International Journal on Multicultural Literature (IJML): Vol. 7, No. 1 (January 2017)

By K.V. Dominic and Harle Rob

International Journal on Multicultural Literature (IJML) Volume 7 Number 1 (January 2017)
ISSN 2231-6248.
Highlights include

• Transgressive Gender Discourse in Anita Nair's Ladies Coupe' by Seema Bansal Somani & Rohit Phutela
• The Poetic Art and Vision of Wole Soyinka by C. Ramya
• Displacement and Morality in Sunetra Gupta's The Memories of Rain by Ruby Vaneesa and S. Ayyappa Raja
• A Feminist Analysis of the Love Poems of Taslima Nasrin by Sigma G. R.
• The Hero as a Weather Shaman in Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist by A. Vanitha
• Revisionist Myth Making: Meena Kandasamy's Defiance of Male Hegemony in Her Select Poems by Jibin Baby and S. Ayyappa Raja
• Multiculturalism in Lakshmi Raj Sharma's The Tailor's Needle by Abhimanyu Pandey

IJML is a peer-reviewed research journal in English literature published from Thodupuzha, Kerala, India. The publisher and editor is Prof. Dr. K. V. Dominic, renowned English language poet, critic, short story writer and editor who has to his credit 27 books. He is also the secretary of Guild of Indian English Writers, Editors and Critics (GIEWEC). Since 2010, IJML is a biannual journal published in January and July. The articles are sent first to the referees by the editor and only if they accept, the papers will be published. Although based in India, each issue includes worldwide contributors.
Although IJML concentrates on multiculturalism, it also encompasses other literature. Each issue also includes poems, short stories, review articles, book reviews, interviews, general essays etc. under separate sections. IJML is available in paperback, Kindle, ePub, and PDF editions.
Distributed by Modern History Press
LCO004020 LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Asian / Indic
LIT008020 Literary Criticism : Asian - Indic
POL035010 Political Science : Political Freedom & Security - Human Rights

• Language: English
• Publisher: Modern History Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781615993352

Book preview

RESEARCH ARTICLES

Transgressive Gender Discourse in Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupe’

Seema Bansal Somani & Rohit Phutela

Abstract: Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupe’ is a microcosmic narrative shedding conspicuous light upon the psyche of Indian women through the lives of the six women, who have to live under perpetual constrains, haunted by fear and agony, but eventually decide to turn hostile and defiant in a bid to transgress the draconian laws. It is pervaded by fin de siècle transgressive gender discourse where Nair represents the taboo themes of female sexuality, rape, lesbianism and evil motherhood. Though these ideas got the literary voices but shunned out by critics and readers as the idea of transgressive female was not worth swallowing and digestive due to the fear factor of rupturing the codes of femininity.

Keywords: Binary, Discourse, Lesbian, Patriarchy, Transgression.

Gender relations in India as compared to west still involve politics. Women’s wing is constructed as separatist by the issues of gender, social class, caste and religion that are still lurking on periphery yet there are silent but rebellious voices echoing throughout literature registering the resilience and revolt on the part of writers as well as their textual counterparts. Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupe’ does not condemn the transgressive female character, leaving her acts incomprehensible and unexplained, as in the case of many texts written by other authors of the time. Among the galaxy of emerging women writers, Anita Nair is the most promising and a writer to reckon with. Her maiden novel The Better Man has placed her among the most sincere and self-conscious Indian novelists and her second novel Ladies Coupe’ has registered her name in the hall of fame.

The novel carves a niche and manages to permit its protagonist both erotic desire and strength without presenting her in negative shades. Most of the narratives woven together are transgressive ones, in which women confess the laid boundaries of domesticity register silent resistance on their parts and acknowledge the conscious or subconscious strategies to subvert the myriad forms of patriarchal oppression. Akhila is a female character whose life experiences can be taken as sample study to reveal the hypocrisy and narrowness of the values of Indian bourgeois society. Only a handful of scholars have dealt with these transgressive issues. Due to the dearth of such excavations, it is time for an extensive gender analysis based on critical theories of Ladies Coupe’ because of its provocative representations of femininity. Butler appropriates theories for the study of gender: "A genealogical critique refuses to search for the origins of gender, the inner truth of female desire, a genuine or authentic identity […]; rather, genealogy investigates the political stakes in designating as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses […]" (Butler xxxi).

Through her novels Nair has presented modern Indian women’s search for liberation and transgression which are natural instincts of human beings though man or woman. She seems to be championing the cause of equality for women that the same code of morality be applied to both men and women otherwise they are bound to transgress. Hence, feminist literary criticism has become, to put it in Toril Moi’s words, an urgent political necessity (Moi 82). The overriding problem is now, how to avoid bringing patriarchal notions of aesthetics, history and tradition to bear on the female tradition (Moi 82). She points out that to write outside the dominant discourses, aesthetics and literary theory is already to accept the fact of being an outsider and posing willingly as the other.

The narrative is a tell tale of six women representing the cross section of women’s society including age, status, class and caste. Like Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, it is an all inclusive and descriptive narration with great minute detail but as far as the inner depiction is concerned, it is not an exaggeration to say that Nair can be compared with Chaucer. She has presented the powerful galaxy of women’s characters of Indian range. Though the number is less as compared to Chaucer’s character range yet her master stroke is in depth analysis which is unsurpassable. This novel stands against the view of dominant structuralism which states that the experiences of women are dumb and dump, invalid and invisible and can easily disappear. The different instances of text of breaking the codes and the resultant consequences, contribute significantly to an extensive image of transgressive women in diversity. As Boehmer’s statement indicates that acts of resistance stress the women who break the codes. This is, as Boehmer reminds, a main feature of post-colonial writings, more general postcolonial interest in multiplicity, expressed i.e. in the concept of women’s many centered, constellated power, the stress being at once on the importance of diversity (Boehmer 227-228).

In the novel, Nair has taken up the themes of estrangement in marriages, marital rape, and lesbianism, issues of pre-marital and extra-marital affairs. All the women passengers share one binding thread in common, that is, affliction; and the metaphor of family becomes the common site for it. The novel is non-linear in structure as main narrative is told in fragments woven in an intricate fabric of the sub narratives of other women. The novel begins with Akhila’s repression and disintegration and ends with the beginning of Akhila’s new life passing through the collective phase of women’s essentialism. Akhila meets five other women, the common thread that binds these autobiographical fragments is the story of Akhilandeswari, each of whom has a story to tell. The stories are all an attempt to answer Akhila’s problematic question: Are women bound to bear and if yes then to which length? Each chapter of the novel is revealing of the one woman’s secret.

Primarily it is the story of Akhila, who happens to be the most subdued, rather crushed member of the family. As a woman Akhila has her dreams, her desires, her cravings, Dreaming for escape and space. Hungry for life and experience (Nair 2). At the end, she transgresses and breaks the laws set out for her in the pursuit of her dreams when she decides to break the barrier and sets out alone to Kanyakumari, by throwing all the norms of her conservative Tamil Brahmin family to wind. Akhila left family, her home, out of tiredness and boredom sandwiched with domesticity to travel around the world. Her other act of transgression consists of when she develops a romantic relationship with Hari who is a twenty-eight years old chap, too young in years as compared to Akhila. Not only that she crosses the limit by entering into the premarital affair physically but she becomes the starter of this course. Her sexual starving can be traced in these lines where it is Akhila the woman who takes the control of the amorous situation which will ultimately lead her on the path of losing her long protected virginity. One case of crossing the lines leads to another; she goes on crossing one taboo after the other. Crossing the limits of the external laws helps her to find her internal strength and at the end leads her to another infringement of the rules.

The another important strand of the story is of Margaret Shanthi and men like Ebenezer Paulraj (Ebe). He seems to belong the regime of lost colonizers who are unable to see and praise the worth of the women being looked upon as the colonized ones. Initially Margaret is not able to understand the double standards of male egoism in Ebenezer Paulraj, as wifely love sometimes make a woman blind. Marriage is such a social trap where men develop and women vanish. A man grows because a woman leaves her space. Ironically Ebe gets promoted and becomes a principal and as far as Margaret is concerned, he always compels her to stay as a teacher only. Beauvoir believes that the institution of marriage has marred the spontaneity of feelings, between the husband and wife by transforming freely given feelings into mandatory duties and shrilly asserted rights. A woman is more than her body and a man dominates this body in the name of possession. The site of body is treated as commodity and husband becomes the authorized legal owner of this body of wife. Margaret’s alienation under the rubrics of sexuality is on account of Abe’s cold intellectuality. While confirming the patriarchal notions that it is not appropriate to leave husband’s home and family, she chooses a subtle method to destroy her husband. She takes revenge when she feeds him with mouth-watering dishes, fried items and excess oily food, till his curve takes a bad shape to make him a very fat man. By converting Ebenzer into a fat, lazy and dull man Margaret takes the revenge on whole mankind who still consider woman an object to be controlled. Here Margaret becomes a symbol of conformity and rebellion both. As within the range of patriarchy, she takes revenge very tactfully.

Anita Nair has chiseled the next important character Prabha Devi to delineate the parental prejudice. It is not an exaggeration to acknowledge that patriarchy shows its ugly face from cradle to grave. This unwelcoming attitude of her father is much realized by Prabha Devi with the passage of time and infects her psyche. This childhood repulsion subverts the idea of motherhood for Prabha Devi as she is not ready to become mother out of the hatred that she was born with. Normative discourse of motherliness demands women’s behaviour to be quite different and this approach of Prabha Devi makes the present discourse transgressive. This becomes the focal point of study to contest the discursive image of feminine having motherhood as compulsion. The ‘mother instinct’ was seen as the most natural and powerful of all female instincts, especially in the middle classes in India. The women’s call to become mothers was normative: those women who did not have children were stigmatized as ‘barren’ moreover pitied, scorned and regarded as incomplete women with unfulfilled lives. Prabha Devi is a perfect example of a character to abandon this criterion and the most important marker of ‘proper’ femininity has been demarked as unnatural and unfeminine. Thus it is explicitly stated that women who are mothers are worth more than those who are not. ‘Feminine nature’ was now defined as synonymous with the model mother, writes the famous gender theoretician Elisabeth Badinter (206). Nair explores the same idea how Indian women become marionettes in the hands of their husbands and how they are still forced to be mother in the name of family perpetuation and honour. A woman’s body is a site of manufacturing and production as far as the birth of a child is concerned yet she is owned by an owner in the name of husband and forfeits every claim and right over her body. At the end, Prabha Devi takes a transgressive step and takes up the position of a principal and makes her husband a subordinate in the sexual intercourse. She becomes Indian Madam Bovary who knows how to seduce a man against his will.

The most vital part of the study for the dissection is the evolution of Marikolanthu, the most pathetic but the most transgressive woman among the six. It is through her narrative that the issues of rape, lesbianism, virginity, rejection of motherhood, and marital rape are expressed in the novel from the perspective of a victimized female. Like Hardy’s Tess, she is a pure woman but becomes a puppet at the hands of God, destiny and most importantly patriarchy. She represents the poor, miserable peasantry women on whom male oppression is forced on heavily and left unquestioned. She is the only woman in the novel who had transgressed every hindrance with great fortitude. She subverts the idea of love, marriage and motherhood that is presented in attractive manner in fiction. Marikolanthu’s subalternity and silence is reflected within her gender in her positioning in this microcosmic Coupe’ as in this seemingly classless utopia, Marikolanthu is again shown ostracized by the upper-middle-class women. As this woman seated at the farthest end (17) borders on margin within the female enclave while the other five women occupy centre, who share a bond of sisterhood. Being bereft of place and voice, she finds herself negated by the other women who are visible and have a voice. This may seem to be in accordance with what Spivak had contended that the subaltern cannot speak.

All her childhood innocence and gentleness is shattered when she is brutally raped by Murugesan, one of the relatives of her employers. She is forced to marry a rapist a filthy animal’’ (245) as she gets pregnant but Marikolanthu resists and transgresses her feminine role. Her female body becomes the site of violence and gender discrimination. The body is commoditified when Murugesan tries to justify the act of violating her body: … if the Chettiar’s sons can feast on this body of yours … remember I’m a relative, even if only a poor one, and I’m entitled to their pickings before anyone else" (239). Here the powerless female body is objectified by the powerful male. As a result, her unwanted pregnancy reinforces her revulsion for her illegitimate child who is a tangible embodiment of her exploitation. The basic two tenets of womanhood: marriage and motherhood are thoroughly rejected by Mari. She steps on the path of transgression by establishing a special bond with Sujata, the daughter-in-law of the aristocratic household of chettiyars (landholders) as the latter has a strong revulsion for heterosexual relationship. The frustrated sexual desires of Sujata find an outlet in her body. This heterosexual social system positions the two women differentially and ruptures the codes of language. The absence of a homoerotic language hinders in realizing the potential of same-sex desire. Marikolanthu belongs to the class that has access neither to the language nor to any Westernized notion of lesbianism. In Ladies Coupe’, lesbianism is ultimately dealt as a defeated pursuit as it cannot transcend the accepted norms of social respectability. Thus she is the most perfect sample study in this discourse of transgression.

To conclude, the novel is a fine women’s world representing the transgressive specimen of femininity. Despite the obstacles created by the patriarchy, these six women channelize their strong urge to survive in different ways of inversion, perversion and subversion. As there is no escape from these hard situations, they don’t want to give up and become an object of pity rather becomes the subject and take the appropriate recourse to face the harsh situations of life. These liberated and emancipated women characters open a vista of development and growth. Though transgression is not the solution of every situation yet it ensures the development on the part of activist. In a way she thinks on the transgressive lines and becomes a landmark for her sisterhood. Nair has thus offered an affirmative solution thereby upholding the virtue of defiance, resistance and subversion in this novel. It is evident from the above cram that the disintegration of the subject takes place in the life of all the characters under study which is very lot of women in India till the date despite its development and growth in global index.

Works Cited

Badinter, Elisabeth. The Myth of Motherhood: An Historical View of the Maternal Instinct (1980). Foreword by Francine du Plessix Gray. Souvenir Press, 1981.

Beauvoir, de Simone. The second Sex. Translated by H. M. Parshley. Vintage Books, 1997.

Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial & Postcolonial Literature. Oxford University Press, 1995.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 2nd edn. Routledge, 1999.

Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics, 2nd edn. Routledge, 2002.

Nair, Anita. Ladies Coupe’. Penguin Books India, 2001.

The Poetic Art and Vision of Wole Soyinka: A Brief Analysis

C. Ramya

Abstract: This article, at the outset, introduces modern African poetry and then focuses on the important voice in African drama, fiction and poetry. It testifies to the fact that Wole Soyinka’s works arises from a passionate and most desperate concern for his community. This article simply projects Soyinka as a writer with a social mission and vision using poetry as a medium to express man’s experiences in the society in which he partly lives and partly survives.

Keywords: post-colonial literature, protest literature, folk—realist and naturalist tradition

Literatures of such new nations as Africa (Nigeria), West Indies, India, Pakistan have been grouped under what is called ‘Commonwealth Literature’ which is multicultural. Over a period of time the literatures of these countries came to mean postcolonial literatures described as literatures dealing with nations’ culture and being affected by the imperial power from the moment of colonization to the present day. Colonialism did affect various cultures and traditions. The literatures that came after the imperial powers dealt with the cultural evasion that took place. The African writer’s responsibility in this context has been to put back their own culture in its right place and perspective.

The birth of new literature was meant to express a culture which has grown up with the settler communities; it may be a continuation of indigenous cultural violation, some mixture of the effects of colonization including the bringing together of various races into one nation. Thus, the very role of new literature was to express and reflect the historical process by which new societies have been created and the development of consciousness through which new levels have been inscribed in the collective imagination of emerging countries. The post-colonial writers had to choose a language that would be appealing to the natives in the process of their getting back into their culture and promoting national unity. The dialectal variety of their languages and English had to be used. Igbo and English were used by writers like Chinua Achebe. Nigeria with its Yoruba History—an ethnic group to which culture Wole Sayinka belongs, has its own language, myth and religion.

While the anti-colonial nationalists waged a fight for freedom at different levels, writing was used as a weapon of political liberation. The post-1945 movement of anti-colonial and nationalist upsurge produced the first literature which unambiguously invited the name ‘post-colonial’ that is, a literature which identified itself with the broad movement of resistance too, and transformation of colonial societies. In the colonial societies, literature developed only in the second half of the 19th century. In the first half of the 19th century, there were diaries, journals and reports from the colonies. Often they dealt with the histories of exploration. In due course of time, there was a continuing minor current on local naturalism. It was partly from such naturalism that the social realism of the 1930’s evolved. From that, a significant literary development starting in the late 1920’s was the rise of a modern narrative poetry based on the earlier balled tradition but which later appeared to be a form of national epic.

The main development of the 1930’s was a protest literature often influenced by socialism and sociology, in which identification was made between the authentic nation and the poor. Influenced by the social realism of the 1930’s with its emphasis on dialect, urban slums, small towns, poverty-stricken