’ Comrade Pillai said as he peeled his banana. ‘The fellow had red varnish on his nails’. (1997: 288)

It is most likely that Ammu would have painted the red varnish on Velutha’s nails, but for Comrade Pillai, who holds Velutha in a mixture of contempt, as an Untouchable, and comradeship, as a member of the Communist Party, it is as queer as it is scandalous.

Perhaps the most enduring quality of The God of Small Things is its choice of the narrative voice and the position from which the novel is narrated. In the main, it is the voice of a child that is invoked in the novel, a child who recalls the tragic events around which the narrative is organised. 94

Not only does the narrator have intimate knowledge of Estha and Rahel’s most private thoughts and actions, however she seems positively one of them or, at the very least, in their stream of consciousness. This, needless to say, gives the narrative its critical edge, while revealing the ways in which the absurdities of the old, pre-colonial prejudices have endured in the postcolonial era. From this child’s perspective, the grand narratives of history, religion, politics and society – of the Indian past: pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial – are subjected to the quotidian events that occur in the personal lives of history’s most obscure agents, who are also its victims. In this way, the past is forced to reveal its complicity with the violence that endures in the present, but which has lost its mystical justifications. For instance, the narrator recalls the complicities of history in the murder of Velutha in Rahel and Estha’s presence thus:

While other children of their age learned other things, Estha and Rahel learned how history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws. They heard its sickening thud. They smelled its smell and never forgot it. History’s smell. Like old roses on a breeze. It would lurk for ever in ordinary things. In coat-hangers. Tomatoes. In the tar on the roads. In certain colours. In plates at a restaurant. In the absence of words. And the emptiness in eyes. They would grow up grappling with ways of living with what happened. They would try to tell themselves that in terms of geological time it was an insignificant event. [. . .] But they would find no comfort in the thought. (1997: 55)

Ammu’s death, like Velutha’s, mirrors the predicaments of both women and the Untouchables at a time when the complicities of history and the present have yet to be exorcised. We read that,

Ammu died in a grimy room in the Bharat Lodge in Alleppey, where she had gone for a job interview as someone’s secretary. She died alone. With a noisy ceiling fan for company and no Estha to lie at the back of her and talk to her. She was thirty-one. Not old, not young, but a viable, die-able age. (161)

The novel is, in this sense, an attempt at an alternative account, as it were, an “inoculation” of the Ayemenem community and Indian society against their own historical prejudices, rather than “against an outbreak” (308-309) of a truly postcolonial history.

Conclusion

The God of Small Things is a novel about the tragic consequences of the grand narratives of history and religion, particularly when they foreclose on other, smaller, narratives. It is from this sense that the novel itself derives its title and epigraph; The epigraph, “Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one,” from John Berger’s 1972 novel, entitled G, is particularly apt, both in relation to the questions that the novel raises about representation and voice, and in relation to its own struggle with multiple ways of telling the story of a single tragic event. However, The God of Small Things is not simply about the tragic event of the death of Velutha; rather, like Nhamo’s death in Nervous Conditions, Velutha’s death in the novel serves to open up a new avenue for rethinking India’s past and its present from the perspective of those long hidden from view. It is a thoroughly postcolonial novel, in the sense in which Homi Bhabha defines the postcolonial in “Border Lives: The Art of the Present,” namely that,

It is the trope of our times to locate the question of culture in the realm of the beyond. At the century’s edge, we are less exercised by annihilation – the death of the author – or epiphany – the birth of the ‘subject’. Our existence today is marked by a tenebrous sense of survival, living on the borderlines of the ‘present’, for which there seems to be no proper name other than the current and controversial shiftiness of the prefix ‘post’: postmodernism, postcolonialism, postfeminism. (1994: 1)

Yet, The God of Small Things goes beyond Bhabha’s apparent sense of the present as a stable place with borders, but, rather, conceives of the present as worked over by the past in different tragic and comic ways. In the novel, there is a productive tension between the ‘big things’ – the grand narratives of history and religion – and the ‘small things’ – the blindspots of history that nevertheless return to demand from history an account. From this perspective, the novel conceives of the beyond not in the narrow spatial and linear historical sense but, significantly, in the sense of 96 the tragic and comic encounter between the past and the present, or, more pointedly, between history and its doppelgänger. In its very architecture, The God of Small Things dramatises the clash of versions of the present: the borderless encounter with borders, in the sense in which Ammu and Velutha are tragic voices and after their deaths nothing can remain the same. Or the way in which the twins’ incest mixes that which convention keeps apart. The incest itself reveals a world saturated with metaphors of different kinds of incest: the caste system itself is an incestuous system founded on kinship bonds and endogamy, together with the fear of contamination, or what Chacko calls “Inbreeding” (1997: 61).

Conclusion

In this study, I have argued that, as postcolonial texts, The Grass is Singing, Nervous Conditions and The God of Small Things endeavour to create a space for re-telling women’s stories and to contest those spaces from which women’s voices have been excluded, at worst, or, at best, mediated through male representations. Their differences in time and place notwithstanding, all three novels could be said to posit what Silvia Nagy-Zekmi calls “counter-history as opposed to the official history. While representations of the official history tend to be national, rational, written, and logocentric, counter-history is oral, intuitive and emotive, inspired more by individual experience” (2003: 176). It allows for the inclusion of different feminine voices, and the woman’s identity is accounted for by the female subject: “women writers have been unlayering the palimpsest of the patriarchal and colonial narrative by engaging their ambiguities, filling their voids, transgressing their taboos, interrogating their in-betweens” (2003: 178). As acts of self- representation or, in the case of The Grass is Singing, representation of the self, the three novels undertake a deconstruction of cultural essentialisms and how these have been at the foundation of male representations of women’s experiences.

What I have also argued in this study is that one of the major features of postcolonial literature is its concern with place and displacement, speech and silence, and writing the subaltern back into history and the present. However, I further proposed that postcolonial writing by women about women adds a layer of complexity to this broad category of the subaltern. With regard to Doris Lessing’s novel, I focused in particular on its representation of the ambiguities of power and powerlessness, speech and silence, and place and displacement in a racist and sexist social and culural milieu in which belonging is governed by unwritten codes of exclusion and complicity. To this end, I argued that Lessing’s fictional strategy in presenting a character who does not quite fit into the specific categories of race, class, gender and place offered to her, due to her very ambiguous position in relation to them, draws attention to the constructed nature of these and other categories more generally. However, more importantly, the novel also shows that, even though they are constructed categories, and can therefore be resisted, they have the capacity to manufacture consent by presenting themselves as ‘natural’ and thus logical. By foreclosing on other possible forms of identification, then, what the novel calls the espirit de corps of the farming 98

community that Mary becomes part of after she marries Dick Turner, acquires more than merely a textual status within the narrative. Indeed, as I have argued, it is not only Mary in whom the novel invests its critique of categories, but the novel itself is a critique of the plaasroman, a form most readily associated with the colonial frontier and white settler masculinism. Thus, The Grass is Singing is as much a critique of racism as it is a cautionary text about complicities with conventions of belonging, both social and literary. In the case of the novel as a doubling back on the plaasroman, a form well-known for its narratives of the tragic breakdown of a community by the incursion of modernity, I have argued that, through Mary’s character, Lessing revises both the form and its conception of the tragic. She does so by disaggregating the farm novel into its constituent parts and by disabusing it of its traditional romanticism. The components that emerge, as my discussion has tried to show, concern race, class and gender, and these invite a materialist critique. To argue this point, I have drawn on, among other works, Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City, a study of the nineteenth-century English novel and its representation of the country and the city as spatial and ideological opposites. Williams’s thesis, which I have employed in my own reading of The Grass is Singing, is that the binary nature of the terms used to define the countryside as a place of tradition and the city as a place of change is misleading. Moreover, this binary structure of thinking about space seals each of these places inside its own false logic. What I have argued, instead, is that Mary’s character reveals the faultlines within the closed space of the farming district, and that, as a result, the tragedy in the novel comes about as the contradictions of the communal spirit are laid bare.

My discussion of Nervous Conditions has focused on the development of the protagonist Tambudzai’s critical consciousness as a young woman growing up poor and female in a thouroughly masculinist social milieu. Consequently, I have discussed the novel as an example of the bildungsroman, in that it is preoccupied with bildung: education, formation or self-cultivation. However, I have also argued that, in much the same way that The Grass is Singing is a revision of the plaasroman, Nervous Conditions introduces into the bildungsroman both the individual and collective voice of femininity, whereas the conventional bildungsroman often tracks the singular life of a male character pursuing a unique destiny. Thus, Nervous Conditions not only departs significantly from the bourgeois and masculine origins of the form that it adopts and adapts, but it also forces the form into an encounter with colonial and postcolonial experience. I have argued, 99

from this perspective, that Nervous Conditions imagines women’s freedom in two fundamental ways: as freedom from the masculine hierarchies both within tradition and colonial modernity.

Drawing on postcolonial feminist theory and criticism, I have argued that Dangarembga explores questions that are both ideological and textual. Not only does Tambudzai raise the central issues of entrapment and freedom, but her narrative is also about voice and the space of writing. Thus, Nervous Conditions is a novel that reflects both on the ideological questions that underpin Tambudzai’s experience and critical development, and on the nature of its composition as a feminist novel. The novel declares its credentials as a feminist novel from the very beginning, that is, as a story about Tambudzai’s escape from and her mother’s entrapment in the double burden of poverty and womanhood; her aunt Maiguru’s complicity in the patriarchal and colonial systems that undermine her independence; and Tambudzai’s cousin Nyasha’s radical feminism. Aside from examining this ideological dimension, my discussion has also shown that what the novel draws readers’ attention to is that Tambudzai’s narrative is driven as much by conviction as it is by its protagonist’s capacity to “question things and refuse to be brainwashed” (2004: 209). It is, as it were, an “account” (2004: 1) of the events surrounding her escape, where the events themselves provide the raw material for the narrative’s extended reflection and self-reflection. I have therefore argued that the novel foregrounds its kinship with other feminist literatures and critical-theoretical interventions. Moreover, by situating the narrative in the experience of Tambudzai, but infusing this experience with the multiple experiences of other women with whom she shares this narrative space, Dangarembga is able to present a complex and nuanced account of the multiple subject positions that women inhabit.

As in my discussion of The Grass is Singing, I have examined the various ways in which Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things explores how certain forms of male power are secured over the body of woman as boundary. In both novels, the female characters, Mary and Ammu, respectively, are tragic characters precisely because they cross the line between what is deemed pure and impure, that is, they break the written and unwitten laws of racial and caste kinship. To this end, I have argued that, like Mary after she marries Dick and moves to the farming district, Ammu increasingly becomes a ‘misfit’ within her family and village, Ayemenem, after she enters into a relationship with a man from the lower caste of India’s Untouchables, Velutha. I have argued that, although 100

The God of Small Things is set in the India of the 1960s, when the caste system had officially been outlawed, the novel shows how male power continues to draw on its social meanings to guarantee its endurance at the close of the twentieth century. Moreover, it does so on the back of a patriarchal order that continues to structure family relations, so that the end of the caste system has not altered the nature of relations of kinship – in this case family kinship – on which it in part drew its sustenance and continuity.

In my discussion I have argued that Roy approaches the subject of male power within the family as a means to reveal the patterns of male authority and pre-eminence in postcolonial India at large. In doing so, she reveals that under the guise of endogamy – of marriage within the religious or tribal family – masculine power is able to secure its continuity, and the caste system has endured. In this sense, as I have argued, the novel confirms that despite the breakdown of the old solidarities of kinship, familial or caste, older relations of power have transcended well beyond ‘the old country’. Thus, my argument has departed quite significantly from Homi Bhabha’s premise that postcolonial lives are lived “beyond” the borders of identity, whether identity is thought of in class, gender, racial or historical terms. Instead, I have argued that, beyond what appears on the surface to be social and historical change, The God of Small Things reveals that very little fundamental change has taken place in the private spaces in which old forms of authority are most tenacious. I have noted that, because the novel uses the Ipe family as a microcosm to explore broader questions of society and history, even what appears ‘post’ remains subject to doubt. In this light, my argument has adopted the historical and dialectical materialist critique within postcolonial studies, according to which the position of individuals within the family reveals their position within historical and material relations that govern familial ones. For this reason, I have proposed a more historial and materialist reading of the tragic relationship between Ammu and Velutha, as I have done in my discussion of the tragic status of Mary’s death in The Grass is Singing.

Besides the fact that in their own particular ways, the three novels examine the nature of belonging – to a race, a caste, a family, a class – they share a similar concern with the space of writing for women and thus function as such spaces for women’s representation and self-representation. All three novels, as I have argued, deal with issues of voice and writing as a means to register the 101 woman’s voice. In this way, all three novels function as symbolic spaces to institute new grounds of contest.

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