Midwest Modern Language Association

Suniti Namjoshi: Diasporic, Lesbian Feminism and the Textual Politics of Transnationality Author(s): Harveen S. Mann Reviewed work(s): Source: The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 30, No. 1/2, Borders (Spring, 1997), pp. 97-113 Published by: Midwest Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1315429 . Accessed: 30/05/2012 11:38
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Suniti Namjoshi: Diasporic, Lesbian Feminism and the Textual Politics of Transnationality
Harveen S. Mann
Gone are the binaryoppositionsdearto the nationalist and imperialistenterprise.Instead we begin to sense that old authoritycannot simply be replacedby new authority,but that new alignmentsmade across borders, types, nations, and essences are rapidlycoming into view, and it is those new alignmentsthat now provoke and challengethe fundamentallystatic notion of that has been the core of culturalthoughtduridentity ing the era of imperialism.
Edward Said, Cultureand Imperialism,xxiv-xxv

In her 1989 collection of selected poems and fables entitled Because of India, the Indo-Briton author Suniti Namjoshi addresses the complexities of defining her particular identity as a diasporic, Indian lesbian feminist in relation to others' variously particularized identities: [I]dentityisn'tonly a matterof self-definition.It also dependson the identity that otherpeople attributeto one. ... [A]sa creature,a lesbiancreature,how do I deal with all the other creatureswho have their own identities, or perIt's haps I mean their own identifications? apparentthat the componentsof the core identity changefromplace to place and periodto period.Todaythe maincomponentsseem to be basedon gender,skin colour,and sexualchoice, as well as otherfactorssuch as nationalityand religion.... Any threatto the sense of self causes a violent reaction.Butthen how are we all to live? (84) In an attempt to chart the genesis and evolution of her own various identities-based on gender, skin color, sexual choice, nationality, and religion - in both geographical and textual time and space, Namjoshi couples the selections in Because of India with highly revealing retrospective, metatexual essays. The collection spans: twenty-two years, from 1967, the date of publication of her first book of poems, to 1989; the four countries of her residence, India, the United States, Canada, and England; and nine major works, from the earliest book, Poems- which reveals, in Namjoshi's words, "acertain unease" with her upper middle-class, Hindu, and normatively heterosexual milieu - to Flesh and Paper (1986), which is a dialogic, lesbian-centered text co-authored with her partner Gillian Hanscombe. In its genealogical and spatial-temporal sweep, as well as its scrupulous attention to questions of the writer's identity, Because of India comes to

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serve as an autobiography in which Namjoshi's personal, sexual political, and poetic intellectual selves converge to offer a rare glimpse of her differing subjectivities, subjectivities that fracture a binarist worldview, which pit past against present, object against subject, First against Third World, race against sexuality. A western-trained academic, Namjoshi disavows her elite background as a daughter of royal landowners in India. Committed to an egalitarian feminist politics, formulated and refined in the West, she disrupts the normative Hindu male discourse of India. A marginalized Hindu Indian in the racist social hierarchy of the U.S., Canada, and England, she brings an "alteredperspective" (India 103) to the Christian, Western history of ideas. A politicized lesbian feminist, she subverts both the male-centered humanism of the West and the androcentric hegemonic erotic ethos of India. A lesbian of color, she complicates the silencing of race in favor of the voicing of sexual difference in dominant Western gay and lesbian theory.' A poet grappling with the problem of "how to write about India in English" (India 42), she remakes as well the colonizer's misogynist language through a feminist parodic idiom, an eroticized grammar, and a subversive fabulosity. A highly personal, subjective, and engaged author, she abandons the orthodox modality of objective, impersonal, and abstract narrative in favor of the dialogics-among writer, text, and reader-of autobiography. Further, her autobiography, cast as multiply voiced, partial, and generically diverse, disrupts not only the patriarchal norm of the linear, socially integrative life story but also the western lesbian narrative orthodoxy of the "coming-out"story. As Namjoshi crosses or erases borders- national, cultural, gender, and narratological- and proffers a transgressive, even subversive, commentary on mainstream traditions both Eastern and Western, she unsettles much on both sides. Failing - here construed as positive - to achieve any idealized sense of belonging to one (essentialized) culture, nation, or group, or, conversely, to arrive at (an even more problematic) "universal" state, Namjoshi occupies instead a "third space," an interstitial location between nations and cultures, as theorized by Homi Bhabha: The interventionof the ThirdSpace... constitutesthe discursiveconditions of enunciationthat ensure that the meaningand symbolsof culturehave no primordialunity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, and translated,rehistoricized readanew. ... It is significantthatthe productive capacities of this Third Space have a colonial or postcolonialprovenance. Fora willingnessto descendinto thatalien territory... may open the an culture,basednot on the exoticismof way to conceptualizing international or multiculturalism the diversity cultures,but on the inscriptionandarticuof lation of culture'shybridity.To that end we should rememberthat it is the "inter"-... the in-between space- that carriesthe burdenof the meaningof culture .... And by exploringthis ThirdSpace,we may elude the politics of polarityand emerge as the others of our selves. (Location 37-39)

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Even a quick review of Namjoshi'sobservations-and their demonstration in selected works from Because of India - regarding her multifaceted

in-betweenness underscores her commitment to investigating the comas plexities of various boundariesand to "emerging the other of her self." on her love of both mathematicsand literature,for instance, Commenting Namjoshi notes tellingly that whereas the former "makesbeautiful patterns within self-containedsystems,"in the latter"someof the best results are obtained by using several systems simultaneously" (India 104) or by whether literary/aestheticor 111), "switchingsystems"("Suniti Namjoshi" cultural.Whereas in the mid-1960s, as an IndianAdministrativeService as officer,Namjoshiregardedherself to be "about Establishmentas it was to be,"the lesbian desire articulatedin her poems of the period possible reveals what she describesas "acertainunease" move (India9). Namjoshi's from Indiato what she imaginedwould be a more liberal U.S.A. in 1968, and thence to Canadain 1969, broughther face to face with, amongother things, racismand a male-centeredChristianhumanism.Confrontedwith the partially unsavory new, Namjoshi developed/formalizedwhat she terms "anAsian perspective, an alien perspective, later a lesbian perspective" (India 22). But this collective perspective does not stand in mere oppositionto a hegemonic Westernethos, nor does it reflectan unsullied, but but originarycategory."Asian," only in a Westerncontext;"alien," only but outside India;"lesbian," only in a Western terminologicaland sexual epistemologicalsense - Namjoshi'swritingsembody instead interrelated, sometimes colliding sociopolitical, racial, psychosexual, and aesthetic strands,to arriveat that unstable,disruptive,liminal, but also ambivalent location of the Third Space. Thus, even as she traversesand destabilizesmultiple bordersof subjecand tivity, Namjoshi,the feminist adult, is drawn to "familyloyalties" carries an unadulteratedlove for her father (India41). An Indianwriting in the English, she grapples with the problem of "combining literary tradi112).A fabulist,she uses "oldways"to "make ("Suniti Namjoshi" something that are true to our experiences as women"("Suniti Namnew,""patterns from "what joshi" 110). Attemptingto "saysomething radicallydifferent" has been said traditionally" males, she focuses not only on her feminist by content but "tentimes as much"on her technique ("Suniti 113). Namjoshi" And committedto subvertingpatriarchal belief-systems, she still does not that "separates espouse a "feministhumanism" [women] from the rest of creation" (India113). My articleexaminestwo sets of selections fromBecauseofIndia:a group of seventeen poems entitled"Snapshots Caliban," of themselves excerpted
from Namjoshi's 1984 book of poems, From the Bedside Book ofNightmares, and a group of eight poems entitled "In This Kind Country," taken from Flesh and Paper. The purpose of my juxtaposition of these two sets of tion of English . . . and daily life in another [deemed exotic] culture"

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poems is to underscore Namjoshi's ambivalent, plurivocal response to her overarching question, "But then how are we all to live?" (India 84). Whereas the former cluster of poems explores, in Namjoshi's words, "the bloodier aspects of gay liberation and women's liberation" (India 83), it does so within a racialized, postcolonial space of another version of Shakespeare's The Tempest. While "InThis Kind Country" attests to Namjoshi's continuing attachment to Hindu India, moreover, it also points to her resistance to the (autochthonous) mother country's silencing and erasure of the Western-influenced lesbian-feminist daughter. In thus enacting and enunciating mutually disruptive and multiply (culturally) (dis)located selves, Namjoshi plumbs the creative dimension of her diasporic state, of her life on "the borderlines," as defined by Trinh Minh-ha: Workingrightat the limits of several categoriesand approachesmeans that one is neitherentirelyinside or outside.One has to push one'swork as faras one can go: to the borderlines,where one never stops walkingon the edges, incurringconstantlythe risk of falling off one side or the other side of the limit while undoing, redoing,modifyingthis limit. (218)

"Making a Present of the Beast": Snapshots of a Third World, Lesbian Caliban

Amongst the plethora of modern and contemporary writings both on the colonialist discourse at the heart of Shakespeare's The Tempest and on its several postcolonialist rewritings,2 Rob Nixon's comment about the reasons for the largely male adaptations of the play are particularly pertinent to my project. According to Nixon, given that Caliban is "without a female counterpart in his oppression and rebellion" and given the "difficulty of wresting from [the play] any role for female defiance or leadership," it follows that "allthe writers who quarried from The Tempestan expression of their lot should have been men" (577). Namjoshi, however, defies the practice of male, postcolonialist dialectical appropriations of Caliban-as-colonized-and-resistant-man by recasting Shakespeare's character as a Third World lesbian subject. Concomitantly, she reimagines Miranda as a desirous and murderous homoerotic figure and Prospero as the excluded and, finally, defeated patriarch, thereby offering another intervention in both the continuing history of The Tempest as (post)colonial narrative and the evolving, conflicted history of global feminism. In their analyses of "Snapshots of Caliban," critics Diana Brydon and Lisa Laframboise, both Canadians, read Miranda as the Canadianized protagonist of Namjoshi's reinscribed text. Even as they consider the significance of the race discourse, based upon the relationship between a white Miranda and a black Caliban, they privilege a (purported) female alliance between the two, thereby appropriating Namjoshi's poetic sequence in

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service of a larger cultural narrative advocating a seamless global sisterhood. Whereas Laframboise emphasizes what she deems to be the "mutuality," "reciprocity," and "equality" of the Miranda-Caliban relationship, which enable both characters to "move [equally] beyond Prospero's [patriarchal imperialist] discourse and to create one in which beyond each Other's 'thing of darkness' is an ally and a friend" (48-49), Brydon envisions Caliban as the instrument of the redemption of both an imperialist Miranda and the neocolonialist, contemporary First World feminist critic. Brydon avers that just as Namjoshi's Miranda "welcomes her new alignment with her sister Caliban, abandoning her role as teacher and starting to learn, as Prospero could not, from his former slave," the white feminist, in unearthing these many "meanings"of Miranda, "un-learns her privilege as her loss" (181).3 I contend, however, that an altered interpretive focus, this one not on Miranda but on Caliban as a resistive, linguistically/rhetorically (pro)creative Third World lesbian yields a more nuanced reading, which underlines the still insidious hold of racism, imperialism, and patriarchy, so that the reader can confront rather than ignore the very real hierarchies still operative in contemporary world cultures. Leading Third World feminist theorist-critics like Gayatri Spivak, Chandra Mohanty, Trinh Minh-ha, and Hazel Carby have repeatedly censured First World feminists for denying the otherness of non-Western women and judging them according to the "high feminist norm" of Europe/EuroAmerica (Spivak, "Three Women's Texts"243). First World feminists have been further criticised for neglecting the distinctions between a predominantly discipline-bound Western feminism and a materialist non-Western women's history, and for eliding the divergences within nation-specific postcolonial feminist practices. They have also been accused of ignoring the consequences of the positionality, location, and audience of the feminist theorist-critic, and participating in the "civilizing mission" of Europe and Euro-America in their claims of global sisterhood. Alternatively, Sara Suleri criticizes those Euro-American critics who reify alterity, thereby "rendering otherness [as] indistinguishable from exoticism" and "representing 'difference' with no attention to the cultural nuances that differentiation implies" (12). A reading of Namjoshi's "Snapshots of Caliban" that scrupulously attends to issues of race, gender, sexuality, language, and power challenges the reductiveness of both approaches- assimilationist and binarist - outlined above and establishes Namjoshi's position as analogous with that of the lesbian Indo-Briton filmmaker Pratibha Parmar, who writes about "anew politics of difference" embraced by lesbians and gays of color: [W]eare not interestedin definingourselves in relationto someone else or our somethingelse, nor arewe simplyarticulating culturaland sexualdifferences. ... We are creatinga sense of ourselvesand ourplace within different and sometimes contradictory communities,not simply in relationto... not

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in oppositionto ... nor in reversalto ... nor as a correctiveto ... but in and for ourselves. Precisely because of our lived experiences of racism and homophobia,we locate ourselvesnot within any one communitybut in the spaces between these differentcommunities.(5) Namjoshi's retrospective introductory note to her selections from TheBedside Book similarly locates "Snapshots"at the destabilizing intersection of cultures: Western and Eastern, Christian and Hindu, hetero- and homosexual, male and female. The "blood and guts" angle of the sexual politics in The Bedside Book is framed within the larger questions of "notions of identity and alienation": the definition of a "lesbian feminist" and her "cause,"her "relation to other people," the "problem of warring egos" (India 83). Taken as a version of "what happens if one lets go of the identity one yields answers pointing to clings to so desperately" (India 84), "Snapshots" multifaceted in-betweenness. Although the poetic sequence Namjoshi's can, on many levels, be regarded as a subversive, Third World rewriting of The Tempest, it can more accurately be read as a "borderline"diasporic text, neither unmitigatedly (oppositionally) postcolonial nor complicitously Western, neither traditionally "feminine"nor radically feminist. Told largely from Miranda's and a female Caliban's perspectives, the poem sequence at first appears as a challenge to a hegemonic male worldview because of its realignment of the (hetero)sexual politics of Shakespeare's narrative. Yet Namjoshi fractures the vision of a seamless global feminism united against patriarchal oppression not only by underscoring the rifts between her Miranda and Caliban characters but also by giving over the final poem of the sequence to Prospero. Thus, whereas such postcolonial writers as Aime Cesaire, George Lamming, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o have refigured the attempted rape of Miranda by Caliban as the literal rape of the Third World by Western imperialists, Namjoshi rewrites the violence of the stereotyped, heterosexual Third World rapist as the murderous rage of the First World lesbian desirous of the Third World woman. Instead of idealizing the (universalized) difference of a lesbian sexual politics and thereby erasing the politics of race, she points to Miranda's collusion, albeit indirect, in the colonialist/imperialist enterother prise. Caliban remains for Miranda her racial and lesser "monstrous" (India93, 87); "hercreature,"whom she can "summon"at will (India85-86); and stereotypical in her "slyness,"prevarication, bestiality ("shehowls like a dog or some tiresome animal," says Miranda) (India 86, 91). Even as she is attracted to Caliban, Miranda finds her "disgusting," and "dislikes" and "hates"her to the extent of twice attempting to murder her (India 86, 91, 93). Unable to admit Caliban's humanity and equality, Miranda finds herself without any points of reference in this (lesbian) sexualization of race;4 falling back, therefore, on the male-gendered imperialist discourse of colonialism, she declares, "[I]f[Caliban] had her way, she would rule the island, / and I will not have it" (India 91).

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In contrast,Namjoshidepicts Caliban,the ThirdWorldwoman, as committed to negotiationand reconciliation- ratherthan revolution- despite her oppression;as a person who can function in two worlds- that of the colonized and the colonizer; as the truly strong one. She can fish, chop wood, pick berries, but she also learns to manipulatethe colonizer'slanguage, as evidenced by the progress of the simple diction of "Caliban's berries are nice, those are not nice. This water is fresh. Journal"-"These That water is salt"- to the more sophisticated poetic structures of Notebook"-"Andthey never got away, I for here we all are, M "Caliban's and myself I and doddering P, still islanded, / still ailing, looking seaward / for company"(India 89, 92). Even though she is derided and whipped for expressingher desire for Miranda,Calibanpersists in using and not languageto "re-evaluate define" simply"the[generic]female'sposition"on the island, as Laframboise points out (46), but, more specifically, the ThirdWorldwoman'sposition on her colonizedisland. Insteadof seeCalibanregardsMirandaand herself as "gods" ing the "newmen"as "gods," (India89); instead of submissively obeying Prospero'severy command, she agreesonly to "try try" "begood"(India90);instead of definingher to to self through her relationship with her colonizers, she looks forward to their leaving so that she might (pro)creatively"peoplethis island (with nice people)"(India 91). In addition, Caliban questions the colonizers' interpretationof events: "Theydreamedit. There was no storm,/no shipwreck, nobody came,"she notes (India92), thereby confirmingnot so much what Laframboiseterms "theillusory wish-fulfilmentof the imperialist's inscription of colonial discourse"(47) but, more significantly, underliningher resistance to and subversion of the colonizers'version of "reality." failed dreamof revengeagainstAlonso, Finally,in contrastto Prospero's and Miranda's fabricatedexistence as a "lady" whose dreams of marriage to Ferdinandare "smashed broken" and (India96, 93), Calibandreamsthe most enabling dream, in which she hunts a tiger.5The animal, with its "ironinsides,"consumptive appetite, and destructive energy, is a metaphor simultaneously for colonialism and anti-colonial force, thereby exemplifyingwhat SaraSulerielsewhere terms"theradicalinseparability of the imperialand the subaltern" "Inside hut,"terrorizing the (3). Prospero and Miranda,the tiger signifiesthe retributionof the oppressed,"destroyand but everything," it also serves as the embodiment [ing]" "consum[ing] of Miranda'smurderous rage against Caliban (India99). In hunting the 99) tiger, Calibantoo "destroys (India of the colonialpast, both everything" the colonizer'swill to mastery and the colonial subject's(purported) passivity, thereby clearing the decks for reconciliationwith her colonizers. While Miranda's utteranceis still introspective, solipsistic, Westernlast "so turned, as she rues her patriarchalconstructionas an imperial"lady,"
pure, so snow-white... a thing or a dream" (India 100), Caliban arrives at

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the enviable Third Space of solidarity with the Western woman. Sympathizing with Miranda's anger at her racialized and sexualized position as imperialist virgin and her resultant, misplaced violence directed at the Third World object of her lesbian desire, Caliban, in a gesture of forgiveness, offers to share the gift of her more positive destructive/reconstructive abilities with Miranda: "Isaid to M that I would, if she liked, make a present of the beast [the tiger]" (India 101). Yet even as Caliban and Miranda unite against Prospero, and against colonialism/imperialism beyond him, Namjoshi recognizes the continuof ing power of the "nightmare" patriarchy and so gives over the last words in "Snapshots"to Prospero. However, having created an admirable Third World lesbian protagonist in Caliban, she casts Prospero's concluding lines in hesitant interrogatives-"I made them? Maiden and monster / .... / Was there something in me/that fed and sustained them?" (India 102)which jar against his earlier, confident rhetoric of possession - "Two monsters are crawling out of my eyes ... ./ O my pretty playthings, / my shining instruments!" (India 94). Now, shaken by Caliban's strength both on Miranda's and her own behalf, Prospero questions, "Arethey mine or their own?," and ends by underscoring his own impotency: "I dare not claim them" (India 102). Just as Caliban and Miranda disrupt Prospero's narrative of paternal possession, so do they defy his control of their sexuality as revealed in their discourse of desire and the body.6 While they underscore her colonialist, of racialized "disgust" Caliban, the poems written from Miranda's perspective also articulate an enabling desire for the other woman. Her first poem of the sequence begins, "Not wrong to have wanted you," and the third poem voices more openly her (transgressive) attraction for Caliban: SupposeI came across her while she was sleeping, her lips half-smiling, her body calm, wholly absorbedin her dear dream; or caughther staring, her ears prickling to the strangesounds, the brave scenes; or found her fishing in a crannyof the island, unawareof the others, would I not like her? Would I not speak, and approaching slowly her try to make friends?(India87) With her identity constructed on the basis of the polarizations of colonialism, Miranda escapes annihilation from Prospero's "dark dream" that

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"swallowseverything" 95) (India only throughher affiliationwith Caliban. it is the latter'sspeakingof her lesbian desire for her FirstWorld However, counterpartthat is truly subversive. Given languageby Prospero,she yet learnsto articulatean independentscript;sexually circumscribed,she yet professes and enacts her desire for Miranda,even though she is derided, and worse still, beaten and almost killed for the threat of her otherness. While ProsperoregardsCaliban'sand Miranda's mutual sexual desire as them as crabs"scrabbling scuttling, / climbingand and bestial, describing sliding on top of one another" (India94), Calibanloves Mirandawith the innocence of the uncorrupted.She catches crayfishfor her, takes her to pools where crabs hide, brings her berries, and "gaze[s] longinglyat [her] blue eyes"(India98), and, finally, even forgivesher her murderousanger, to establish a bond, however tenuous, between the colonialist and colonized woman. Namjoshi represents her resistance to and subversion of patriarchal but imperialism not only through her language of desire in "Snapshots" also through"changing perspective" the in multiple ("Suniti Namjoshi"116) otherways. Forexample,her rewritingof Shakespeare's Tempest The from a ThirdWorld, lesbian feminist perspective establishes the impossibility of closure of the colonial text and the legitimacyof alternativenarratives. Her adoption of multiple speaking subjects sunders the convention of a single, trustworthynarrator.The controllingmetaphor of the snapshots makes for an intertextualitybetween self and other, writer and reader, and at the same time questions the stereotyping of the (here colonial) camera'sgaze. Finally, the gaps between the (poetic)""snapshots" parallel the gaps between heterosexualand lesbian, FirstWorldand ThirdWorld discourse which Namjoshi'spoems seek to fill in. "Finding a Different Bit of Space": Masculinist Indian Nationalism in This Hostile Country Whereas in "Snapshots" Namjoshidepersonalizesher autobiographical self, displacingit onto Calibanin a generalizedway and reversingthe gaze of the colonizer through the perspective of Caliban-as-Third-World-lesThis KindCountry" personalizesher bian, in the poetic sequence of "In she autobiographicalself, locating it at the nexus of Indian nationalist and feminist discourse. Whereasin "Snapshots" interruptsthe monologic/ she monolithic narrative of British colonial expansionism and Jacobean nationalismas thematizedin Shakespeare's Tempest, "InThis Kind The in Country"she challenges Indian nationalist ideology from her diasporic position. Thus, while Lorraine York,Diana Brydon,and Diane McGifford are correct in maintaining that issues of gender and sexual orientation
serve as the impetus for Namjoshi's art, I establish the commensurate

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significanceof the modern Indian nation and nationalcul(antagonistic) ture to her poems. As I discuss below, the poetic sequence of "In This Kind in Country," particular,embodies Namjoshi'sfemale-genderedand lesbian-sexualizedattempts to fashion an alternative "nation," "peopled a place"of words "wherewomen may walk freely"(India123).7 As theorist-critics BenedictAnderson,GayatriSpivak,Michel Foucault, and ParthaChatterjeeamong others have demonstrated,modern nationalism is a genderedconstructthatfavorsmale hegemonyand idealizesthe A woman-as-mother (country)-of-nationalist-sons. corollaryeffect of such a singular,masculinist, heterosexistnarrativeof the nation is the effacement of lesbianism- even more than of male homosexuality- from the national-cultural and script. Both Euro-American Indiancivic discourses therefore demonstratewhat Teresa de Lauretisdescribes as the "socioof sexual (in)difference" nationalism and what Andrew Parker et al. of orientedsexualities" to describeas the "exclusion all nonreproductively "securethe heterosexualcontractby which all sexualities, all bodies ... are bonded to an ideal/ideologicalhierarchy of males"(de Lauretis 161, Parker6). It is partially to undo such nationalist, heterosexist, epistemic-and ontological- erasurethatNamjoshicreatesthe lesbianas speakingsubject in Becauseof Indiagenerally and in the cluster of poems entitled "InThis more specifically. Yet, when writing in her companion Kind Country" essay aboutthe reasonsfor her excerptingof this clusterof poems, the subject-matterof which is largely the nation-spaceIndia, Namjoshiclaims a largely positive significanceof nation to sexuality, thereby revealing the visit mattereda great seductiveness of a national-familial identity. "That deal to me,"she reminisces;"nowat last there was somebody in the West with whom I could talk about what things meant on the basis of shared experience.... Gill had, at least to some degree, experiencedthe realityof my personalpast (andcontinuingpresent, except that it'sin a differentbit of space)"(India 112). On reading the poems, however, we are immediately confrontedwith a host of ambivalencesand disjunctures.Hardly with Namjoshi'sWestern/Other the groundfor "shared lover, experience" Indialargelythwarts.Not only does it compel Namjoshito seek her present existence as a lesbian feminist in "adifferentbit of space,"but it also of splitsNamjoshifromHanscombe,as an examination the issue of authorship clearly demonstrates. LorraineYork rightly points out that Namjoshi and Hanscombe'scollaborativeauthoringof FleshandPaperchallengesin the main the capitalist-patriarchalnotion of authority/author-itythrough an abdication of individualownershipof the poems, at the same time thatit figureslesbianformatand a doublingof body ism textuallythrougha statement-response and page in the emotional-sexualresponse concretizedin the poems (153,
158, 162, 164). But in "InThis Kind Country,"in what I am dubbing the India

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poems, there is a rent in the collaborativefabric, and Namjoshior Hansas combe can be clearly identified individually the author of this or that York reads this rupturepositively from a social-constructionist, poem.8 deconstructiveperspective, positingthat such a fracture,by remindingus that collaborationis "nota stable concept,"preemptsthe impulse to build collaborativeauthorshipinto "atotalizingscheme" and, more importantly, as checks the propensity to cast "lesbian" a unified, essentialist category that denies the hierarchies of race, class, and political positionality still operative within lesbian studies and lesbian feminist theory (164). However, I maintain that the schism between the authors in "InThis KindCountry" marksnot only the deconstructive lesbian-feminist moment of aporiabut also, and more significantly,concretizesthe insidioushold of the (Indian)nation over the diasporiclesbian body-text. One of the chief effects Namjoshi cites of her visit to India in Hanscombe'scompany was her dawning awareness of "justhow much I had been influenced by... Hinduism"(India112). And, while in several of her explanatoryessays Namjoshi pits her near prideful Hindu consciousness againsta Christian one (India28, 84, 112)- the latter constitutingan understandablepoint of reference given her address of a largely Western audience-what becomes clear from her Indiapoems is that it is the dominantHindu, masculinist nationthat at least initiallyimpingesupon and splits her diasporic lesbian feminist body and text.9 The first part of the first poem in the cluster, "Wasit quite like that?," penned by Namjoshi, keeps to an earlier agreement between Namjoshi and Hanscombeand begins, equitably, "inthe middle"(Flesh42): "Andso you said, 'Well, which goddess then?'/ I replied, 'Cometo the country of which / my bones are made up"' (India114).The goddessfigureis key here and in other works by Namjoshi and appears twice more in Namjoshi's In poems in "InThis KindCountry." the poem "Inthat particulartemple" Namjoshidisplacesthe dancingShiva,the god of cosmic destruction,with the dancing goddess-as-lesbian,whose "sacredand secular"lovemaking sets the world spinning;and, in "Becauseof India,"she "plaitsa new litto urgy" the goddessto replacea patriarchal historyand family (India120, 121). While such authorsand critic-theoristsas Anita Desai, Spivak,and Chatterjeehave remarkedupon the gendered circumscriptionof women generallywithin Indiannationalismand their specific containmentin the Namideologically inflected figure of woman-as-goddess-and-mother, joshi here harksback to the pre-Vedic,pre-Aryan(c. 2000 B.C.),empowering goddess traditionthat informed the matriarchalculture prevalent at the time. Yet the fact that Namjoshi's goddess, erotic and procreative in the domain of words, of art, fails to provide a bulwark against the heterosexual familial ideology of the modern nation is underlined by Hanscombe's perspective as outsider. Her first independent poem in the clus-

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ter, "They invent, circumvent," is a negative testimonial to the power of "the [Indian national] family" to regulate what it perceives as deviant sexuality. "They [the lovers] invent, circumvent," Hanscombe admits; "their goddess hides her face," for "shame has many modes" (India 117). Not only is this shame warranted in the national familial ideological superstructure because their love is lesbian but also, and perhaps more importantly, because it is interracial. To Namjoshi's naive belief that "Youwere like me. ... You did not question my kinship," Hanscombe counters from her racialized-sexualized stance, "Wasit quite like that?"and goes on to establish her quite different "kinship"as masculinized ex-colonizer: I'mwhite. I'mWesterncivilization.I'mChristendom, their blood runningin rivers. I'mcapitalist imperialism,overlordingtheir lords. I'm barbarism: misplacing,renaming.(India114-15) In this hostile country, then, Hanscombe attempts to claim a collective identity as lesbian with Namjoshi-"I'm us, not them"-harking back to E. M. Forster as forefather of the white Western homosexual lover in India. But she soon realizes that, "because of India,"such a "passage to India"remains "afiction" in more ways than one (India 115). Following this realization of exclusion, Hanscombe's poetic responses are all negative. She sees little hope for a common country or common (in)sight. Instead, she writes in ironic tones of the "gift of deception" that India bequeaths on the lovers, a "gift" "implicitly prized"by them, so much so that they do not even know whether they are "mated or parted" (India 117). Sight and insight turn to blindness, and to Namjoshi's qualified placating, "Butyou like what you see, / at least some aspects, / some part of it," Hanscombe responds tersely, "Isee what I can" (India 118, 119). And even this partial seeing soon turns to unseeing as the country continues to push apart the lovers-who-aren't-lovers-anymore: as Hanscombe attempts to take photographs to pin down and re-view images later, for "ofitself, not belonging makes me blind,"Namjoshi upbraids her, "Bequick ... people are shamed," "You want pictures of poverty?" (India 119). "Untutored, unenlightened," left to her own devices by an aloof, "businesslike"companionnot lover - who only "sometimes ... explain[s],"Hanscombe fails to take off her shoes as she enters a Hindu temple dedicated to Vishnu, the supreme god, among whose many avatars or incarnations are Rama, Krishna, and Buddha (India 115, 119), and thereby unknowingly not only offends orthodox Hindu sensibility but also challenges its patriarchal religious superstructure.10 Finally, in her last poem, entitled "We can compose ourselves," Hanscombe addresses the task of "inventing a country"-here used synonymously with "nation"- where lesbians may live freely. But her search for such a utopic space is couched in hesitant interrogatives and metaphors of isolation:

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We can compose an ocean if we like .... Or we can compose ourselves. But a politics?To invent, just we two, a view? How to think?Whatto do? And a country? Then follow images of epistemic erasure and violence: In yours [yourcountry, India],... though even the rocks have names, we wither, having no word. And in mine [England] the word is so raw it bleeds; and from fury of pain, it attacks;and would maim us daily. (India122) The poem ends in a rejection of the possibility of a common country/ nation where Namjoshi and Hanscombe can live as citizens. But some positives remain: in the sphere of art, in sexual-textuality, for as Hanscombe observes, "We can compose courselves;" and even though "notour passports," "our bodies ... fit so uncommonly well" (India 122). In Namjoshi's poems, too, the emphasis is away from living in the nationspace to living in the world of language. In the Introduction to Flesh and Paper, Namjoshi and Hanscombe write of their need and commitment to create such an alter-native world of words, an alter-nation which would fracture the inherited "man-made language" of English with "its logic of need and greed" (India 123). "Wordsinvent the world," they point out; "and then the invented world invests language with images of itself. In turn, we see and hear the emerging world with words. But ... a lesbian woman does not inhabit the worlds that make sense to heterosexual men" (Flesh3). However, the converse effort to invent a lesbianized linguistic world, which is, in Namjoshi's words, the effort to"understand what kind of sense the world makes to a lesbian consciousness" (India 113) is extremely problematical in India. As Wayne Dynes and Stephen Donaldson point out, the Hindu sacred law code of Manu (1-3 A.D.) condemns lesbianism and prescribes far more severe punishments for it than for male homosexuality, while Islam virtually ignores the existence of the lesbian (ix). Since Vedic and, to a lesser extent, Koranic attitudes still constitute the modern Indian woman, it is hardly surprising that the lesbian difference does not exist in any current Indian lexicon: witness Hanscombe's lament above that in India "we wither, having no word." To counter non-existence, therefore, Namjoshi attempts to fashion both a diasporic lesbian feminist world and self in a context located outside of India, "because of India." Yet India seduces and Namjoshi initially responds as a dutiful, Hindu daughter, a response that contrasts sharply with Hanscombe's more perceptive, alienated view of India's suppressions and oppressions discussed

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earlier. Namjoshi is, at first, the estranged child coming back to her mother country, "the country of which my bones are made up," where "these native modes / these shades of feeling, / return me to an element that feels / like home" (India 118). Through her contact with the familiar and the familial, she reverts to an infantile stage as she disclaims her bond with Hanscombe in almost petulant terms: I did not come into being a full-grownlesbian with a knowledgeof English, a trainedbrain and sexual politics inscribedupon it. (India118) But her harking back to an earlier, idyllic time, when she was unaware of her lesbianism, of sexual politics, and of the English language and its creation of what to her were at first alien worlds, soon gives way to her realizations of the greater denials forced upon her as-an adult by India. Now, like Hanscombe, she admits - and it is a "frightening admission" - that "in this kind country / of exact relationships, there is / no word / for you and me" (India 116). In a religious system that recognizes consanguinity based upon distinctions between paternal and maternal relatives, blood relatives and relatives by marriage, male and female relatives, and establishes a strict hierarchy of familial relations and obligations-in short, in a nation obsessed with patriarchal privilege, the concomitant control of women's sexuality and material wealth, and the propagation of the male lineage - it is little wonder that Namjoshi, and lesbians in general, are erased from the national imaginary. A dawning recognition of her own earlier collusion in the silencing of lesbianism and the ambivalence of her position as daughter and not-daughter, insider and outsider -"they are my kin / and I their alien," she writes (India 116) -soon leads to other, more traumatic insights: "Inthe West I burn,"Namjoshi now confesses, but in India, which only "feels like home," she is condemned not only to non-existence but also to (ontological death: "Here, / when my lungs give out, / I cannot breathe" (India 118). And so, "because of India"- in the dual sense of India as the agent of her understanding but also of her exclusion and metaphoric extinction- Namjoshi arrives outside of India, "thehistory not for taking:/the family not for joining" (India 121). Unable to "name her cause" in India, she renounces fealty to this nation in particular and to nations in general, reserving loyalty for sexuality and sexual-textuality alone: "We can / -I / you can-press dreams and theories, bellies, / breasts, hair, hips, lips; and words" (India 121). As she realizes that "there is no undiscovered country" but only "an ordinary planet" where her lover and she "mustpay for safety / with a dis-

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guised I and difficult deference / and the habit of fear," and that there is "only man-made language I with its logic I of need and greed, I doom, dearth, despair," she "speaks"and creates in her poetry a "peopled place"not nation, not country, but place-"where women may walk freely / in the still breathable air"(India 123). Thus, she moves from the asphyxiating nation-space where her "lungs give out, I cannot breathe" to a transnational sexual-textuality (the latter also signified in the title of the collection Flesh and Paper), across and beyond political nations, to the land of body-text where women, Western and Eastern, feminist and (women's rights) activist, white and black, can "walk freely / in the still, breathable air." And while she is keenly cognizant of the other identities/identifications-of gender, sexuality, race, nationality, and religion-that impinge upon this precarious "place,"which is no mapped place; while she is scruwhich is no pulously conscious of the tenuousness of her created "border," while her final statement is still cast as an unangeographical border; swered interrogative -"shall we speak of a peopled place ... ?"- she manages to articulate in sexual-textual space a diasporic lesbian-feminist self, in all its complexity, in answer to her overarching question, "Butthen how are we to live?"" Loyola University/Chicago Notes 1. Writingabout the race- and nation-basedexclusions of First Worldfeminist and lesbiantheory,JuliaWatsoncritizeseven the use of the terms"sexual colonization"and "decolonization" metaphorsfor describingwhite Western, lesbiansexas ual differenceand liberatorypractice, respectively. "Isa concept of colonization even viable outsidea networkof political,externallyimposed,repressivepractices that operateon entire peoples?" asks perceptively.And underliningthe probshe lematic of racialand national-political differencesas they functionin gay and lesbian theory, she continues,"Or 'sexualdecolonization' indicationof the decais an dent and depoliticizeddiscourseof Americanfeminism ... miredin personaland the bourgeoisissues ratherthan addressing exploitationof entireclassesof women workers characteristic late capitalism?" of (146-47). 2. See, for example,DeborahWillis's"Shakespeare's and Tempest the Discourseof Colonialism" (1989), LauraDonaldson's"TheMirandaComplex:Colonialismand the Question of Feminist Reading" in (1988),Thomas Cartelli's "Prospero Africa: TheTempest ColonialistText and Pretext" as (1987),and PaulBrown's"'This Thing of DarknessI AcknowledgeMine':TheTempest the Discourseof Colonialism" and (1985). 3. Brydon borrows the latter phrase from GayatriChakravorty Spivak's"Critiin Critic: Stratecism, Feminism,and the Institution" ThePost-Colonial Interviews,

gies, Dialogues, p. 9.

4. Evenin contemporary scholarshipon imperialismandwomen, the emphasisis overwhelmingly on heterosexualrelations. See, for example, InderpalGrewal's HomeandHarem:Nation, Gender, and of Empire, the Cultures Travel (1996),Laura
Donaldson's DecolonizingFeminisms:Race, Gender,and Empire-Building (1993), Jenny

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Sharpe's Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (1993), and Margaret Strobel and Nupur Chaudhuri's Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (1992). However, some recent studies of the imperialist construction of masculinity- Christopher Lane's The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegoryand theParadoxes ofHomosexual Desire (1995) and Sara Suleri's TheRhetoric of EnglishIndia (1992)- focus on the submerged text of male homoeroticism in the colonial encounter. 5. It is instructive to briefly compare Caliban's empowering dream in Namjoshi's poetic sequence with the political powerlessness of the dream of Shakespeare's Caliban. As Paul Brown sees it, the latter's dream is "theapotheosis of colonialist dis"a course" marked as it is by "adesire for powerlessness," desire to escape reality and return to dream" (148-49). 6. In his incisive reading of the connections between a colonialist class discourse, race discourse, and courtly and politicized discourse on sexuality in Shakespeare's The Tempest, Paul Brown points out the parallels of Prospero's practices and the "civilized rhetoric of the Virginia planter, John Rolfe's letter to the Governor seeking his blessing for his proposed marriage to the American Indian Pocahontas. Just as Rolfe's letter "reorients potentially truant sexual desire [of Rolfe for Pocahantas] within the confines of a duly ordered and supervised civil relationship [in which Rolfe will convert the pagan Pocahantas]," states Brown, so too does Prospero's "power to order and supervise his little colony ... manifest [itself] in his capacity to control not his, but his subjects' sexuality, particularly that of his slave and his daughter." Rolfe's "personal triumph of reason over passion or soul over body is repeated publicly as Prospero's triumphant ordering of potentially truant or subversive desires in his body politic" (134), Brown concludes. Namjoshi's Caliban and Miranda both defy the control of such a colonialist civil-sexual discourse; further, her feminized Caliban overturns the discourse of savagism underwriting Shakespeare's creation of his rapacious male character. 7. I put the term "nation"as related to (lesbian) feminism in quotation marks to underscore the irony inherent in coupling what have traditionally been regarded as contradictory, even mutually exclusive, concepts and practices. See, for instance, Virginia Woolfs Three Guineas. 8. Similarly, the accompanying essay, with its more benign approach to India, is exclusively in Namjoshi's voice. 9. Adrienne Rich, whom Namjoshi cites as a mentor, notes elsewhere that "lesbians cannot assume that we are untouched by that ideology [which demands heterosexuality] and the institutions [among them that of the modern nation] founded upon it" (26). 10. Note here the "echo" Mrs. Moore's "losingher bearings"inA Passage to India, of as pointed out by Hanscombe herself (India 115). 11. An early version of this article was presented at the 1995 Modern Language Association Convention, Chicago, IL. Works Cited Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Brown, Paul. "'This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine': The Tempestand the Discourse of Colonialism." In William Shakespeare's"TheTempest."Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1988. 131-51.

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Brydon, Diana. "SisterLetters: Miranda's Tempestin Canada."In Cross-CulturalPerRe-Visionsof Shakespeare. Ed. Marianne Novy. formances:Differences in Women's Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993. 165-84. de Lauretis, Teresa. "Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation." Theater Journal 40.2 (1988): 151-77. Dynes, Wayne R. and Stephen Donaldson, eds. Lesbianism. New York: Garland P, 1992. Laframboise, Lisa. "'Maiden and Monster': The Female Caliban in Canadian Tempests." WorldLiterature Writtenin English 31.2 (1991): 36-49. Minh-ha, Trinh T. Framer Framed. New York: Routledge, 1991. Namjoshi, Suniti. Because of India: Selected Poems and Fables. London: Only Women P, 1989. Namjoshi, Suniti, and Gillian Hanscombe. Flesh and Paper. Devon: Jezebel Tapes and Books, 1986. Nixon, Rob. "Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest." Critical Inquiry 13 (Spring 1987): 557-77. Parker, Andrew et al., eds. Nationalisms and Sexualities. New York: Routledge, 1992. Parmar, Pratibha. "That Moment of Emergence." In Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video. Eds. Martha Gever et al. New York: Routledge, 1993. 3-11. Rich, Adrienne. "Contemporary Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence." In Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985. New York: Norton, 1986. 23-75. Said, Edward. Cultureand Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Ed. Sarah Harasym. New York: Routledge, 1990. . "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism." CriticalInquiry 12.1 -(Autumn 1985): 243-61. Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. "Suniti Namjoshi." In Olga Kenyon, The Writer's Imagination:Interviewswith Major International WomenNovelists. Bradford, England: University of Bradford, 1992. 109-17. Watson, Julia. "Unspeakable Differences: The Politics of Gender in Lesbian and Heterosexual Women's Autobiographies." De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography. Eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1992, 139-68. York, Lorraine. "Lesbianizing Authorship: Flesh and Paper." Essays on Canadian Writing54 (Winter 1994): 153-67.

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