A few weeks ago I emailed a bunch of people, bloggers some, asking for recommendations on short stories by South Asian/Muslim writers living in the West. I should have specified that I was looking also for short stories featuring South Asians/Muslims in the West. In any case, this lovely bunch of coconuts1 gathered for me a comprehensive list of books and authors that I’ve only begun to get through. For those of you who don’t know, I want to become a doctor. That is to say, a doctor of philosophy. (I know, eh. Brown kids these days.) And what I want to pontificate on is the fluidity of identity, as constructed and maintained, individually and communally, along lines of “race,” religion, and nationality.

What this has meant, then, is that for the most part I am studying, deconstructing and reconstructing myself. And that, in ways, the essay that I intend to hand in next week on this topic has been a labour as much of pain, as of love. Luckily for me, the first book I opened was a horrible, horrible choice and it cemented what it is that I will not be arguing.

The book comes bound in an unpretentious, dusty blue hardcover, blank except for its title, Odyssey2, imprinted on its spine. Divya Mathur, the compiler of this volume, describes in her introduction the how difficult it was for her to get the book published. “The High Commission of India,” she notes, “does not pay its employees enough to live on, let alone to finance … literary ventures” (8). That explains the poor printing quality.

It does not explain or excuse, however, the poor writing. And I’m not talking about style. I finished about half the stories and with the possible exception of the first, Anita Desai’s “Sale,” all of them were littered with egregious grammar mistakes: misplaced apostrophes, missing words, numerous spelling mistakes. Clearly aware of this, Mathur writes that “the prohibitive cost of translation and lack of good translators [meant that] authors translat[ed] their own stories. Needless to say, a great author need not be a great translator, and many stories … suffer in translation” (7). Yet Mathur greatly underestimates the effect of the many “imperfections of linguistic expression” (7). While I can appreciate her chagrin at those, like “Salman Rushdie, [who] assert … that anything of substance is written only in English” (8)3, I’m not about to let pity skew my judgement of this book. It is poorly translated and not in the sense that the translations lack the vigour of the original texts, but in that basic grammatical precepts are ignored entirely. Given that this is a book written in English and about the “power of expression” in “European culture” (7), I’m going to demand nothing less than best – at least in syntax, if not in style or content. Also, it was proof-read by two separate people. In any case, Mathur is confident that the best is exactly what she provides.

Anyway, all of this is secondary. These are gripes, jarring though they are, that I’d be willing to forgive if not for the cardinal sin that Mathur commits in her preface. She begins with a heavy-handed comparison of Princess Diana’s funeral to that of a hypothetical “Indian woman in similar circumstances” (7). Mathur believes “in India, a woman, despite her goodness, her sacrifices, sufferings and selfless devotion to her family, will not be forgiven even one little transgression” (7).

I’m not Indian – no, not even of origin – so I’m not going to try and criticise that statement on a factual basis, except to say that I have a problem with such large scale generalisations. Basically, I’m not about to believe that every single one of India’s (approximately) 500 million women4 is treated the same. At the very least, it’s statistically impossible.

What Mathur is really interested in proving, however, is that “if living in European culture boosts [Indian women’s] self-esteem and power of expression, then it must follow that it was not so in their own country” (7).

Let the fun begin.

First off, she believes not in multiple European identities (or even Western ones), but in one homogeneous European culture. Secondly, this uniform European culture exists in an absolute contradiction to Indian culture (again, though she speaks of multiple Indian languages, she does not really deal with the issue of multiple Indian cultures and conceptions of womanhood). That is to say, the one exists in order to prove the other, so that there is no mingling of the two, no confusion of allegiances. When she speaks of “freedom” it is opposed to “torture and servitude” in just the way that “European” is juxtaposed against “Indian.” She refuses to acknowledge anything redeeming in India or anything problematic in Europe. My own interests lie in proving first, that one need not move to the West to find freedom and second, that having moved to the West, one is not guaranteed freedom, no matter how you define freedom.

What is interesting is that she feels her “contributors’ statements support” her opinion (7). It is unclear if by “statements” she is referring to the short stories collected here, but because there are no other words from her contributors, I’m going to have assume so. I would argue that many of her contributors take a more complicated view of global identity-making than she is willing to admit. In fact, I’m curious as to whether or not when she sent out her appeals for contributions, she stated what she was going to be proving with their works. (I’m going to have to note here that not all of the stories have anything to do with international relocations, so I don’t even see why Mathur tries to group them all together under her misguided umbrella of a bias.)

I’m beginning to think that maybe this what I should do, take Mathur’s book and use it to disprove her own thesis, but the thought of combing through that multitude of poorly constructed sentences makes me cringe.

Instead, I’m going to be selecting a few stories from a much more promising collection (if no less depressing), Her Mother’s Ashes 25. Interestingly enough, Her Mother’s Ashes 2 was published in 1998, the same year Odyssey was published. Given the quality of the work in the first, I’m not at all surprised that it found a publisher more easily than did Odyssey.

Oh, and as for theory, I’m hoping to draw on Arjun Appadurai, bell hooks, and Cornel West. But we’ll see.

Anyway, so yes, it’s true. I couldn’t get over the grammar and the preface, and this is why I will not be finishing Odyssey. If you can redeem this book, please do. And let me know how you do it.

And for all of you who promised to reply and didn’t: no cookies for you.

Footnotes
1 And no, “coconuts” was not a Freudian slip.
2 Mathur, Divya, ed. Odyssey: Stories by Indian Women Settled Abroad. New Delhi: Star Publications, 1998.
3 I really wish she’d cited this.
4 From Census India.
5 Aziz, Nurjehan. Her Mother’s Ashes 2: More Stories by South Asian Women in the United States and Canada. Toronto: TSAR Publications, 1998.