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Contemporary
Literary Review India
September 2014
CONTENTS
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Editorial
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Book
Length Poem Collection
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Men
of Honour
Song
of Silence
Walking
the Untrodden Path
A
Pinch of Sun
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Regular Poems Collection
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In
the Colony of my Mind
I
Still Possess You
Now
There is Nothing Left But the Journey
In
Place of Stillness and Solitude
Colibri
for a Girl
Gentleman
A
Lot of Beauty
A
Circle
Smile
The
Show Goes on!
Fabric
An
Elegy of Anarchy
On
Blindness
Brother
Mayakovsky
Road
of Dreams
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Stories
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If
Someone Knows Please Tell Me!
A
Walk
Here
Lies a Heart Beneath the Stone
Spaz
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Criticism
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Globalization:
National Identity and Cultural Hybridization in Late 20th Century and 21st
Century Novels
Shyam
Selvadurai: Homosexual Tendencies, Twilight Moments and a Liberated
Acceptance
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Book Review
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Announcement
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A blog for Contemporary Literary Review India or CLRI. It publishes new announcements, releases, and blurbs meant for CLRI the literary journal hosted on http://literaryjournal.in/. Previously, literary issues were brought out on this blog with own domain. Authors and artists published here can still search their pieces but with http://contemporaryliteraryreview.blogspot.in/.
Monday, September 22, 2014
CLRI September 2014
Sunday, September 21, 2014
Shyam Selvadurai: Homosexual Tendencies, Twilight Moments and a Liberated Acceptance by Narola Dangti & Prof. (Dr.) N.D.R. Chandra
Shyam Selvadurai: Homosexual Tendencies, Twilight Moments and a Liberated Acceptance by Narola Dangti & Prof. (Dr.) N.D.R. Chandra
The last chapter ‘Roses and Silence’ is a chapter of acceptance. The chapter deals with the departure of Niresh to Canada and Amrith’s acknowledgement of his self. He quietly misses the absence of Niresh in the house and in the room. He does not know what to do and how to start his days without Niresh. Selvadurai gradually allows Amrith to come to terms with his sexual self. The visit of Lucien Lindamulage shutters Amrith totally, as all the pieces of the puzzle of his life fits into place. Amrith’s knowledge of his own self and his search for acceptance leads him to his mother’s grave. He sits on his haunches and looks at his mother’s name on the tombstone for a long time. He then looks around if anyone is looking and finally speaks out.
Abstract
The category of sex is often invoked as
an issue of cultural and material difference. As Foucault states it a
‘regulatory ideal’ or a regulatory practice because of the simple fact that
bodies are governed by the power to produce, differentiate and construct.
Sexuality has become a major consideration in political life. Communities and
nations have debated and struggled to address the issues of sexual expression
and behaviour. The article talks about the issues of being different and the
feeling of being considered a social Pariah as a homosexual in a political and
cultural set- up. The article also highlights the risks that the characters of
Shyam Selvadurai take and live as they come to terms with their homosexuality
in the most traditional and repressive circle. It also brings to light the
author’s own issues of being gay as a Sri-Lankan and the pain he had to take to
negotiate his sexuality in terms of projecting, defending and weaving it into
his identity and into the identity that his country represented.
Key Words:
Queer theory, Homosexuality, Hijras,
Transgressive, Cross-dressing, Ponnaya, Effeminate Homosexuals, Deviant,
Tendencies, Gay, Inverts.
Shyam
Selvadurai: Homosexual Tendencies, Twilight Moments and a Liberated Acceptance
Queer theory is the academic discourse that has
largely replaced what used to be called gay/lesbian studies. The term was first
coined by Teresa De Lauretis for a working conference on theorising gay and
lesbian sexualities that was held at the University of California, Santa Cruz,
in February 1990. The theory, as such encompasses a whole range of
understanding issues relating to sexual orientation and gender identity. Queer
theory is largely based on the works of Michel Foucault, the French
Philosopher. Besides Foucault, the works of Derrida, Lacan and Freud have
contributed as important theoretical references. Beginning in the nineteenth
century, sexuality gradually assumed a new status as an object of scientific
and popular knowledge. The last two hundred years or so have seen what the
critic and historian Michel Foucault once described as a ‘discursive explosion’
(Foucault 1998: 38) around the question of sex, by which he did not simply mean
that it came to be talked about more widely or more often or more explicitly,
relaxing the grip of repressive conventions or taboos but also calling for a
genealogical analysis of sexuality as it has been lived and understood in
Western culture over the last couple of centuries.
The breadth of output in literary and
cultural criticism which has investigated the specificities and constructions
of human sexualities is vast and it is a corpus which continues to grow and
explore some aspect or representation of sex, sexuality or sexual desire. As
such, ‘sexuality is much more than a facet of human nature, the seat of
pleasure and desire. It has become a principle of explanation, whose effects
can be discerned, in different ways, in virtually any stage and predicament of
human life, shaping our capacity to act and setting the limits to what we can
think and do’ (Glover & Kaplan 2007: 12). Thus, the growing willingness to
put sex into question, even to search for the truth about sexual behaviour,
gradually opened up new ways in which the entire field of sexual possibilities
and sexual identities could be imagined, permanently transforming people’s most
intimate sense of their sexual selves. This article thus aims in studying
anomalies of sexual instincts with special emphasis on queering homosexuality
in the novels of Shyam Selvadurai.
The novels of Selvadurai give a brilliant portrait
of the anxieties aroused by gender non-conformity, especially in patriarchal
societies. Apart from the issue of being different, the protagonists in
Selvadurai’s novels experiences the discomforts and the risks associated with
being a non-conformist in a country with persistently traditional and
conformist norms about sexuality. The article elaborately studies the gradual
and the ultimate passage that the protagonist takes to come out and to accept
their sexual identity with corresponding references to the author’s own passage
to becoming gay openly and the discomforts he felt of being gay in a country he
considered home ‘Sri Lanka’. In the author’s own words, he explains his
decision to be openly gay, ‘I remembered how it was for me feeling there was no
one out there who was a role model of any sort. When I decided to be out in
public, I was really thinking of that version of me in Sri Lanka who would read
my book and feel relieved to not be alone. If I decided not to be out, I would
be sending a message to that young person that I was still afraid and ashamed’
(Hunn 2005: 2). Selvadurai’s novels have the background of the struggle of the
spirit against oppression – of class, gender and sexual orientation capturing
the nuances of the Sri Lankan society steeped in ethnic riots, political
tensions and cultural and social and sexual rigidity. He clearly has a deep
engagement with his country of birth and its troubled history, but he is also
aware of how impossible it would be for him to live there due to the country’s
anti- homophobic attitude towards homosexual relationships. All the three
novels chafe through the themes of traditional restrictions, rigidity and the
disturbing blend of the Tamil-Sinhalese-British conflicts with that of
heterosexuality and homosexuality against the strictures of family, marriage
and patriarchy. As the Sri Lankan critic Prakrti has noted, Selvadurai’s
particular gift is to understand how such factors as ethnic tensions and the
legacy of British colonial rule are interweaved with the dominant ideologies of
sexuality and gender. Selvadurai’s novels are a constant reminder of the price that
a non-conformist has to pay rebelling against conformity – emotionally and
socially.
Tendencies: The Unnamed Third Place
The polarisation of sex and gender into what
theorists’ term a ‘binary system’ has largely eradicated legitimate third or
fourth gender roles. Those who do not behave in ways considered appropriate for
their biological sex are regarded as transgendered, for they have crossed over
the socially constructed boundaries of gender – appropriate behaviour. In
India, a gender variant category, hijra, remains intact despite the efforts of
British colonials to eradicate what they called ‘a breach of public decency’
(Penrose 2001: 4). Influenced by western discourse hijras were viewed as
inverts and deviants or gender variants or variant gendered. The concept of a
third gender can be identified as a neuter bereft of either a masculine or a
feminine nature. Arjie, the protagonist in Funny Boy is
‘funny’. He likes to wear saris and play with girls – and he hates sports. For
Arjie, the sari being wrapped around his body and the veil pinned on his head,
the rouge put on his cheeks, lipsticks on his lips, kohl around his eyes was a
transfiguration of his self, ‘an ascent into another more brilliant, more
beautiful self’ (Selvadurai1994: 5).When Arjie is caught dressed in a sari, his
grandmother decides manual labour will teach him to be more masculine. This is
the first time Arjie is embarrassed about his ‘funniness’, though he does not
understand why. This resistance comes not only from the grandmother but also
from the father because Arjie’s third nature stands out against the notion of
societal tolerance. His unwillingness to associate himself with a gender in his
‘more beautiful self’ shows his recognition that he is ‘caught between the
boys’ and the girls’ worlds, not belonging or wanted in either’ (ibid.: 39). As
a child and young adult, Arjie displays ‘certain tendencies’ (ibid.: 162), as
his father calls them, that defy accepted norms of the ways
men and women are expected to behave earning him the adjective of ‘funny’ a
word whose significance he does not fully understand but that he can sense
nonetheless has a shameful connotation. Arjie negotiates his sexuality amidst
family and political tensions becoming gradually aware of the repercussions of
his ‘tendencies’ yet, struggling to occupy a space outside of normal gender and
sexual categorisations.
Third gender roles and cross dressing in
traditional societies entails a system of multiple genders that can exists only
outside dichotomous gender systems, which polarise sex, gender and sexuality
into categories of male and female. Thus, in a binary gender system, androgyny
becomes the only available alternative. ‘Third and fourth genders, on the other
hand, help us to perceive all that is left over when the world has been divided
into male and female’ (Roscoe 1998: 210). Gender stereotypes imposed by his
family explicitly demarcate the separate worlds of boy and girl, leaving Arjie
caught between the boys’ and girls’ worlds, not belonging and wanted in either.
Within these early episodes Arjie’s sexuality is negotiated solely within the
confines of gender, male and female. His exclusion from both the boys and girls
suggests that Arjie himself inhabits some third space in between these two, but
that third space is merely described as funny and never named. Just as the
space Arjie occupies between male and female is not clearly defined, so too are
the words employed to describe this space vague and shifting.
Privacy and secrecy are stressed as important factors
in certain sexual relations. If sexuality is to be categorised by acts, there
exists certain socially accepted institutions that often harbour the hidden
third natured sexual behaviour. Marriage is seen as one such institution which
acts as a safe transitory alternative that helps to generate a facade of
heterosexuality. Cinnamon Gardens is
a tragedy of manners that centres around the life of a gay man living in a dead
marriage in a repressed, conformist, colonial society Cinnamon Gardens talks
about Balendran and his homosexuality both in Sri Lanka and in England, and the
importance of his father ‘The Mudaliyar’ who represents the power that is
organised and deployed throughout the choices that Balendran makes in life. In
his days as a student in London Bala had carried on a relationship with a man
called Richard Howland but had to abandon his lover and return to Colombo to
marry his cousin under pressure from his domineering father. The return of
Richard Howland to Ceylon as a member of the Donoughmore Commission sets
Balendran at odds with the very social and familial strictures that have
confined repressed and sustained him in his place as a normal man. Balendran
had actually never been able to forget Richard. In his own words he says, ‘As
for the type of love Richard and he had had, he accepted that it was part of
his nature’ (Selvadurai1998: 38). His marriage to Sonia was to break the
pressure from his father and society and in the words of Selvadurai; Balendran
can be seen as a person with enormous courage to live the life he lives. In
conforming to social expectations by entering into a sexually unfulfilling
marriage, Balendran reveals himself as a decent but a weak individual, racked
by the guilt he feels for neglecting his wife and for having betrayed his
feelings for Richard.
‘As one by one we give up, we get freer and freer
of pain’, he said, citing to himself that verse from theTirukkural on
renunciation. How often he had repeated it during that first year of his
marriage, to comfort himself for the anguish he had felt, the suffocation,
lying next to his wife, Sonia, at night, unable to sleep. His suffering had
been intensified by knowing that she despaired along with him, felt his
alienation, almost hatred towards her, without knowing its cause (Selvadurai
1998: 38-39).
A number of factors and agencies are involved in
curbing any tendency that stand outside the male/female category. In highly
patriarchal societies with sharp gender differentiation, the development of a
gender variant category is totally unacceptable. For Balendran his father’s
hands on his shoulders were like clasps on the mantle of societal approbation
that drew around him and controlled him. He sees himself as the gentle, humane,
dutiful, ministering son and the gallant spouse to his wife, yet he feels that
he is a failure because at the end of the day he has not been true to himself.
Of even graver, consequences, however, is the fact that for the past twenty
years Balendran has submerged his own homosexual desires underneath a façade of
respectable familial propriety. Selvadurai explores in Cinnamon Gardens the
attendant clashes between sexuality, colonialism and classicism inherent in the
caste system, religious divisions, racial and sexual prejudice of Ceylonese
society, when the homosexuality of a man of polite society was
considered a regrettably irreversible disposition. The novel exposes the
stifling conformity that is the price of acceptance in the wealthy precincts
of Cinnamon Gardens.
As the narrative unfolds and deepens the liberal
sympathetic Balendran’s world much repressed by his father reveals secrets that
are an outcome of conflict The novel unveils Balendran’s secret sexual
escapades with Ranjan, a private in the army even after his marriage to Sonia
confirming the truth that Bala is a repressed homosexual, confined and steered
to becoming a heterosexual by his father. The unnamed third place in Balendran
case is treated as a deviance or eccentricity or a sexual variance which is
anti-social or psychopathological, requiring cure or correction. A deviance
which can be sanctified by tradition and formalised by recognised rituals like
marriage. The Ceylonese society that rejects a third gender forces Bala to
adopt a gender that is normal by repressing all tendencies that is innate and
natural to him. The fact that the personal is political and any transgressive
act can mess up the identity politics of an individual is a truth to which Bala
sticks to maintain the tenet of his sexual identity. The epigraph of the novel,
a passage from George Eliot’s Middlemarch – ‘… for the growing
good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are
not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number
who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest is unvisited tombs’ stages the
world of Cinnamon Gardens that have stories of unhistoric acts and unvisited
tombs.
Selvadurai’s third novel Swimming in the
Monsoon Sea has Amrith a gay teenager in the early 1980’s who portrays
the same tendencies that Arjie experiences in Funny Boy but
with a more intense, complicated and moving passage to an assertion of that
identity.
But people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring
posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their
parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is
to say Yes to live.
From Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
The epigraph of the novel from James Baldwin’s
novel Giovanni’s Room is an acute representation of the world
of Amrith, in and out of family, friends, relatives and loved ones. The word
‘invent’ in the epigraph is an assertion of what one is given in a natural
state, a transcend to insist that life comes in divisions and that it is an
unavoidable fact with which everyone must in some way come to terms (1985:
101-05). Amrith in the novel visibly experiences an identifiable third nature
in and out of his social worlds that is structured by his school, family and
friends. The third unnamed creation allows Amrith to tie a cohesive thread with
his own past and his future. Amrith looks forward for rehearsing and
participating in the school play. He desperately wants to be in the school
production of Othello – and manages to win the part of
Desdemona (a part he covets, after winning an award for his acting as Juliet
in Romeo and Juliet). He had won the cup for the Best Female
Portrayal from a Boys School. Female roles are roles which other boys in the
school limit themselves from performing but for Amrith it is role that gives
him satisfaction of an unknown inner tendency. The role of Desdemona is a cross
-dressing that allows Amrith to comfortably fit into a gender variance in his
mind which would have otherwise caused unnecessary stir. It is a role that
reveals Amrith’s hidden sexuality.
The character of Lucien Lindamulage in the novel is
relational to the third gender that is posited against the character of Amrith
who still is new to this variance. ‘He was a little grey-haired gnome of a man,
with large ears and nose and thick glasses. He always applied white powder to
his face, and this gave his dark complexion a greyish sheen’ (Selvadurai 2005:
59). Lucien was the talk of the town and Amrith had often heard his uncle tell
his aunt that he should leave his secretaries at home when they went on
business outstation. As he says; ‘There was something scandalous about Lucien
Lindamulage that Amrith did not understand. It had to do with his constant
round of young male secretaries’ (ibid.: 59). Despite Lucien’s odd manner and
scandal surrounding him, Amrith really liked the old architect. ‘Unlike most
men, Amrith felt that he could simply be himself around Lucien Lindamulage’
(ibid.: 59). This is the first tendency of inversion that we see in the novel
as Amrith progresses further to explain ‘how he had once heard boys in school
mention about Lucien Lindamulage’s secretaries and refer to the old man as
‘ponnaya’ – a word whose precise meaning Amrith did not understand, though he
knew it disparaged the masculinity of another man, reducing him to the level of
a woman’ (ibid.: 60).
The third nature in this sense is an opposition of
the norm as the male takes on the appearance of a female or turns more passive.
Amrith later shows such tendencies as his cousin Niresh arrives from Canada.
Niresh is handsome, worldly and cool and the two boys hit it off immediately.
Amrith’s ordered life undergoes an unexpected turn. Amrith begins to see that
Niresh was keen to impress him and win his affection and that from the
beginning Niresh was trying to build a relationship between them. ‘Amrith had
never been courted in this way by anybody, and it was especially flattering
because Niresh was two years older than him’ (Selvadurai 2005: 83).
Selvadurai in the novel chronicles the growth,
development, rejection, repression and exploration of a fourteen year old’s
homosexual tendencies. The unnamed third place that Amrith, Niresh and Lucien
belong to and the tendency that alienates them from the rest is treated as
transitory and dangerous in nature. The characters of Selvadurai keeps this
place unnamed and unspoken many times. They are described as beings of an
alternative gender, the ‘effeminate homosexuals’. A nature which is immediately
preceded by vivid appearance of virile sexual behaviour abhorred and shunned.
Selvadurai blends Amrith’s knowledge of this awareness with a beautiful animal
imagery that enhances the affirmation that in being different he is not alone
and that there is nothing wrong in it.
When they were in the aviary, Amrith watched Kuveni
busily pecking away at the mango he had brought. ..It struck Amrith that Kuveni
had never resorted to feather-plucking or any other signs of anxiety and
depression. She seemed perfectly content to be alone. Perfectly content to
remain silent. And he realised that he had grown to like her silence. He was
not sure, at all, that he wanted another mynah (Selvadurai 2005: 206).
Twilight Moments: Embarrassed Funniness
Discourses in the past with regards to sexual
identities were less defined and almost absent. Oblique gestures, sexual
desires, relationships and practices were half understood and half expressed or
veiled in silence as unconventional sexual behaviour since it did not produce
any identity. Looking at the period before modern sexual identities, any
deviant sexual act or behaviour was uneasily tolerated and though hidden was
subject to discipline. ‘The term twilight can be used as a metaphor to explore
those sexual practices and desires that is prohibited by law or custom but that
which people pursue either in secret or as an open secret. Twilight can be those
silent moments when a boy looks at another boy and longs for desires that are
queer, when a man has secret sexual escapades with another man in secret and
when a boy creeps into the bed of another boy and caresses his friend. These
people’s desires did not create a fixed identity: they indulged in these
forbidden moments and then returned to their ordinary lives, just as twilight
fades into darkest night and night is succeeded by the dawn. Just as one can
see only vague shapes in the dim light of dusk, twilight words, sexual desires
and practices were only half –understood and half expressed hidden in the
respectable darkness of the night. The metaphor of twilight offers a way of
thinking the forms of moral and social discipline that limit deviant and queer
acts by punishing, expelling or by obscuring or even subjecting to medical
treatment but that which still exists in veiled and hidden forms’ (Clark 2005:
140).
Arjie in Funny Boy is bewildered
by his incipient sexual awakening when he sees Jegan. Jegan is introduced in
the novel as a twenty-five year old qualified accountant who has worked as a
relief worker for the Gandhiyam movement, a movement helping displaced Tamils
who were affected by the communal riots. Jegan is an honest and straight
forward person who has come to Arjie’s family looking for a job and begins to
work with Appa (Arjie’s father) at his hotel. Arjie strikes up a friendship
with Jegan and becomes aware of his pull towards him. His funniness that was
always hidden, unspoken or veiled and one that caused embarrassment begins to
show first as twilight gestures, nascent and young but becomes persistent and
strong later.
I had got a closer look at him. What had struck me
was the strength of his body. The muscles of his arms and neck, which would
have been visible on a fairer person, were hidden by the darkness of his skin.
It was only when I was close to him that I noticed them. Now I admired how well
built he was, the way his thighs pressed against his trousers (Selvadurai 1994:
156-157).
The hidden darkness of Jegan’s skin is a metaphor
of Arjie’s sexual tendencies that are hidden. It begins to show signs as spurts
of light as he views it closely. Jegan notices that Arjie is looking at him and
as an assurance Jegan glances back at him and smiles, as if to say that it was
alright. His smile makes Arjie feel shy but also happy. Selvadurai slowly
highlights the moments of Arjie’s life when he had felt and experienced sexual
desires much beyond the norm. How he had looked at men; the way they were
built, the grace with which they carried themselves, the strength of their
gestures and movements. Sometimes Arjie even dreamed about them and longed to
become physically attractive and graceful like them. When Arjie’s father tells
Jegan ‘That boy worries me’ … From the time he was small he has shown certain
tendencies … he used to play with dolls, always reading … Anyway, the main
point is that I’m glad you’re taking an interest in him. Maybe you’ll help him
outgrow this phase … I don’t think there’s anything wrong with him’ (Selvadurai
1994: 162). Jegan was the first one to ever defend him and for this Arjie
grows even more devoted to him. Eventually, Arjie understands his father and
uncle’s conception of ‘funny’ when his friendship with Jegan escalates. He
finally realises that his attraction for Jegan filled him with unaccountable
joy. ‘The twilight metaphor can help to fill a conceptual gap; a gap that makes
it difficult to describe sexual relationships, desires and practices that were
neither celebrated – like marriage – nor utterly forbidden, deviant, or abject-
like incest or sodomy’ (Clark 2005: 141). Arjie later strikes up an intense
friendship with a fellow renegade student, Shehan who is rumoured to be gay. In
this instance, Arjie defines ‘funny’ as a deviation from the norm that both he
and Shehan experience. The romance between Arjie and Shehan blooms each
progressively more violent in their repercussions. As their intimacy for each
other grows, Arjie begins to explore his sexual self even deeper. He is
bewildered when Shehan kisses him on his lips and finds himself thinking that
there was a wanting in him to carry something through. He does not know what,
but the fact that the kiss was somehow connected to what they had in common
which Shehan had known all along. Later, Arjie and Shehan have their first
sexual encounter together in his parents’ garage during a game of hide and
seek. Afterwards, Arjie feels ashamed of himself and believes he has failed his
family and their trust. Though Arjie is disgusted at his own desire, Shehan is
upset and says ‘At least I know what I want and I’m not ashamed of it’ (ibid.:
258). This awakens Arjie’s sense of himself as Shehan points out. Arjie goes
through a stage of tossing and turning, torn between his desire for Shehan and
disgust for that desire. He is confused of which world he belongs to, the
twilight world where he is in love with Shehan and where he is Arjie the
homosexual or to his father’s world where his love is an embarrassed funny
feeling and where he has to be Arjie the heterosexual. ‘The concept of twilight
moments can help us refine the distinction between acts and identities that has
been influential in the history of sexuality. Foucault’s distinction between
acts and identities remain crucial to the history of sexuality because he
exposed the modern invention of the notion that sexual identities, desires, and
acts were consistent, he enabled us to unpack sexual acts from sexual
identities’ (Clark 2005: 142).
Balendran in Cinnamon Gardens lives
such twilight moments confused between sexual acts and sexual identities with
Richard before marriage and with Ranjan after marriage. His relationship with
Richard is an aborted twilight escapade that ended because of the Mudaliyar.
Moreover it happened in London as a student and Bala was brought to Ceylon to
seal that moment as a past that would never see the dawn. But when Bala meets
Richard for the first time after twenty years Balendran felt a sudden pang of
sadness, for there in Richard’s face, like the physical distance between them
across the foyer, were the missing years of their lives …Their gaze met and, in
that instant, Richard saw that Balendran’s eyes were unguarded. His own
defensiveness fell away. As they held each other’s hands, there passed between
them the understanding of their history together, of the life that had been
theirs. It settled on them like fine dust (Selvadurai 1998: 106).
The moment returns again and this time it is even
stronger and Bala struggles not as a young student, but more so as the son of
the Mudaliyar and as a husband and a father. The twilight now comes back more
defined, an act that refuses to fade with the setting of the night. This uneasy
reunion with Richard throws Balendran into turmoil and re-ignites tension
within himself. The awkward yet intimate meeting between Bala and Richard takes
place as Richard invites Bala to have tea with him in his room. Bala ponders
about himself and the difficulties he had struggled to navigate in his life as
a homosexual and as a husband. The twilight metaphor helps us to get beyond the
assumption that sexual desires and behaviours that did not follow prescriptive
ideals inevitably destabilised the conventional order. At times the opposite was
true; twilight moments could be complicit in maintaining dominant power
structures. The concept of twilight moments also takes into account the gender
dynamics or sexual regulation. While such incidents may be concealed because of
the fear of public notice, the incidents usually considered twilight moments
did not permanently stigmatise the perpetrators. Bala comes to know about his
fathers’ own twilight weakness with a servant and feels a deep abhorrence for
his father for having seduced a servant. Yet is unable to actually and totally
hate his father for this hypocrisy as this was a fleeting, momentary transient
state just like his ones with Richard and Ranjan, which remains a twilight
secret As the narrative unfolds and deepens the liberal sympathetic Balendran’s
world, reveals secrets that are an outcome of conflicted passions and
splintered feelings The novel unveils Balendran’s secret sexual escapades with
Ranjan, a private in the army even after his marriage to Sonia.
Balendran liked to take his time with Ranjan, to
prolong his bliss as long as possible. For, once it was over, he knew he would
be visited by a terrible anguish. Then, walking quickly away from the station,
he would curse himself for his imprudence, for putting everything at risk, his marriage,
his family name (Selvadurai 1998: 82).
These secret twilight escapades with Ranjan are a
constant reminder of the fact that his sexual desires are limited by moral
panics designed by his father. ‘Gayle Rubin has argued for the existence of
“sexual minorities” who create their own rules and discourses and take refuge
from the dominant culture. Rubin has also used the metaphor of walls to
illustrate how societies distinguish between “sexual order and chaos”. This is
a helpful metaphor, but it does not account for those who reside in the
acceptable category but perform acts in the between zone and those who refuse a
sub-cultural identity’ (Clark 2005: 148). The feelings of alienation
experienced by Balendran are painful, as he twilights back and forth in and out
of his self.
Swimming in the Monsoon Sea is a
novel where twilight moments in Amrith’s life comes more as a luminal state
between childhood and adulthood. A stage where Amrith initiates transgressive
desires by having queer feelings for his cousin and by expressing it in his own
sexual language. Twilight moments in Amrith’s case can be described as a
stepping out of his conventional identity to perform an occasional act, such
as, seeping into the role of a female character with ease or being comfortable
and simply himself with a gay man like Lucien Lindamulage when otherwise he is
uncomfortable with men. In Amrith’s all boys’ school, Amrith had never had a
male friend. So when his uncle asks Amrith ‘isn’t there any boy from your drama
society you’d like to have come and spend the day?’ (Selvadurai 2005: 22).
Amrith fells very nervous and comes to realise that though he was respected for
his acting talent, none of the boys had ever made overtures of friendship
towards him. The seniors in the school always treated him with respect and
often asked his opinion on matters relating to art and literature. Amrith also
realises that they never made fun of his silence and shyness and instead
greeted him warmly. It was as if, they already knew about him, his shyness and
silence and even his dramatic skills were the twilight zones that they could
see but was unseen to him. His growing friendship with Niresh is one such
transitory moment that is shaded and camouflaged. Amrith’s twilight moments are
made fun of by his school friends and his classmates who gossip and use shaming
as a form of twilight discipline to make fun of Amrith’s queerness. While
returning home after the rehearsal, Amrith for the first time feels strangely
uncomfortable at the thought of his teacher’s and friends’ amusement over his
growing friendship with Niresh.
Amrith’s twilight moments and his queer identity
are merged with his feelings of jealously for Niresh. Sexual desire which is
often an emotional and uncontrollable force is facilitated through the order of
society bringing to light the blurs created in the dark. Amrith’s desires for
Niresh that blurred the borders of gender are moments that were formed in the
twilight boundaries of his sexual self. Amrith does not realise the developments
of this moments until his sisters point it out. During a quarrel with Selvi
Amrith tells her to stay away from Niresh as Niresh is his cousin who has come
only for three weeks. Selvi points out ‘Don’t be so jealous, looking him up and
down with disdain. You don’t own Niresh’ (ibid.: 123). Amrith gradually becomes
aware of his own homosexuality and his jealously for Niresh. Suddenly like an
unexpected monsoon, his whole life suddenly becomes storm-tossed.
Shakespeare’s Othello, with its powerful theme of disastrous
jealousy, plays in the backdrop of the drama in which Amrith finds himself
immersed.
The gossip surrounding the life of Lucien
Lindamulage in the novel is one twilight episode that foreshadows Amrith’s own
awakening of his sexual self. The grey haired man who frequented Amrith’s house
on matters related to architecture and construction. Amrith was fond of the
architect and in an odd way he felt could simply be himself with him. Lucien
was the talk of the town and Amrith had often heard his uncle telling his aunt
that he must leave his male secretaries when he went outstation. Amrith does
not understand the seriousness of the issue but felt that it was an
embarrassing open secret of his friend. Selvadurai paints Lucien’s sexual
escapades as the twilight truths that are hidden from social light. The term
ponnaya is the closest that Amrith can relate to when he sees Lucien’s
secretary waiting for him in the courtyard – a young man in his mid-twenties
with olive skin, glossy black hair and full lips. ‘Martha Hodes argues and
posits a distinction between toleration – “a measure of forbearance for that
which is not approved” – and “tolerance” – “a liberal spirit toward those of a
different mind”. But toleration is still too ambiguous and positive a word;
“forbearance” does not convey the sense of shame and secrecy that goes with
“twilight” or the necessity of veiling and concealing the disapproved
behaviour’ (cited in Clark 2005: 145). Lucien lives a life sheltered by the
fact that his secrets will be treated as bizarre sexual acts one that enjoys
tolerance and acceptance as twilight anomalies, yet for Amrith the sense of
shame and secrecy behind this anomalies still exists as a form of disapproved
behaviour.
The concept of twilight moments seems most useful
in exposing secret desires, fantasies and practices to the harsh glare of
daylight. The concept of twilight moments can thus help us reconcile rigid
prescriptions about sexual morality, gender roles and class and racial
boundaries with the frequency with which people engage in sexual relations that
transgress these boundaries. The twilight experience was a moment for people
who wished to explore unusual desires, veiled by a lack of understanding or
words; after all the twilight is a zone where moralities and words and
transgressive ruptures are not constant.
‘To thine own self be true’ is perhaps one of the
most frequently-quoted lines from Hamlet. Selvadurai’s characters
consist of gay individuals finding a queer identity or a gay identity in an
ever challenging heterosexual world. Characters paving their way through
challenges to place themselves in a more positive, liberated accepted state of
mind and body. Under Selvadurai’s skilful hand, we discover just how clichéd
the line can be ‘to thine own self be true’ or in other words, to which self be
true?’ Shyam Selvadurai explores the effects of ethnic naming, which has its
roots in de-colonialization. As cultures were becoming freed from colonialism,
they established independent nations, and these nations developed discourses
that legitimized themselves. Nationalistic, or us, identities are often
legitimized by being constructed as normal. But, in order to have a normal -
us, there must be an abnormal - them. According to Anne McClintock, the
discourse of nationalism is also masculine, and within this discourse, a kind
of normalcy is developed in conjunction with and in opposition to discourses of
deviance. The national identity is legitimized because it is the normal
identity and it opposes degenerate identities (McClintock 1995: 46). In
contrast, Selvadurai‘s characters do not fit easily within either sexual or
ethnic boundaries; as such, Selvadurai highlights the possibility of a new - in
between space of national identity, which provides hope for the end of
constricting boundaries. Weaving together the ethnic and sexual identities of
his characters, Selvadurai provides hope that a new politics of reciprocal
recognition through touch can liberate those who are oppressed. Exploding the
myth of heteronormative colonial power, Selvadurai creates a new kind of
identity for his characters. Arjie in Funny Boy is bewildered
by his incipient sexual awakening, mortified by the bloody Tamil-Sinhalese
conflicts that threaten to tear apart his homeland, Arjie painfully grows
toward manhood and an understanding of his own ‘different’ identity. Arjie
begins exploring his sexual awakening and his ‘tendencies’ amidst political
turmoil and growing violence of the late 1970s and early 1980s Colombo. Arjie’s
father is a conservative Tamil business man who thinks highly of tradition. He
believes that Arjie’s ‘funniness’ is a nurtured trait and a phase that will
outgrow. His father decides to change Arjie’s school and send him to the
Victoria Academy which ‘will force [him] to become a man’ (Selvadurai
1994:205). It makes Arjie wonder and he asks his brother ‘what for?’ and he
answers ‘He doesn’t want you turning out funny or anything like that’ (ibid.:
205). Instead to his father’s disappointment, Arjie rebels against the sadistic
principal and the social and political constraints the school tries to place
upon him, and strikes up an intense friendship with a fellow renegade student.
During his stay in the school and in the days that followed Arjie finds himself
coming to terms with being a homosexual and realises that he does not hold the
same disgust that his own father has for individuals who are ‘funny’. Arjie as
a rebel and as a lover comes to assert his true self which liberates him and
gives him a sense of pride in being gay.
A saying from the Tirukkural, verse 68 ‘A wise son
gives joy not only to his father, But to all the world’ serves to project the
relationship between the Mudaliyar and his sons. The Mudaliyar Navaratnam, a
patriarch of an old and important family represents the law that Bala and his
brother Arulanandan follow. The eldest son Arulanandan had stabbed his father
in the arm because of the Mudaliyar’s resistance to his affair with a low-caste
woman who worked as a servant at Brighton. Arulanandan was forced to leave with
the woman to India twenty-eight years ago. Balendran is the obedient son, a gay
man who has nonetheless dutifully married the wife chosen by his father and
fathered a son. He feels that he is a failure since he had not been true to
himself and thinks of his brother who had the courage to pursue his love for a
servant girl, though at the cost of his father’s displeasure and
disinheritance, a more honest individual. Selvadurai explores in Cinnamon
Gardens the attendant clashes between sexuality, colonialism and
classicism inherent in the caste system, religious divisions, racial and sexual
prejudice of Ceylonese society. The real question is ‘To which self be true’.
This is one question that Bala struggles with being in love with his wife and
at the same time struggling with his sexual nature. The return of Richard
Howland to Ceylon as a member of the Donoughmore Commission, a high level
delegation from London sets Balendran at odds with the very social and familial
strictures that have repressed and sustained him in his place as a normal man.
The struggle of the spirit against oppression – gender and sexual orientation
is at the heart of a person’s liberated acceptance. An uneasy reunion with
Richard throws Balendran into turmoil and re-ignites tension within himself.
Liberation of the mind is more important than the liberation of any other kind
and Bala realises this slowly at first and more fervently later. As he decides
to reignite his relationship with Richard Bala thinks of the risks he has to
take to liberate himself and Richard. He takes a bold step to go and meet
Richard and surprises him by inviting him to explore Colombo at night.
Selvadurai sets up the Donoughmore Commission not just to introduce the freedom
of adult franchise but also to symbolically introduce freedom in between
Balendran and Richard as a price of rebelling against conformity. In his own
words he speaks about the invisible bond he shares with Balendran, a married
gay man in his 40s battling to live in a repressed, conformist colonial
society. Cinnamon Gardens is thus, about personal courage and
liberation. Sexual freedom requires an oppositional practice that is,
transgressing socially respectable categories of sexuality and refusing to draw
a line on what counts as politically or culturally correct sexuality. The
feelings of alienation experienced by Balendran, is painful and his challenge
oriented ethic of sexual liberalism ultimately leads him to the next stage in
his life. Balendran’s sexual freedom becomes an ideology and a form of identity
to assert an ever growing need for reshaping sexuality.
Perhaps it is enough to have one person to whom
nothing is a secret, to whom one can lay open the inner workings of one’s heart
…To ask for your friendship is, then, for me, an immense gesture of bravery. I
make it now (Selvadurai 1998: 385).
Amrith’s awakening and his search for a liberated
identity is more of an adolescent seeking to express his difference amidst a
traditional high class family and a homophobic society. Selvadurai explores and
projects the feelings of a young adult growing into homosexuality and the
constant tension that Amrith experiences in the sea of his life. With passions
he is shy about, but passions that completely captivate his heart and soul,
Amrith feels he is drowning in the monsoon sea with Niresh. Selvadurai
beautifully projects the growth of Amrith, a teenager revolting against the
feelings of love, family and his own self. The novel chronicles the growth,
development, rejection, repression and exploration of a fourteen year old’s
homosexual tendencies. Amrith’s progress in a world where he is still answering
doubts about his parents, family and his background, the entrance of Niresh and
the subsequent feelings of love and infatuation gets bundled up with his
feelings as a growing adult.
Focussing on the liberation of sexual pleasure, as
the organising principle of identity formation, Selvadurai moves towards a more
pluralistic sexual ethics – an ethics of sex positivity and sexual diversity
through the characters of Amrith and Lucien Lindamulage. He brings in the
politics of social liberation and merges it with that of personal liberation by
positing disparaged sexual identities and styles. The chapter titled ‘Cassio’
in the novel is a total assimilation of Amrith’s life as a character in the
play ‘Othello’ and in his own life. As the other boys make fun of the role and
the impending homosexual scene in the play between Iago and Cassio, Amrith
becomes furious and livid. Yet, the assignment of the role is symbolic in the
novel as it serves to project Amrith’s tendencies and the sexual self that was
hidden without an identity. From this point on, Selvadurai sets the acceptance
of secrets, tendencies and family feuds positively. Amrith decides to set the
barrier straight. The revelation of secrets, bonding and intimacies shared
between Amrith and Niresh strengthens and constructs sexual styles that
transgress the matrix of cultural and political constructions. Amrith’s
identity as a deviant sexual being before, outside and beyond power is a
cultural impossibility and a politically impracticable task of rethinking
subversive possibilities for sexuality and identity within the terms of culture
and norms of the society.
The last chapter ‘Roses and Silence’ is a chapter of acceptance. The chapter deals with the departure of Niresh to Canada and Amrith’s acknowledgement of his self. He quietly misses the absence of Niresh in the house and in the room. He does not know what to do and how to start his days without Niresh. Selvadurai gradually allows Amrith to come to terms with his sexual self. The visit of Lucien Lindamulage shutters Amrith totally, as all the pieces of the puzzle of his life fits into place. Amrith’s knowledge of his own self and his search for acceptance leads him to his mother’s grave. He sits on his haunches and looks at his mother’s name on the tombstone for a long time. He then looks around if anyone is looking and finally speaks out.
‘I am …,’ but he could not continue, for he did not
know a decent word to describe himself. And he refused to use ‘ponnaya’.
Finally, he leaned closer and whispered, ‘I am … different.’ (Selvadurai 2005:
205).
Selvadurai unobtrusively points out that one
needn’t be gay, or extra-ordinarily different in any way to feel this same
sense of alienation, and that in fact is a common aspect of the human
condition. Selvadurai expertly paints characters as whole human beings, with
all of the nobility as well as the faults that are inherently human. He reminds
us of just how alike we all are, once we get past religion, or skin colour, or
sexual preference. Thus, Selvadurai addresses the difficulty of being different
in a funny way which does not conform to accepted gender and sexual norms. He
brilliantly portrays the anxieties aroused by gender non-conformity especially
in the Sri Lankan patriarchal society. Selvadurai elaborately presents the
gradual and the ultimate passage that the protagonists in the novels - Arjie,
Balendran and Amrith – take to come out and accept their homosexual identity.
Thus, under Selvadurai’s skilful hand, we discover just how clichéd the line
can be ‘to thine own self be true.’
References
- Baldwin, James The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-fiction 1948 – 1985 New York: St Martin’s Press 1985.
- Clark, Anna “Twilight Moments” Journal of the History of Sexuality Vol 14, No 1/2, January/April, pp 139-160 The University of Texas Press 2005.
- De Lauretis, Teresa “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities”, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3(2), pp iii-xviii, 1991.
- Foucault, Mitchell The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality: 1 New Delhi: Penguin Books 1998
- Glover, David & Cora Kaplan Genders: The New Critical Idiom London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2007.
- Hunn, Deborah “Selvadurai, Shyam (1965-)” glbtq: An Encyclopaedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender & Queer Culture pp 1-3, 2005, http://www.glbtq.com/literature/Selvadurai_S,2.html retrieved on 11/03/2011.
- Penrose, Walter “Hidden in History: Female Homoeroticism and Women of a ‘Third Nature’ in the South Asian Past” Journal of the History of Sexuality Vol 10, No1, January, pp 3-39 University of Texas Press 2001.
- Roscoe, Will Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America New York: St Martin’s Griffin.
- Selvadurai, Shyam Funny Boy New
York: Harcourt Brace & Company 1994 --Cinnamon Gardens: A Novel New Delhi: Penguin Books 1998.
--Swimming in the Monsoon Sea New Delhi: Penguin Books 2005.
Narola Dangti is Assistant Professor,
Sazolie College, Kohima & Research Scholar, Department of English,
Nagaland University.
Prof. (Dr.) N.D.R. Chandra is Vice
Chancellor, Bastar University, Jagdalpur, Chhattisgarh.
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Globalization: National Identity and Cultural Hybridization in Late 20th Century and 21st Century Novels by Dr. Afaf Jamil Khogeer
Globalization: National Identity and Cultural Hybridization in Late 20th Century and 21st Century Novels by Dr. Afaf (Effat) Jamil Khogeer
Abstract
Globalization has been defined as the
process whereby events that happen in one part of the world impact other
places. The inborn trait of a national identity has shifted considerably during
the latter decades of the twentieth century, now irrevocably transformed in the
new millennium. An individual’s national identity has become less relevant than
his/her cultural or ethnic identity. In my manuscript, selected works from the
global literary canon are presented, which highlight the cultural, national,
and technological aspects of globalization: The
House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros and Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee, Graceland
by Chris Abani, and Neuromancer by
William Gibson. These novels consist of stories about people who are part of
the global society in which national identities have been affected and cultural
hybridization has emerged.
Introduction
Globalization has been defined as the
process whereby “events happening in one place importantly impact upon many
other places, often remote in time and space” (Urry 39). In this paper,
selected works from the global literary canon are presented, which highlight
the cultural, national, and technological aspects of globalization: The House on Mango Street by Sandra
Cisneros, Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee,
Graceland by Chris Abani, and Neuromancer by William Gibson. These
novels consist of stories about people who are part of the global society in
which national identities have been affected and cultural hybridization has
emerged. As cultural theorist and sociologist, Stuart Hall, explains, we “all
write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture
which is specific. What we say is always in context, positioned” (Hall 234).
Cultural
Hybridization
The predominant theme in the novels
presented in this paper is cultural hybridization, a consequence of
globalization. Cultural hybridization is a product of globalization created,
From the paradigm of polarization and the paradigm of homogenization, and derives meaning only in relation to them….It resolves the tension between purity and emanation, between the local and the global, in the dialectic according to which the local is in the global and the global is in the local” (Pieterse 57).
The traditional definition of culture is
no longer applicable in the twenty-first century global community. Professor of
Anthropology, Gordon Mathews, posits that the new millennium’s definition of
culture is the “information and identities available from the global supermarket”
(1). In this era of globalization, many countries resemble each other, they are
becoming similar and “Americanizing,” evidenced by having the same McDonalds,
KFC’s, the same malls and department stores, the same entertainment industry
with MTV and Disney, and the same movies and music. As Pulitzer Prize winning
author, Thomas Friedman, says, “Touring the world will become like going to the
zoo and seeing the same animal in every cage – a stuffed animal” (229).
Cultural hybridization is the
intertwining of Asian, African, American, and European cultures. The increased
global flow of people (migration), commodities, information (increased by
technology), and capital has resulted in a form of creolization, the
crossing-over in a chaotic pattern of hybrid formations. For example, in the
streets of Japan, one can visit a traditional tea house alongside a McDonald’s
restaurant. Logos of multinational corporations flood the billboards on the
streets and allies of South America. Non-western teenagers are rushing to the
malls and stores to buy American designer brand clothing, such as Ralph Lauren
and Tommy Hilfiger. An Indian girl wearing a sari and carrying a Louis Vuitton
purse can be seen walking down the street, talking on her cell phone to her
friend who lives in Australia. The hybridization of music is also a part of the
globalization phenomenon. For example, Latin based singers such as Ricky Martin
and Shakira are now crossing over to English speaking markets and are mixing
English and Latin lyrics.
Immigration
and Assimilation-- The House on Mango
Street and Jasmine
The
House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros and Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee chronicle
the lives of two immigrant women, who strive to engage in the global community.
As depicted in these novels, both legal and illegal immigrants generally hail
from socioeconomically challenged, underdeveloped nations in which violence,
poverty, and political instability are commonplace. The division between legal
and illegal immigrants encourages racism and xenophobia. This discrimination
makes it difficult for immigrates to interact normally with the host society.
They have problems finding a social space for themselves, and finding support
to aid them with obtaining social equality.
The
House on Mango Street
The
House on Mango Street by Mexican-American writer,
Sandra Cisneros, is the story of Esperanza a young girl growing up in the Latino
section of Chicago. As Professor of Hispanic Studies, Julian Olivares, notes, it
is, “(1)...an ideological perspective of the downtrodden but, primarily, the
condition of the Hispanic women; (2) the process of a girl's growing up; and
(3) the formation of the writer who contrives to have a special house of her
own” (Olivares 1606).
Esperanza, is still a big part of the
“we” that is her family and their fate is intertwined with hers. She slowly
begins to understand that to have her own identity, she must become the “I”
that will bring her out of poverty. So many hopes and dreams were invested in her
idealization of the ideal American home, the home she saw in the sitcoms on
television. Esperanza’s house “serves a twofold symbolic function: it is a
symbol of the socio-economic condition in which Esperanza finds herself and its
alienating effect on her, and …as a symbol of human consciousness” (Eysturoy 93). Her
dream is symbolized by her dream of a new house, "They always told us one
day we would move into a house, a real house that would be ours for always so
we wouldn't have to move each year" (Cisneros 337). It gradually becomes
evident that this new house is very much symbolic for a social liberation as
well.
Esperanza is aware that Mango Street is a
place the “other” people fear because it is dangerous, “Those who don't know
any better come into our neighborhood scared. They think we're dangerous. They
think we will attack them with shiny knives. They are stupid people who are
lost and got here by mistake” (Cisneros 29). Although she lives in a tight-knit
community of Latinos, Esperanza identifies herself as an outsider like the
trees that do not belong among all the bricks and buildings in the barrio. She
asserts that, “When I am a tiny thing against so many bricks, then it is I look
at trees. When there is nothing left to look at on this street. Four who grew
despite concrete. Four who reach and do not forget to reach” (Cisneros 71).
Esperanza is separate from her crumbling world; but she must seek the strength
to grow, as the trees do.
While Esperanza dreams of leaving her
neighborhood, she also aspires to be a writer. It is this dream that actually
becomes the symbol of her actual exodus from Mango Street, for she will
ultimately leave only on in her artistic imagination. She writes about leaving,
One day I will say goodbye to Mango. I am too strong for her to keep me here forever. One day I will go away....They will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot out. (Cisneros 342)
Esperanza tells many stories that reveal her
views on life, how she sees herself, and how poverty affects her life. She must
reach outside of her surroundings, let go of the ground and fulfill the dreams
that are a part of the stories she tells:
I like to tell stories. I tell them inside my head. . . . I make a story for my life, for each step my brown shoe takes. I say, "And so she trudged up the wooden stairs, her sad brown shoes taking her to the house she never liked." I like to tell stories. I am going to tell you a story about a girl who didn't want to belong. (Cisneros 101)
Through her creative stories,
superimposed over the harsh realities of her situation, she journeys to a place
where her thoughts matters. Among the characters she writes about are women who
have been forced to make choices that caused them to have stifled, restricted
lives. She chooses not to be one of these women, who are at first wild and
resistant and later sad and helpless:
My great-grandmother. I would've liked to have known her, a wild horse of a woman, so wild she wouldn't marry until my great-grandfather threw a sack over her head and carried her off. Just like that, as if she were a fancy chandelier. That's the way he did it. And the story goes she never forgave him. She looked out the window all her life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow. (Cisneros 12)
While Esperanzo begins to free herself
through her writing, she maintains a commitment to her roots on Mango Street.
In other words, she wants to escape poverty but wants to keep her roots. Thus,
she escapes poverty through her artistic talent, but remains fixed
geographically. She knows very well, that, "You can't forget who you
are." (Cisneros, p.105) As Julian Oliveras
notes, “on the higher plane of art, then, Esperanza transcends her condition,
finding another house which is the space of literature” (Oliveras 1607).
Esperanza is eventually forced to accept
her fate. She will not be leaving the Latino neighborhood and moving to the
house of her family’s dreams. Ultimately, this is what The House on Mango Street is about: achieving liberation through
art, rather than through geographical excursion. Esperanza overcomes her
condition by creating literature, rather than moving to a new house. In this
way, she is able to distance herself from her family and community. And yet,
she holds on to her heritage. By affirming her own artistic expression, she is
able to blend both of her dreams.
Jasmine
Jasmine
by Indian-born American writer, Bharati Mukherjee, is
the story of a present-day, seventeen-year-old Indian woman whose life begins
in the Punjab. The main character, Jasmine, traverses to from her India to four
different locations: Florida, New York, Iowa, and California. Like Esperanza, Jasmine
is a victim of poverty and wants to escape for a better life in America. After
the death of her husband, Prakash, she begins her journey in Tampa, Florida
where her deceased husband Prakash planned on attending college, “I had not
given even a day’s survival in America a single thought. This was the place I
had chosen to die, on the first day if possible. I would land, find Tampa,
walking there if necessary, find the college grounds and check it against the
brochure photo” (Mukherjee 120).
When Jasmine arrives in the United
States, she is determined to make herself fit in as an American. While in
Florida, she meets Lillian Gordon. Lillian tells Jasmine that she can live with
her sister, Wylie, and Wylie’s husband, Taylor, in New York. Jasmine eventually
moves in with Taylor and Wylie and right away Jasmine has feelings toward
Taylor, “I fell in love with his world, its ease, its careless confidence and
graceful self-absorption. I wanted to become the person they thought they saw:
humorous, intelligent, refined, affectionate. Not illegal, not murderer, not
widowed…destitute, fearful” (Mukherjee 171). Jasmine’s job with the family is
to be the caregiver for the young daughter, Duff. She has trouble adjusting to
this American family and leaving her Indian customs at bay. For example, it is
hard for Jasmine to accept the fact that she is to sleep in a different room,
which is simply not how it is done in India, according to her. It is with this
family that Jasmine is most American, but at the same time, still part of her own
culture.
Jasmine wants to be accepted as normal in
America, however, being an illegal immigrant forces her into very difficult
situations. One day Jasmine and Taylor are sitting at a park in New York.
Jasmine is startled when she sees, or thinks she sees, the man who killed her
former husband, Prakash. She screams and Taylor offers to call the police.
Jasmine is forced to keep the police out of the situation because she is an
illegal alien. “Don’t you see that’s impossible? I’m illegal here, he knows
that. I can’t come out and challenge him. I’m very exposed, I’m alone all day,
I’m out in the park” (Mukherjee 189). She is now forced to make another
desperate decision. She decides that it is time to move on to Iowa, where there
are less people.
In Iowa, Jasmine meets a banker named Bud,
“People assume we’re married. He’s a small town banker, he’s not allowed to do
impulsive things. I’m less than half his age, and very foreign. We’re the kind
who marry” (Mukherjee 7). Jasmine does not give any reasonable explanation for
why they should be married. She gives reasons out of desperation more than out
of love. Jasmine will do anything it takes to start a family in the United
States. She is determined to assimilate.
Jasmine initially believes that she and her
mother-in-law, Mother Ripplemeyer, would have much in common, as a result of
the latter having lived through the depression. But Mother Ripplemeyer was
uncomfortable hearing about the poverty in India, after all, she was now a part
of the American culture, and has gotten over the strife she experienced during
the depression. She felt that Jasmine should forget about her life in India and
make an effort to assimilate into American culture. Jasmine is disheartened to
know that a bond has not been forged as a result of their shared experiences of
going through hard times:
Mother Ripplemeyer tells me her Depression stories. In the beginning, I thought we could trade some world-class poverty stories, but mine make her uncomfortable. Not that she’s hostile. It’s like looking at the name in my passport and seeing “Jyo---“ at the beginning and deciding that her mouth is not destined to make those sounds. (Mukherjee 16)
Jasmine is content to pretend to be
someone else who does not identify with the water famines in Hasnapur where the
women fought savagely over the last muddy bucketful of water in a dried up
well. Instead, she is content to listen to her mother-in-law rattle on about
the rather whitewashed experiences of the depression. Like Esperanza, Jasmine is
an outsider, her only cohorts are those people who love her because she is easy
to be around, as long as she does not discuss those issues about herself that
make her different (Mukherjee 16-17).
The most poignant character in the novel
is the refugee named Du who Jasmine and her husband, Bud, adopt from Korea. Du
is also an outsider and has a story of displacement and poverty that can rival
Jasmine’s, but he chooses to create a new life centered around the advances of
the modern world, embracing American TV as if it is a lifeline. He wants to
overcome the emotional and physical upheavals that characterized his
experiences in the Saigon refugee camps. He wants to assimilate into American
culture, and, thus avoids any conversations with Jasmine on the subject of war
or strife. His refusal to engage in this type of conversation leaves Jasmine
perplexed, “I’ve told him my stories of India, the years between India and
Iowa, hoping he’d share something with me. When they’re over he usually says,
“That’s wild. Can I go now?” (Mukherjee 18).
Jasmine knows that in order to assimilate,
she must adopt a new identity, which is prompted by the death of her husband,
Bud. He was killed in a terrorist attack that she believes was meant for her. She
now has make a new life for herself without relying on others. The validity of
her past is not lost, just subverted, just as in the life of Esperanza, who
recognizes the vagaries of her past life and yearns to recreate it.
Unlike the families in The House on Mango Street and Jasmine, most members of the global
population will never cross their own national borders, living and dying in
close proximity to their place of birth. Mechanisms of government control, most
prominently migration policies, are among the greatest forces affecting
migration. Nation-states generally organize their immigration system around the
distinguishing between citizens and foreigners, with an underlying and
institutionalized resistance to foreigners who want to settle and socially
integrate.
The
Influence of Western Popular Culture-Graceland
Graceland by Nigerian author, Chris Abani, portrays the ubiquitous influence
of the United States’ popular culture on members of the international community.
Abani switches between flashbacks and the present in his compelling narrative
about sixteen-year-old Elvis impersonator, Elvis Oke, who lives in Maroko, a
ghetto section of Lagos, Nigeria. Elvis’ story is like that of others whose
search for identity entails a struggle between their traditional cultures and the
burgeoning popular culture of the global society.
Elvis lives in a culture that abounds
with cultural hybridization, for example, he listens to highlife and reggae
music, and watches American movies. Throughout the novel, Abani makes
references to Elvis’ choices in literature, music and movies that illustrate
cultural hybridization. Elvis’ immersion in popular culture contrasts with the
backdrop of a dismal urban existence. Though he is immersed in his own Igbo
culture, Elvis hopes to one day live a better life in America – the place where
dreams come true. After all, America is the place where Graceland is located,
which is the “King of Rock and Roll” Elvis Presley’s mansion.
At the beginning of Graceland, Abani reveals that Elvis had fallen asleep reading Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Like
many of the works later referenced, Invisible
Man deals with social alienation, which Elvis struggles with throughout the
story. Elvis navigates through adolescence in a ghetto without parental support.
However, he does have aspirations; his main goal is to become a famous dancer.
Elvis stands out in Lagos because of his job as an Elvis impersonator. Although
he is an entertainer, his strong, personal sense of morality and justice is his
greatest attribute. He is not willing to accept the horror of poverty and
desperation that is the fabric of his urban existence. Clearly, “Elvis and the
other characters in Abani’s novel constitute the violently evacuated waste
products of today’s world economy” (Dawson 20–21). Despite his slum dwelling”
environment, Elvis is determined to not be an outcast. He criticizes other
fellow Nigerians because they have submitted to their deplorable living
conditions: “That is the trouble with this country. Everything is accepted. No
dial tones or telephones. No stamps in post offices. No electricity. No water. We
just accept” (Abani 58).
Another notable work mentioned in Graceland is Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which is
referred to as Elvis’ “current inspirational tome” (Abani 7). It is easy to see
why Elvis would find the letters inspirational, as they encourage the poet to
whom Rilke wrote to stop looking for approval in others and focus his energy on
understanding himself. As Elvis tries to make a living from an unconventional
job, he must face ridicule and rejection from tourists, fellow Nigerians, and
his own father. Yet this isolation and discouragement are not enough for Elvis
to abandon his dreams. In a sense, Elvis may have been reading the letters for
the guidance and support that was so absent in his life.
Elvis smiles when he reads the first line
of the novel, A Tale of Two Cities by
Charles Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was
the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season
of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” Elvis
believed these words expressed his condition. Obviously, the worst of times
reflects his present condition, but the reader may wonder what could possibly
be good about Lagos. The contrast between beauty and horror is a constant in
the book, and Elvis’ feelings are split in relation to the atrocities he
witnesses. His disgust mirrors that of the western reader, while some of his
other feelings are more similar to the general sense of apathy and acceptance
that exists among his peers, his family and his neighbors.
The best of times that Elvis has is when
he is reading books by American authors and going to American movies. Elvis likes
movies that have conflict as the predominant theme--the antagonist is trying to
defeat the protagonist, who struggles to defeat the antagonist. When Elvis goes
to the cinema with his acquaintances, they watch American movies about “the
eternal struggle between the good of John Wayne and the evil of the villain”
(Abani 149). As the novel progresses, the connection between these movies and
Elvis’ own life becomes clearer, as he attempts to be the hero in his own story;
but the “bad guys” in Graceland are
not as easy to defeat. Though Elvis does nothing when he witnesses a grave
injustice taking place, it is hard to blame him when doing anything would
almost guarantee his death. He frequently voices his disapproval and refuses to
accept the horrible scenes that he witnesses, which are brave acts themselves,
as standing apart from the crowd is always a brave act.
The most obvious western influence in the
book is that of Elvis Presley, whom Elvis Oke is named after, and who he
aspires to be. Dancing and singing as an Elvis impersonator and listening to
his Elvis records take up the bulk of Elvis Oke’s time. However, Elvis
struggles with living up to the very idea of Elvis Presley, not only when he is
dancing and singing, but also when he tries to live up to the image associated
with Presley. Elvis believes he can never be as good as Elvis Presley and fights
this despair by clinging onto the belief that he will eventually escape to
America and become famous. However, the reality of his life in Lagos is a
constant reminder of how difficult, if not impossible, that future will be.
Fortunately for Elvis, his opportunity to
escape Lagos finally comes when his mentor, Redemption, gives him a forged
passport. The passport has Redemption’s name, so Elvis must assume a new
identify as he transitions from his life of unfulfilled dreams to what he hopes
will be the land of opportunity. While waiting in the airport for his flight to
American, Elvis reads James Baldwin’s Going
to Meet the Man, which deals with racism in America. He can relate to the
black man in the book who was lynched by a group of racist white men:
He knew that scar, that pain, that shame, that degradation that no metaphor could contain, inscribing it on his body. And yet beyond that, he was that scar, carved by hate and smallness and fear onto the world’s face. He and everyone like him, until the earth was aflame with scarred black men dying in trees of fire. (Abani 320)
One would think that Elvis would be
feeling something closer to excitement and anticipation about his escape to
America, and perhaps this passage indicates the conflict that still exists
within him, relating to the reality of what exists in Lagos and how it relates
to America, the West, and colonialism. It is significant that the first few
works Elvis is shown reading in Graceland
reflect his innocence and loneliness, as well as his desire to be free, while
the book he reads when the novel ends is much more grim. Elvis has lost his
innocence and now the adult Elvis must learn how to come to terms with his own
pain and suffering. This final scene illuminates Elvis’ realization that
escaping to America will not solve all of his problems, and that his pain will
not be left behind. The book ends with his response to the airline clerk who
calls his name, signifying his new identity, “Yes, this is Redemption” (Abani
321). In the global community, many people, like Elvis, are becoming migrants,
moving rapidly through various cultural and national spaces.
The
Internet/Cyberspace-Neuromancer
Internet communication directly impacts
those living in a world whose traditional boundaries and patterns have been
altogether changed. People worldwide are now riding in fast cars on the
information highway that Jessica E. Baum calls the “Mad, Mad Internet,”
Scholars have posited that international trade has a spillover effect on international relations, transforming relationships among nations by promoting interdependence and consequently producing economic stability and peace in a globalizing world. (Baum 702)
The community arising from the worldwide
web is a mental or intellectual one that has its power in the nature of the
medium which unites people. For instance, the ordinary human struggles of
people attempting to live in community is being overtaken, perhaps, by a human
inclination towards ‘picking and choosing’ and finding agreeable new communities
by way of cyber communities. No human being is an island, yet islands will be
united invisibly, verbally and conceptually by way of machines.
In most contemporary literature, the
Internet is mentioned as a vital part of the plot. Some of the “real life”
issues that are addressed in stories about the Internet include the ways in
which people’s privacy can be impinged upon by outside, hostile attacks. In
addition, the novels reveal the grandiose notion that people can control the
world through technology. The viral infection that obliterates computer memory
acts as a powerful challenge to this assumption.
American-Canadian author, William Gibson,
is one of the most prolific science fiction authors and major contributor to
what is referred to as the cyberpunk genre. Gibson, who has been called the "noir
prophet," created the term “cyberspace,” which refers to the realm that
encompasses the Internet. Of course, discussing William Gibson means discussing,
however briefly, the concept of “cyberpunk.” Although he did not create the
term, Gibson became the most recognized writer of cyberpunk. The term was first
used by Bruce Bethke in 1983 as a title for his short story. It describes “punk
attitudes and high technology,” usually criminal driven teenagers, who use high
technology to commit crimes on the Internet. The word “cyber” comes from
cybernetics, the study of control processes and communication in biological, electronic,
mechanical and artificial systems. The word “punk” describes an entire
generation that found its roots in the Sex Pistol music and the general
anarchistic attitude that many youths had embraced at the end of the seventies.
The punk teenager is individualistic, anarchic, anti-social and rebellious.
Cyberpunk basically describes an ultra-technological rebel movement, a revolt,
but a revolt orchestrated by using high technology (Baum 698-730).
The 20th anniversary edition
of Gibson’s novel, Neuromancer, was
released in 2004. Neuromancer won him
international fame and recognition, as well as the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award
and the Philipp K. Dick Award. The action of the novel is set in 21st century
Japan. (It was during the decade of the 1980s that Japan became the United
States’ pivotal source for cutting edge technology). Amidst the backdrop of
technology in Japanese society, Gibson writes about a decaying future society,
where moral norms and rules seem to have been forgotten or neglected.
Corruption abounds and technology is used for evil purposes. In fact, this is
one of the novel’s declarations: technology is negative and only negative. Not
only is it used for evil purposes, but it has dominated, not so much in a “Terminator”
way, but by controlling the humans that have created and are using it.
The novel’s main character is Case, a
former hacker specializing in breaking security systems, who is caught stealing
from his own employees and banned from using the Internet. The plot consists of
his meeting with Armitage, a powerful and mysterious figure who helps him
regain access to the Internet and society and places him under the protection
of Molly, a professional killer. Armitage is a kind of savior; the negative
aura around Armitage, as well as its association (even patronage) with
professional killers such as Molly, makes this a rather negative savior. As his
work for Armitage progresses, Case successfully completes clandestine
assignments and has the final revelation that he has been working for
Neuromancer, an artificial form of intelligence. The necromancer is an evil
wizard, that deals with dark forces and death. Very much like a necromancer,
Case, through his hacker vocation, has evil intentions and is associated with
chaos.
Neuromancer
contains several recurring themes which pertain to
much that tends to be discussed about the networked imagination. The novel is
futuristic, but it also offers its commentary on a world and human
consciousness that are now being transformed quickly, due to the advent of
cyberspace’s promise of rapid communication and in a amplified flow of
information across diverse populations. Throughout the novel is the unitary
theme of cyber communication and cyber culture producing a different kind of
human being, along with different kinds of human potential. In essence, cyber
reality is divorced from physical or material reality. It is not so much that
the geographical world has have altered, but that our conceptions of it, and
our places within it, has undergone a revolution that is registered most powerfully
in the human imagination.
Gibson’s opening chapters introduce expressions
that are a part of cyber communication, such as “navigational burn,”
“high-resolution Cray monitor,” “matrix,” and “slow virus.” What Gibson illustrates
by using these expressions is that those who are not familiar with the Internet
and its intricacies will be excluded from the cyber community. For those who
are already attached to the information highway or the marvels of the networked
imagination, Gibson’s fairly Orwellian approach will be clear and familiar. As cultural
critic, Howard Rheingold, has explained, a few hours per day of computerized
communication, as was his experience, can quickly begin to transform one’s
outlook. Rheingold states that people have an “emotional attachment to an
apparently bloodless technological ritual.” This phenomenon is shared by
millions of people who also belong to, “computer mediated social groups known
as virtual communities” (Rheingold 64).
Gibson describes ordinary human events
within the framework of this cyber society. At the opening of the third
chapter, for example, “Home” is introduced as ‘the sprawl,’ in reference to
what has become the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan axis, a swath of territory that
was long ago enjoined by way of cyber communication. Its physical features or
diversity need not exist, for its ‘essence’ has become the conceptual idea of
Boston-Atlanta or BAMA. The region’s different histories, the experiences of
its millions of inhabitants through time, and all that might have been local to
one component of BAMA or another have become meaningless. On the cyber map, the
area is identified by many hundreds of millions of megabytes each second, until
blocks of Manhattan begin to come into view. The character, Case has awakened
from a “dream of airports,” somewhere in Europe. By the chapter’s conclusion,
the existence of the Matrix has been referred to, an unknown computer
revolution that began in arcade games and in, “graphics programs and military
experimentation with cranial jacks” (Gibson 51). The tone is set for a novel
that will continue to remind the reader of George Orwell’s 1984 in its effective suggestion of not just a culture, but a
consciousness, that is shaped by unknown past progressions to form a seamless
way of “seeing” shared by millions. Whenever people engage in the realm of
cyberspace, they form communities that supersede the influence of public spaces
or ordinary group communication.
Gibson writes about professions and
occupations that are transformed by the cyber age. He uses quirky descriptions to
illustrate how humans become machines and machines become humans. For instance,
when one of the characters, Molly, visits a physician, she turns to a “medical
team” in an old condominium building in Baltimore; her leg is treated in an
office that bears the name of a dentist (Gibson 69). Sherry Turkle, Professor
of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, has explored the changes of identity that Gibson alludes to, which
tend to result from cyber communication. What has gone before, in terms of
convention or attachment to who one is and what one does is effectively
disrupted by a new identity and consciousness that is united by cyberspace,
more than everyday reality, ordinary social interaction, or what might be
assumed about a group or kind of person, a profession, or other designation
that defined people and their lives, in the past. Turkle comments that,
“without any principle of coherence, the self spins off in all directions” (81).
Not only has cyberspace encouraged diverse emotional, communal, geographical
and conceptual views of life and the world but also it has promoted adoption of
a replacement consciousness that rests and relies upon what is presented in cyber
communication. When people are united by the medium of cyberspace, far more in
many cases than by their everyday interaction with people, or their
relationship to place and tradition, the result is apt to be a weakening of
those descriptors and identifications of a person which do not connect to what
is shared on the computer screen. Needless to say, the traditional roles,
functions, jobs and professions of participants become as irrelevant as the
geographical locations that once confined them.
The concluding chapters of Neuromancer depict the futuristic
aspects of globalization in which cultural boundaries have disappear. Characters
identify their national origins in a wide array of first names that have been collected
at random. A character is named Lupus and, why not, given that no dictates of
old apply, and cyber-related imagination has become the norm. In these last
chapters, Gibson writes write sparsely, for the major work has been done. He
has already told the story of the cyber revolution. In the final chapter,
Gibson pulls together all that has been presented. When Case meets the waiter,
Ratz, that he had known in the past, Ratz acknowledges him as “the artiste” and
adds quickly that, “Night City is not a place one returns to” (Gibson 258). Wintermute
is explained, at last, as the “hive mind” or decision-maker, the force that
creates change in the outside world. Neuromancer, on the other hand, is the
human personality, a technologically produced phenomenon that represents the
people of the future.
Gibson reminds the reader of timeless
human attributes and how they are either incorporated into cyberculture or discarded.
Machinery is no longer serving humanity so much as it is shaping the nature of
human organization and interaction. People are freed by cyber technology but at
the price of their individuality. The prophecy seems to be that the future
belongs to computers and high technology, and they will be controlling the
global society.
Conclusion
The novels, The House on Mango Street, Jasmine,
Graceland, and Neuromancer, provide depictions of how the homogenous society has
been rendered largely nonexistent by globalization, with common values,
national identity, citizenship, social integration, and technology in a
constant state of flux during the latter part of the twentieth century and the
twenty-first century. As the novels confirm, due to global hybridization and
the telecommunications revolution, the world is shrinking. As the global
economy grew, countries became more dependent upon each other. This
interdependence has broken down borders and combined cultures, traditions,
values, and norms, as portrayed in the novels. Edensor (2002) affirms that “the
circulation of ideas and images in the media provides a vast storehouse of
interlinked cultural forms, places, objects, people and practices which are
associated across time and space” (187). Increasingly complex but with core
components relatively unchanging, the national identity is made stronger through
cultural elements. The sense of national belonging, in short, is no longer
linked to official, political definitions of the nation-state. Efforts to
maintain cultural purity are futile, as global conditions have generated cultural
hybridization. Although fictional, the novels mirror the state of the global
community in which there is no longer a clearly cut cultural framework for any
nation.
Works
Cited
- Abani, Chris. Graceland. New York: Picador, 2004.
- Baum, Jessica E. “It’s a Mad, Mad Internet: Globalization and the Challenges.” Federal Communications Law Journal 63.3 (2011): 698-730.
- Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. New York: Vintage, 1991.
- Dawson, Ashley. “Surplus City.” Interventions 11.1 (2009):16-34.
- Edensor, Tim. “National Identity and the Politics of Memory.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29 (1997): 175-194.
- Eysturoy, Annie O. Daughters of Self-Creation: The Contemporary Chicana Novel. 1st ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.
- Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963.
- Friedman, Thomas. The Lexus and the Olive Tree. New York: Anchor Books, 2000.
- Gibson, William. Idoru. New York: Putnam, 1996. ---. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 2000.
---.Pattern Recognition. New York: Putnam, 2003. - Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora." In Patrick Williams & Laura Chrisman, (Eds). Colonial Discourse & Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993.
- Mathews, Gordon. Global Culture/Individual Identity: Searching for Home in Cultural Supermarket. New York: Routledge, 2000.
- Mukherjee, Bharati. Jasmine. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1989.
- Oliveras, Julian. "The House on Mango Street and the Poetics of Space." The Americas Review 15:3–4 (1987): 160–70.
- Pieterse, Nederveen J. Globalization and Culture: Global Mélange (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009.
- Rheingold, Howard. Introduction to the Virtual Community. In Victor J. Vitanza, (Ed). CyberReader. New York: Allyn &Bacon, 1998.
- Turkle, Sherry. Identity Crisis. In Victor J. Vitanza, (Ed). CyberReader. New York: Allyn &Bacon, 1998.
- Urry, John. Global Complexity. Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2003.
- Weiss, Linda. The Myth of the Powerless State: Governing the Economy in a Global Era. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.
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Dr.
Afaf (Effat) Jamil Khogeer, is an Associate
Professor of English Literature, Department of English, Umm Al-Qura
University. She has B. A. and M.A. in English from Oregon State University,
U.S.A. and the PhD. English Literature, Women’s Faculty of Arts, Major:
Fiction; Women’s literature in 20th. Century Britain.
Her previous experiences include Chair, Department
of English, Deputy Dean, Institute of Scientific Research, Member in Umm
Al-Qura University Advisory Council, and a ‘Visiting Scholar' to some universities
in Canada, U.S.A., and the U.K. She has published quite a number of articles
in the fields of literary criticism, Translation, Women's Literature, the
short story, the novel, Comparative studies on English, American, Saudi
Arabian and Canadian literature. Her published works include: Integration of
the Self: Women in the Fiction of Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble,
"Translating Poetry: Is it a Creative Translation or a Translation of
Creativity?", “A Deconstructive Reading of Muriel Spark’s novel, The
Public Image”, “A Bildungsroman
Interpretation of M. A. Yamani’s novel, A Boy From Makkah,”, "Saudi
Literature and Electronic Creativity", and "Translating Children's
Literature and Its Impact on the Child's Intellectual and Educational
Growth".
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