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Literary Review
ANTHOLOGY
Poignant pictures
SAYANTAN DASGUPTA
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A fascinating account of women’s lives in the most populous continent on Earth.
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Speaking For Myself: An Anthology of Asian Women’s Writing; Edited by Sukriti Paul Kumar and Malashri Lal; Penguin, Rs 650.
It is perhaps possible to talk of a composite Indian civilisation and culture, invoking the concept of ‘unity in diversity’. It is even possible, perhaps, to talk of a South Asian civilisation, given the fact that national boundaries are
not congruent with state boundaries in this part of the world. But can one talk of an Asian civilisation and culture? An emphatic ‘yes’ is the answer this anthology posits. For, the texts presented here do throw up certain patterns in their depiction of Asian societies and cultural practices even while, in most cases, disseminating culture specificities rooted in their countries of origin.
Speaking for Myself is an ambitious anthology and features as many as 65 writers from various Asian countries. Most of the texts here are translations from the various languages in which they were first written while a few were written originally in English itself. Together, they add up to a telling, fascinating and sometimes poignant picture of women’s lives in the most populous continent on planet Earth.
Overview
Some texts, such as the Taslima Nasreen poems, are consciously ‘feminist’, while a few, like Kunzang Choden Roder’s story from Bhutan, are almost silent on gender. Some exhibit an overt engagement with contemporary politics, while others, narrated from the émigré’s perspective, recount the political repression back ‘home’, while still others steer conspicuously clear of any culture or political specificities. Notably, several of the texts from Southeast Asia focus on foreign intervention and on how it has fuelled social disjunctions and an anarchy of values.
Relationships constitute the most important problematic of a sizeable majority of texts in this anthology. Yet, exploring the dynamics of human relationships is not an end by itself for most authors featured here.
Women in Asian societies as featured here come across both as products and accomplices of patriarchal socialisation, but also as bodies of dissent, repositories of alternative knowledge systems and harbingers of change.
The collection begins with Bi Shu-Min’s Chinese “One Centimetre”, a powerful story that depicts with rare sensitivity a mother-son relationship, and uses the tropes of human relationships to comment on Chinese history. Zong Pu’s “Melody in Dreams” paints a striking picture of the relationship between Murong Yuejun, a cello teacher, and the teenaged Liang Xia to invoke Chinese political history and critique the persecution of intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution just as the Hong Kong-based Wong Bikwan’s “She’s a Woman and So am I” builds up the relationship between two college girls to comment on codes governing female sexual behaviour, and the Vietnamese Phan Thi Vang Anh’s “Thuong” depicts the relationship between Hao and the much younger Thuong only as an instrument to uncover the hypocrisy of patriarchal discourses of sexuality.
Abiding concerns
Politics and sexuality are, in fact, abiding concerns of the texts featured in this anthology. And the family figures prominently as a site within which such concerns are explored. It is, thus, when the narrator of Leila S. Chudori’s Indonesian story, “The Purification of Sita”, and her fiancé are thinking of setting up a family that he invokes questions of sexual fidelity, confesses his infidelity and says, “...but you are a woman and women seem more capable of exercising self-control.” Chudori’s story offers a re-appraisal of the Ramayana in gender terms and an incipient critique of how codes of honour have got implicated with the female body in Asian societies, a critique whose politics are more fully manifested in Bano Qudsia’s Pakistani story, “Soul-Weary”.
It is the prospect of such inter-textual readings that is opened up by these texts that point towards an Asian reality, a reality that many of us are perhaps not quite aware of yet because of our limited access to literatures from other Asian countries. One hopes this anthology will fuel more attempts of this sort and result in a shifting of our attention from the Western world to communities closer home.
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