Australian Women's Book Review: Online

Hecate's
Australian Women's Book Review

ISSN 1033-9434
Editor:  Barbara Brook
Contributing Assistant Editor:  Katie Hughes
Photomontage:  Set in Stone, Adele Flood

Volume 12, 2000

Interview with Suniti Namjoshi

by Christine Croyden

Suniti Namjoshi describes her recent book, Goja an Autobiographical Myth, as the book that she has wanted to write all her life. Her story is set between the rich and the poor in India and moves across to the West, where she now lives. The grand daughter of the Ranisaheb of Maharashtra, Namjoshi was aware from an early age of her privileged status in a society, where “indecent” disparities exist between human beings. She was raised and loved by two women from opposite ends of the social scale: her grandmother Goldie, the matriarch of the family, and her servant woman Goja. The reader is afforded a unique position - to see the East from the perspective of the West; and the West through the eyes of Goldie and Goja, who have only experienced the East.

Despite what Namjoshi sees as the essence of her story - the quest for love, any autobiography is hard to read and separate from what is known of the actual life. Namjoshi is a successful academic and writer who has spent most of her adulthood in the West teaching English literature. Her book confronts sensitive issues of race, gender and ethnicity and is beautifully woven together with poetry, fairytale, myth, and imagined conversations between the dead and living.

The interview took place soon after the launch of Goja an Autobiographical Myth at the Sydney writer's festival in June, 2000.

Interview

Why did you choose to call your book an autobiographical myth?

It's autobiographical, in that my experience is all I have, I've written 15 or 16 books, I am nearly sixty and towards the end of my life, what does it all mean, what sense can I make of it. What was valuable and mattered most? It's fictional since any version manipulates facts. I've used my life as raw material for asking questions that matter to everybody. It's myth, because I make specific patterns out of it, I do not want to claim this is how it was definitively for me, or anyone I came into contact with.

So it's like a disclaimer?

Yes it is. It is not the facts of my life that are important, but what kind of meaning anyone's life might have. Myth is a way of trying to make sense of experience, a way of patterning it and making it all fit together. Myths say things to people; I've tried to make patterns to work out what kind of reciprocity is possible.

You said you left out parts that didn't fit, your mother doesn't come into the story and I noticed her absence, why did you choose not to have her there?

Several reasons, the first is, my grandmother and my boarding school brought me up. My mother was only 21 when I was born so she left me with my grandmother and went overseas with my father. I was loved and cared for by these other two women. Once when my mother visited me in England she said, “do you realise these three months are the longest we have ever been together”. Second reason is that my mother is still alive. She is eighty years old and I am not out to tell the truth about other people or to damn them. She has never been particularly happy about the fact that I'm a writer, or, a lesbian feminist. She sees these as notoriety, tarnishing the good name of the family. A section that concerns her is the Fairy Tale. I use pure myth and fairytale in part, to allow me to bring in the complexity of the pain of the relationship, the psychological trauma. Somehow it allows for greater accuracy. I'm not the kind of writer who is interested in giving somebody a factual account of something. I want to make a beautiful shape. It is the difference between the mindset of a historian and of a poet. A historian is interested in getting the facts right. A poet is concerned with trying to embody humour and emotional truths correctly. The imagery need not be true, it could be but that is not important.

Are you primarily concerned with morals and ethics?

Yes I am. I see injustice as a puzzle. How can you love someone and allow them to be so poor? How can we call ourselves decent human beings and allow these vast disparities in conditions. We treat a lot of people as if they belong to a different species. That's the element where I say it's autobiographical - I'm not telling lies about a fantastic country in which there is this huge discrepancy between the rich and the poor. This was and is still, to some extent, India. Just think about it, it's not right … it's dreadful.

Post modernism has dealt a blow to that sort of thinking, saying morality doesn't exist and moral values are rhetorical.

I don't care what they think. What is a moral problem is also a literary and technical problem. Say you go to India and you see the disparities, you say, “Oh goodness how awful how can they be like that”, you feel like a bit of a fool saying that because why are you distancing yourself from them in that way? Are you not comfortable? It's not just them - what about you how can you be like that? Now that's the moral problem. Then you think about it as a technical problem. How can you talk about such indecency decently? That is actually how I grew up. It's also a technical ploy. It allows me, as a child, to say “I needed you both” and from that position I'm not being patronising. It's a problem I could only solve at the end of my writing career.

It is respectful, especially at the end, when you are speaking with Goja and Goldie; they could be contemporary women.

It also says “I will not collude”.

Goldie puts her perspective across well.

It's something I have been training all my life for, four hours a day, six days a week, to write.

Is it possible to see things from a powerless position? You say: “Talking about who deserves to be king, deserves to be queen, deserves to be rich, deserves to be poor, could get very tricky” … and it does.

It does. And to maintain that balance so you are not going around shouting “mea culpa”, so you're not glossing over anything, and letting the patterns fall apart and writing an uninspired book. It's not a book I could have written in my youth, not because I didn't think enough or I was not mature but because I was just not a skilled enough writer.

Of when you worked in the Indian civil service you say: “It is perhaps true that being my grandfather's grandaughter I could afford to be honest”. What do you mean?

I mean not take bribes and not be swayed by other people because I didn't need the money. For example, they couldn't say to me “do this corrupt job or we'll get you transferred”, because I was too well connected; it is in that sense I could afford not to be corrupt and to be honest. In a way, if you were profiting from somebody else's misery and you allowed yourself to really see what you were doing; you wouldn't be able to continue. That was the importance of consciousness raising in the women's movement, once your consciousness is raised, it's very hard to carry on, but as long as it's not, people can do all sorts of things and be very nice for the rest of the time.

It's not a novel in any sense that I'm used to.

No, it isn't, and it's not an autobiography in any sense that you are used to, but it contains elements of all of these.

It's a very individual form.

Yes, nothing I ever write fits into anything. I wrote “The Conversations of Cow”: you could call that a novel if you like, but, it's not really, you could call it a political satire, science fiction, an extended fable or a fantasy.

Do you identify with Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth or even Salman Rushdie as an Indian writer?

Why would I identify with them? I'm nearly 60 for God's sake. No, no, I haven't read any of their books; they are younger than me. I am Indian. I lived there until I was 27 years old. India is culturally a very dense society, it's difficult to grow up there without being “indianised”. I grew up with the traditional Marathi writers - in Marathi not English. I am influenced, as one is, by the air you breathe, the music you listen to, the architecture, the language, to the culture all around. If you really want to categorise me, my mind happens to be that of a fabulist. I mostly write fables and verse, this book is different because it doesn't use donkeys and one-eyed monkeys. It could be called magic realism, because of the conversations with dead people, I suppose.

Are there any books or writers you do identify with?

Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Ezra Pound; I wrote my dissertation on his Cantos.

“I belong to India and to the West. Both belong to me and both reject me”. How does the West reject you now?

Because of racism of course, homophobia and sexism too, but even if none of these labels take, any person coming to an environment where other people are established, is an outsider. In the university for example they may say “who asked them to come?” they see you as after their jobs. The Indians have no use for lesbians: if I had stayed there I'd have had to live a life of lies and discretion, which is damaging to a human being because it means admitting that you are something to be ashamed of. It is important to remember that one has been shaped by the very society one has been rejected by. You might be a seventh generation white Australian - I don't know - but you could still feel an outsider because this society has peculiar attitudes towards women. Anyone who is reasonably honest does experience that. Say it simply as a truth, without having to attitudinise about it. Again a matter of trying to see clearly.

“As a woman a lesbian and a brown skinned person, am I less than nothing it makes me want to laugh to be nothing is to be free”. Can you say that now?

Sometimes, not always. I am as egoistic as the next person is. I get as annoyed as the next person does. It's one of the first lessons of feminism, but we need to hear it again and again - that to be oppressed is not shameful. What is truly shameful is that we do this to others. The glory we attach to power, to the conqueror and the disgrace we attach to those who are oppressed. We are all guilty of it when we have a sneaking admiration for Bill Gates, not because he's clever but because he's so stinking rich! [Laughs heartily]

How do you feel about feminism today?

Sad. In the late 70s I was teaching A Room of One's Own and I looked at the date of its first publication - 1929. I was teaching it 50 years later and the insights were, and are, still fresh. It is as though we have to keep reinventing the wheel.

And why do you think that is the case?

There must be a number of reasons. We make a certain amount of progress and then we become complacent and the next generation thinks all the battles have been won, but they haven't been won. We don't realise this until we get a bit older. Then in another 50 years time when things get bad enough, another huge effort will need to be made. It's not just feminism. If you consider that our century is the century of two world wars and the Holocaust it's very difficult to maintain that we are getting any better. Perhaps it all takes longer than we think.

Is it because we are divided as feminists?

My impression is, feminism isn't divided, as much as submerged and it's because there isn't much happening. Capitalism, technology and economics are more pertinent today. People see themselves as serfs of capitalism – “who would please like not to see themselves as serfs”.

Charity and ideals are an important part of your book. It made me think of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi when she said: “'To live the full life … one must have the courage to bear the responsibility of the needs of others … one must want to bear this responsibility”. Is that where you are coming from?

Yes, that's the direction, but even though I can't do that, it is my duty as a writer to point in this direction. What was valuable is that Goja and Goldie were there for me - to say “the capacity to love” is such a cliché but to write it, is a technical feat. It's easy with the best will in the world to say things, but it's not enough, to act is often too hard. Some of the themes in this book are platitudes, and the fact that they are platitudes means every one knows them, they might have been repeated over and over again. Writers take the worn out truth and renew it. Bear in mind, the fabulist is closer to the poet.

You talk about academic liberalism in the seventies?

Yes when I say, “the breast beating white liberal types were common in the universities”.

Does that still go on?

Oh sure, why not? It's human nature. Don't you see, if I might implicate you, that you and I often fall into this and we have to be careful. We fall into it partly out of niceness and complacency. If one is frightfully well educated, and one is terribly nice to someone who isn't, it can be patronising, and it's so easy to cash in on whatever people are willing to let you cash in on, because most of us are feeling insecure anyway.

When people try to turn it on its head it becomes a rather foolish type of inverted snobbery; you used to get this in the women's movement all the time. “Oh you are a black woman I will bow down to you”. It's just a load of rubbish!

It's relevant today in Australia with the reconciliation issue.

It's very difficult, with the best will in the world. There are emotional and moral pitfalls, one has to stay honest all the time, and that is the bit nobody wants to do, because it's too hard. It means giving up all the perks that you have. The rest of the world says, “you poor idiot”, and the world goes on as it was and continues to worship the people who have power and money. However, each time the effort is made, I think it holds back the forces of darkness, if nothing else.

Did you grow up with the Hindu or Christian faith?

Liberal Hindu, but the boarding school I went to was Protestant. But if you teach English literature you have to understand Christianity because the language is imbued with it. Language does matter. If you want to be a writer it is what you struggle with all your life. It is the stuff with which you are shaping the experience.

The blurb on the back describes the book as part elegy, I wondered about that -'a lament for the dead'?

Because an elegy is also praise. My experience of Goja, my experience of Goldie, they are like people who inhabit my head they are who I am - in part, at least, who I am.

Is that how you own who you are?

That's right and that is when it becomes important.

Christine Croyden is a Melbourne writer.

Suniti Namjoshi, Goja: An Autobiographical Myth, 2000, Spinifex Press, $22.95

Hecate's Australian Women's Book Review

ISSN 1033-9434		Editor: Barbara Brook Contributing Assistant Editor: Katie Hughes *Photomontage: Set in Stone, Adele Flood*
Volume 12, 2000

Interview with Suniti Namjoshi by Christine Croyden Suniti Namjoshi describes her recent book, Goja an Autobiographical Myth, as the book that she has wanted to write all her life. Her story is set between the rich and the poor in India and moves across to the West, where she now lives. The grand daughter of the Ranisaheb of Maharashtra, Namjoshi was aware from an early age of her privileged status in a society, where “indecent” disparities exist between human beings. She was raised and loved by two women from opposite ends of the social scale: her grandmother Goldie, the matriarch of the family, and her servant woman Goja. The reader is afforded a unique position - to see the East from the perspective of the West; and the West through the eyes of Goldie and Goja, who have only experienced the East. Despite what Namjoshi sees as the essence of her story - the quest for love, any autobiography is hard to read and separate from what is known of the actual life. Namjoshi is a successful academic and writer who has spent most of her adulthood in the West teaching English literature. Her book confronts sensitive issues of race, gender and ethnicity and is beautifully woven together with poetry, fairytale, myth, and imagined conversations between the dead and living. The interview took place soon after the launch of Goja an Autobiographical Myth at the Sydney writer's festival in June, 2000. Interview Why did you choose to call your book an autobiographical myth? It's autobiographical, in that my experience is all I have, I've written 15 or 16 books, I am nearly sixty and towards the end of my life, what does it all mean, what sense can I make of it. What was valuable and mattered most? It's fictional since any version manipulates facts. I've used my life as raw material for asking questions that matter to everybody. It's myth, because I make specific patterns out of it, I do not want to claim this is how it was definitively for me, or anyone I came into contact with. So it's like a disclaimer? Yes it is. It is not the facts of my life that are important, but what kind of meaning anyone's life might have. Myth is a way of trying to make sense of experience, a way of patterning it and making it all fit together. Myths say things to people; I've tried to make patterns to work out what kind of reciprocity is possible. You said you left out parts that didn't fit, your mother doesn't come into the story and I noticed her absence, why did you choose not to have her there? Several reasons, the first is, my grandmother and my boarding school brought me up. My mother was only 21 when I was born so she left me with my grandmother and went overseas with my father. I was loved and cared for by these other two women. Once when my mother visited me in England she said, “do you realise these three months are the longest we have ever been together”. Second reason is that my mother is still alive. She is eighty years old and I am not out to tell the truth about other people or to damn them. She has never been particularly happy about the fact that I'm a writer, or, a lesbian feminist. She sees these as notoriety, tarnishing the good name of the family. A section that concerns her is the Fairy Tale. I use pure myth and fairytale in part, to allow me to bring in the complexity of the pain of the relationship, the psychological trauma. Somehow it allows for greater accuracy. I'm not the kind of writer who is interested in giving somebody a factual account of something. I want to make a beautiful shape. It is the difference between the mindset of a historian and of a poet. A historian is interested in getting the facts right. A poet is concerned with trying to embody humour and emotional truths correctly. The imagery need not be true, it could be but that is not important. Are you primarily concerned with morals and ethics? Yes I am. I see injustice as a puzzle. How can you love someone and allow them to be so poor? How can we call ourselves decent human beings and allow these vast disparities in conditions. We treat a lot of people as if they belong to a different species. That's the element where I say it's autobiographical - I'm not telling lies about a fantastic country in which there is this huge discrepancy between the rich and the poor. This was and is still, to some extent, India. Just think about it, it's not right … it's dreadful. Post modernism has dealt a blow to that sort of thinking, saying morality doesn't exist and moral values are rhetorical. I don't care what they think. What is a moral problem is also a literary and technical problem. Say you go to India and you see the disparities, you say, “Oh goodness how awful how can they be like that”, you feel like a bit of a fool saying that because why are you distancing yourself from them in that way? Are you not comfortable? It's not just them - what about you how can you be like that? Now that's the moral problem. Then you think about it as a technical problem. How can you talk about such indecency decently? That is actually how I grew up. It's also a technical ploy. It allows me, as a child, to say “I needed you both” and from that position I'm not being patronising. It's a problem I could only solve at the end of my writing career. It is respectful, especially at the end, when you are speaking with Goja and Goldie; they could be contemporary women. It also says “I will not collude”. Goldie puts her perspective across well. It's something I have been training all my life for, four hours a day, six days a week, to write. Is it possible to see things from a powerless position? You say: “Talking about who deserves to be king, deserves to be queen, deserves to be rich, deserves to be poor, could get very tricky” … and it does. It does. And to maintain that balance so you are not going around shouting “mea culpa”, so you're not glossing over anything, and letting the patterns fall apart and writing an uninspired book. It's not a book I could have written in my youth, not because I didn't think enough or I was not mature but because I was just not a skilled enough writer. Of when you worked in the Indian civil service you say: “It is perhaps true that being my grandfather's grandaughter I could afford to be honest”. What do you mean? I mean not take bribes and not be swayed by other people because I didn't need the money. For example, they couldn't say to me “do this corrupt job or we'll get you transferred”, because I was too well connected; it is in that sense I could afford not to be corrupt and to be honest. In a way, if you were profiting from somebody else's misery and you allowed yourself to really see what you were doing; you wouldn't be able to continue. That was the importance of consciousness raising in the women's movement, once your consciousness is raised, it's very hard to carry on, but as long as it's not, people can do all sorts of things and be very nice for the rest of the time. It's not a novel in any sense that I'm used to. No, it isn't, and it's not an autobiography in any sense that you are used to, but it contains elements of all of these. It's a very individual form. Yes, nothing I ever write fits into anything. I wrote “The Conversations of Cow”: you could call that a novel if you like, but, it's not really, you could call it a political satire, science fiction, an extended fable or a fantasy. Do you identify with Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth or even Salman Rushdie as an Indian writer? Why would I identify with them? I'm nearly 60 for God's sake. No, no, I haven't read any of their books; they are younger than me. I am Indian. I lived there until I was 27 years old. India is culturally a very dense society, it's difficult to grow up there without being “indianised”. I grew up with the traditional Marathi writers - in Marathi not English. I am influenced, as one is, by the air you breathe, the music you listen to, the architecture, the language, to the culture all around. If you really want to categorise me, my mind happens to be that of a fabulist. I mostly write fables and verse, this book is different because it doesn't use donkeys and one-eyed monkeys. It could be called magic realism, because of the conversations with dead people, I suppose. Are there any books or writers you do identify with? Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Ezra Pound; I wrote my dissertation on his Cantos. “I belong to India and to the West. Both belong to me and both reject me”. How does the West reject you now? Because of racism of course, homophobia and sexism too, but even if none of these labels take, any person coming to an environment where other people are established, is an outsider. In the university for example they may say “who asked them to come?” they see you as after their jobs. The Indians have no use for lesbians: if I had stayed there I'd have had to live a life of lies and discretion, which is damaging to a human being because it means admitting that you are something to be ashamed of. It is important to remember that one has been shaped by the very society one has been rejected by. You might be a seventh generation white Australian - I don't know - but you could still feel an outsider because this society has peculiar attitudes towards women. Anyone who is reasonably honest does experience that. Say it simply as a truth, without having to attitudinise about it. Again a matter of trying to see clearly. “As a woman a lesbian and a brown skinned person, am I less than nothing it makes me want to laugh to be nothing is to be free”. Can you say that now? Sometimes, not always. I am as egoistic as the next person is. I get as annoyed as the next person does. It's one of the first lessons of feminism, but we need to hear it again and again - that to be oppressed is not shameful. What is truly shameful is that we do this to others. The glory we attach to power, to the conqueror and the disgrace we attach to those who are oppressed. We are all guilty of it when we have a sneaking admiration for Bill Gates, not because he's clever but because he's so stinking rich! [Laughs heartily] How do you feel about feminism today? Sad. In the late 70s I was teaching A Room of One's Own and I looked at the date of its first publication - 1929. I was teaching it 50 years later and the insights were, and are, still fresh. It is as though we have to keep reinventing the wheel. And why do you think that is the case? There must be a number of reasons. We make a certain amount of progress and then we become complacent and the next generation thinks all the battles have been won, but they haven't been won. We don't realise this until we get a bit older. Then in another 50 years time when things get bad enough, another huge effort will need to be made. It's not just feminism. If you consider that our century is the century of two world wars and the Holocaust it's very difficult to maintain that we are getting any better. Perhaps it all takes longer than we think. Is it because we are divided as feminists? My impression is, feminism isn't divided, as much as submerged and it's because there isn't much happening. Capitalism, technology and economics are more pertinent today. People see themselves as serfs of capitalism – “who would please like not to see themselves as serfs”. Charity and ideals are an important part of your book. It made me think of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi when she said: “'To live the full life … one must have the courage to bear the responsibility of the needs of others … one must want to bear this responsibility”. Is that where you are coming from? Yes, that's the direction, but even though I can't do that, it is my duty as a writer to point in this direction. What was valuable is that Goja and Goldie were there for me - to say “the capacity to love” is such a cliché but to write it, is a technical feat. It's easy with the best will in the world to say things, but it's not enough, to act is often too hard. Some of the themes in this book are platitudes, and the fact that they are platitudes means every one knows them, they might have been repeated over and over again. Writers take the worn out truth and renew it. Bear in mind, the fabulist is closer to the poet. You talk about academic liberalism in the seventies? Yes when I say, “the breast beating white liberal types were common in the universities”. Does that still go on? Oh sure, why not? It's human nature. Don't you see, if I might implicate you, that you and I often fall into this and we have to be careful. We fall into it partly out of niceness and complacency. If one is frightfully well educated, and one is terribly nice to someone who isn't, it can be patronising, and it's so easy to cash in on whatever people are willing to let you cash in on, because most of us are feeling insecure anyway. When people try to turn it on its head it becomes a rather foolish type of inverted snobbery; you used to get this in the women's movement all the time. “Oh you are a black woman I will bow down to you”. It's just a load of rubbish! It's relevant today in Australia with the reconciliation issue. It's very difficult, with the best will in the world. There are emotional and moral pitfalls, one has to stay honest all the time, and that is the bit nobody wants to do, because it's too hard. It means giving up all the perks that you have. The rest of the world says, “you poor idiot”, and the world goes on as it was and continues to worship the people who have power and money. However, each time the effort is made, I think it holds back the forces of darkness, if nothing else. Did you grow up with the Hindu or Christian faith? Liberal Hindu, but the boarding school I went to was Protestant. But if you teach English literature you have to understand Christianity because the language is imbued with it. Language does matter. If you want to be a writer it is what you struggle with all your life. It is the stuff with which you are shaping the experience. The blurb on the back describes the book as part elegy, I wondered about that -'a lament for the dead'? Because an elegy is also praise. My experience of Goja, my experience of Goldie, they are like people who inhabit my head they are who I am - in part, at least, who I am. Is that how you own who you are? That's right and that is when it becomes important. Christine Croyden is a Melbourne writer. Suniti Namjoshi, Goja: An Autobiographical Myth, 2000, Spinifex Press, $22.95