BOOKS: Asia’s ‘Other’ Voices

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Jun 6 1995 (IPS) - Thanks to her troubles with Bangladeshi Islamist leaders and her notoriety as “the female Salman Rushdie”, Bangladeshi poet-novelist Taslima Nasreen has won notice as the leading South Asian feminist writer today.

But she’s not alone.

Nasreen — whose last novel ‘Lajja’ (‘Shame,’ published by Penguin books) offered such a harsh view of Islamic fundamentalism that religious leaders drove the author from her country — is one of a growing wave of South Asian women who challenge traditional racial or gender roles.

That wave now includes two U.S. authors, Bombay-born California resident Ginu Kamani and Pakistani-descended New Yorker Ameena Meer.

Both authors have published their first books in the past few months. Kamani’s short story collection is ‘Junglee Girl’ (published by Aunt Lute books for 10 U.S. dollars). Meer’s novel is ‘Bombay Talkie’ (published by High Risk for 13 U.S. dollars).

The two books offer sharp contrasts: Kamani’s pensive, lyrical style and Meer’s jumpy, streetwise edge. But they share a desire to uncover truths about South Asian cultural identity and sexuality that have rarely been touched in fiction.

Kamani and Meer also are willing, as has Nasreen been, to take on most of the taboo subjects of their cultures: incest, homosexuality, and the sexual degradation and oppression of women.

Kamani, in particular, seeks to explore the difference between “normal” and “wild” women in the 11 short stories that comprise ‘Junglee Girl’. Junglee — a Gujarati variant of the Sanskrit word ‘jungle’ — itself refers to wild, or uncontrollable women, a subject Kamani means to reclaim and redefine.

In most of the stories in ‘Junglee Girl,’ the narrator is a young Indian woman who must come to terms with her sexuality or desire, from the seven-year-old confused by her feelings for her maid in ‘Maria’ to the poor worker hired to strip hair from rich women’s bodies in ‘Waxing the Thing’.

Some of the stories may seem insufferably coy in their efforts to talk about sex without being obvious — a coyness Kamani may have inherited from working in film production for three years in the glamorous ‘Bollywood’ movie industry.

That coyness in turn obscures the horrors of incest depicted in ‘Younger Wife’, and the abuses that are hinted in many other stories.

But at their best, the stories honestly explore the confusion of women who feel torn between multiple identities, whether Indian or American, demure or desirous. (MORE)

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