Leaving
Aloo’s migration is propelled by both “push” and “pull” factors – a rude refusal of the fulfilment of his dreams in the “homeland” coupled with rosy dreams beckoning from America. Drawing on (and adapting it to the “diasporic” context) Spivak’s reading of the Tagore story, “Didi” , in “The Burden of English” , we may say that while Aloo is pushed into a “dynamic (diasporic) future”, his mother remains in a “static culture”; however, such an analysis must be complemented by a proper understanding of the emotional complexities woven into the fabric of the family. The mother does not want to deny her son the passage into the diasporic future, but she also knows that the “leaving” would be a leaving for ever: the son’s promise of return is utterly fragile. It’s on the sacrifice of her “dynamic future”(through remarriage after her husband’s death) that the very possibility of the son’s passage into a glorious diasporic future is based. So, the son does not leave only a place, but also a time-it is, in a very complex sense, a symbolic ‘matricide’ that is, as Julia Kristeva points out, indispensable for the emergence of the male individual as a “subject” in the patriarchal order. The emergence of the diasporic male subject is inextricably linked with the abandonment of a past that is coterminous with the mother’s sacrifices and compromises with life made for the offspring.
Loose Ends
In this story, Mukherjee casts an oblique light on the diasporic people from the perspective of the dark world of the mafia and hired assassins in America. Jeb’s and Jonda’s relationship collapses; Jeb is entrapped in the labyrinth of the underworld, while Jonda fails to get an employment at the “turbaned man’s” establishment. On the other hand, the Patels are enjoying a sunny and happy togetherness which deepens the envy and exasperation of Jeb. Here we may dwell on Zygmunt Bauman’s speculations on the ‘stranger’ in the age of globalization. As he rightly observes, the nation-states are no more able to offer their subjects individual security, specially economic stability, and this instability in the fragile ontology of the postmodern state is what leads to the mythologization of a collective insecurity which operates on the basis of the hostility towards the strangers. The Cuban Chavez or the Indian Patels enjoying joie de vivre are the political “Others” of a collective self that has become fragile, fragmentary, chaotic, thanks to the underside of the global economy filled with- to quote Jeb’s expression-“snakeshit”.
Squatter
The sheer physicality of the process of acclimatization in the host country that is essential for the immigrant’s adaptation is foregrounded in this ostensibly humorous narrative. As the boys rightly surmise, Nariman’s funny tales are never simply funny – acutely poised between humour and satire , the story of Sarosh is both a critique of the immigrant’s obsession with adaptation and that of the mythic multicultural “mosaic” of Canada. Sarosh is a failed immigrant, finally returning to the homeland that is “real” and would never(alas) obtain the “imaginary” status for him. The story is a narrative of a malady, for which there can be only Dr. No-Ilaaz, no remedy. The problem is not merely that of a lavatorial inconvenience, but the very hostility to the “foreigner” (or the “ethnic”) underlying the multicultural facade of Canada- the unadaptable immigrant is fired by the supervisor. There is the constant play of double meaning on the word, “squatter”- it’s not just associated with the lavatorial ordeals of Sarosh; rather, it’s the overt commentary on the Canadian attitude to the Third World immigrants who are seen as “squatters”, the unwanted ones taking possession of the country. We are not just offered glimpses of the lavatorial problems of Sarosh but rather led into the lavatory of the discourse of the multicultural mosaic, through a narrative cast in the guise of a cautionary tale to the young people throbbing with “diasporic” aspirations.
-----Anway Mukhopadhyay

Blossom

"She had the power to see and the power to fight;she had the power to feel pain and the power to heal."

"Blossom" by Dionne Brand is a story of a woman whose distrust of whites is not based on some personal craziness of hers,it is based on historical practice and historical events that place her as a black woman in the world at that point of time.

The figure of a West Indian domestic is treated by Brand in a radically different way,much more militant and politically oriented.In "Blossom"-Priestess of Oya,Goddess of Winds, Storms and Waterfalls,the eponymous character,Blossom, is also a new immigrant in Toronto and works as a domestic in order to survive.She enters a new world where she is jilted by a man,baby sits for whites in oriole,tries to learn to type and also becomes a secretary.She also tries to sell old furniture and so as to earn fast money she also joins the pyramid scheme,but she ultimately gets cheated by her girlfriend Fancy Girl.She finds herself surrounded by loneliness all around.Later,in the story she works for a doctor.Blossom makes her struggle against sexual and racial discrimination heard loud and clear ,following her employer's attempt to rape her.Blossom also frees herself from her exploiting husband,Victor.

Blossom's real struggle however leads her back to ancestral spirits.She is a woman of mighty cresilience and quick action.This is seen when Blossom decides to move out of her employers house and chooses her own dwelling place(in spirituality).She refuses to play the part of the hermit crab,thinking "Living wasn't just for slaving...harder you work,the less you have..."

She has buoyancy.She never thinks of dying and her anger is the anger about silence and injustice...The whites in the story are not Blossom's only antagonists ,though the whites might read the story that way.What Blossom hates is the suffering of black people and her hatred turned her into the priestess of Oya,in whose presence she becomes a" warrior knife" and "not even snarky white people could keep Blossom under".


Archna Olive Toppo
PG I

MARIGOLDS

Mr Chetram's very existence reverberates with the “...the history of this strife,-this longing to attain self conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better truer self”; W.E.B Du Bois, The Souls Of Black Folk. Incarcerated by claustrophobia, away from home , his life is punctuated by misery,squalor and sordidness. The angst of the migrant, entrapped in an alien land, often surfaces in the sudden acts of violence. An attempt to reassert his existence as a human being, in the dystopia of stasis Chetram is seen to destructively break the doll's head and even beat up his wife unnecessarily towards the end. Chetram's enunciation of the melancholy encompassing “The incurable distress of a vacant,bright Sunday!” turns our gaze to the much similar monotony of Jimmy's(Look Back In Anger) life prompting him to resort to anger and resentment “God how I hate Sundays!.......A few more hours and another week gone. Our youth is slipping away.” It is the emptiness of a nonfunctional life that instills morbidity in both these characters.The atmosphere of chaos and discord is occasionally painted with the positive images of the “school garden” and the dream of a “vast, open field of heavily blowing marigolds”. The 'marigolds' symbolize a deep yearning to escape from the limbo of nonexistence,of inaction. However, the act of mouthing the flower even before his wife could know about it brings about a crashing of the unrealized moment of the dream scape. Thudded into a realm of confusion, unable to associate with the “imaginary homeland”...”Silence” is his “secret weapon”.

Sayanti Mukherjee

PG I

Marigolds

Subramani’s Marigolds constructs a man, who is desperately attempting to comprehend and negotiate the “fetid” bleakness of his life, from a postcolonial Fijian girmit vantage point. Chetram’s experiences, however, are representative of universal anguish and ennui of modern existence. In this existential realm of limbo or “self-made prison”, there is “nothing to be done” (Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett) and there is an understanding of the fact that “words are never concerned with truth, never with adequate expression” (On Truth and Lies in an Extra-moral Sense, Friedrich Nietzsche). The collapse of communication and activities inevitably leads to a breakdown of relationships, as Chetram’s wife “pulls the orhini over her head” to shield herself from his gaze; his mother only exists to tease him with her insanity; his quiet brother resists the “tremors of brotherly love” that Chetram feels; and, his precocious nieces despise him for being old.

In the postcolonial imagination, possessing a house symbolizes the purest indicator of forging a positive identity and a contented life, as has been seen in A House for Mr Biswas. Yet, in this story, even after building a house of his own, Chetram is denied any scope of private redemption through the motif of a “dried-up flower bed” – an emblem of nihilistic frustration of life energy, personal desires and domestic harmony. However, what proves to be especially catastrophic is Chetram’s attempt at “suppressing all aggression”. Herein, the numerous references to toilet activities in the story sardonically point at the mislaid release of psychological repressions through visceral functions of the body. Though, Chetram occasionally finds rescue from these tormenting anxieties of his repressed inner life through dreams, for the most part, he suffers, surrenders and even embraces the futility of his life. Even his beautiful Felliniesque dream of flying is unceremoniously terminated by the “reproaches from the shadow”. This shadow signifies a postmodern fragmentation of the self and the creation of an alter ego. Unfortunately, in the case of Chetram, his alter ego is the product of his darkest instincts that express itself in sudden bouts of irrational violence and cruelty, like breaking the head of a doll or mouthing flowers in a fit of insecure rage. Chetram’s postmodern angst proves to be doubly painful, in the context of the bitter “historical basis” of his girmit reality. Thus, his aggressive activities are directed towards his wife, signifying a subaltern’s Will to Power that seeks validation by subjugating other social and cultural groups that are further marginalized than him. Though Chetram attempts desperately to avert a total union with his alter ego, the experience of being overlooked by his peers and mocked by his students finally sends him to the precipice of a dizzying realization that his “whole existence has been in bad faith”. All of Chetram’s inner tensions are further released by alcohol and he tumbles into a point of no return. The implications are devastating; in spite of his attempts to “run”, the shadow of his alter ego – “a wiry creature in a hippie blouse” – has finally caught up to him. This can only have disastrous consequences, as Chetram loses all his deference for family values, culminating in his final brutal abuse of his wife. The mock “serenity” has finally gone from their days, leading to the ominous realization that “There is no alternate life: a hundred years of history on these islands has resulted in wilderness and distress”.

Abira Nath

PG I

Canadian Experience

Standing before the oval-shaped mirror, barely managing to see himself, the protagonist of Austin Clarke’s ‘Canadian Experience’ stood and simply laughed at himself; laughed at the “morbidness of his own thoughts” as the author writes. For a man, who migrates to another country leaving behind an apparently prosperous life on the Barbadian plantation of his homeland, in search of better prospects, morbidity is all that this alien life has to offer him. Being torn apart by a crisis of identity as a black man in a white land, he lives in penury with the dreams of a brighter future shattered. His ‘otherness’ has not just turned him into an alien but has ripped his self esteem apart. It is only his own laughter that helps him get through the ironies of reality—a reality consisting only of disappointments. Even the actress next door with “cold sores” on her spine faces a similar predicament of trying to make her ends meet by going for auditions one after the other and taking long baths just to make sure she looks just right cause “you never know what the directors are going to ask you to do.” This statement gives us a glimpse of the ugliness of reality that even this young actress has to face to find a ‘room of one’s own’—to quote Virginia Woolf.

The man is caught in a tussle with himself as the elevator goes up and down. The corporate woman he sees in the fourteenth floor and the flowers and the floor in its entirety intimidates him and paralyses him with fear. He is unable to bring himself to attend the interview because of the fear of rejection—the same rejection that he deals with in his everyday life. Ultimately he is seen standing at the train station looking at the oncoming train and the author takes a full circle by bringing us back to the same reflection that the man had seen of himself, of himself in the eyes of the driver and we are left to draw our own conclusions when we are told that he simply “steps off the platform”---maybe making us aware of the dreadful consequence of a ruthless reality.

Ishita Chakravarty

PG II

Blossom and Marigold

Blossom

She upholds the diasporic experiences of a female black emigrant which is doubly painful due to the twofold struggle,to cope with the material and spiritual insecurities of exile and at the same time to fulfill the demands of family and work.In her fight against “Suffering” she refuses to be a silent and docile victim of a white man’s sexual abuse and also to be economically and emotionally exploited by a black husband.Being separated from her “homeland” and also from the white Canadian community this “Suffering” represents the “double-consciousness”(W.E.B Du Bois,The Souls of Black Folk).On one hand she has to escape from the gaze of her white “boss-man” who perceive her as a sex object and on the other she has to cope with her poverty-stricken life and also to fulfill her desire to get settled in a family life,like any other Trinidadian woman.W.E.B Du Bois states in The Souls Of Black Folk that such “double aims” result in the shattering of “courage and faith and deeds”.However,when Blossom faced this she resorted to her nativity and returned back to that forefather of Caryl Phillips’ Crossing the River.This forefather who is Africa itself,connects with her through that mother language which had been long forgotten.This connection also imparts her some weapons of protest to fight.

Like Afua Cooper’s Negro Cemeteries Dionne Brand’s Blossom acknowledges and re-establishes native African culture,exhibiting her culture pride. “Obeah”,previously considered to be malignant is redefined here and used as a weapon of protest,much like in V.S Naipaul’s The Suffrage Of Elvira,transforming her from an ordinary voiceless Black emigrant to Oya,a warrior spirit and also a spirit of transition.Again,like in Afua Cooper’s Woman in Wail Brand has used dance to express repressed emotions and as Blossom presents “a new way of thinking/a new way of living”.

In her shift from a phase of resistance against exploitation to that of a self-assertion Blossom resembles the history of the “Black Atlantic” where she emerges out of her momentary identity crisis,blankness and hopelessness to “the new negro” (The New Negro,Alaine Locke).She raises her voice against enslavement and stereotyping,subverting the image of servility and inferiority.

Marigold, the other face of Blossom.

The “double-aims” of Blossom is also carried on in Marigold through Mr.Chetram.Though like Blossom he faces an identity crisis,unlike her Mr.Chetram could not hear a nativist call back from his “homeland”.His hyphenated identity pushed him into a “double-consciousness”(W.E.B Du Bois,The Souls of Black Folk) where he can not structure his life to normalcy as he feels estranged from everyone,even his wife and mother.While the warrior spirit of Oya within her made the female black self “blossom”,the “marigold” dreams of Mr.Chetram could not finally be”afloat” out of the “labyrinth”.While the former had fought for her emancipation,the latter always lied “to hold,to maintain serenity,accepting countless humiliations without rebelling,suppressing all aggression out of fear…”.However,it will not be right to say Chetram had no freedom et all as Jean-Paul Sartre states that freedom is the amount to make choices and not being able to avoid making choices and Chetram made the choice to surrender to “humiliations”.He was too preoccupied with “the look” of others (Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness) and the existential angst in him make him hugely conscious of what others feel for him or how they perceive him,compelling him to stand “alone in the staff room toilet”.In Being and Nothingness(chapter III),Sartre states that an escape from anguish is possible through action-oriented constructs such as visions and here Chetram’s dream of marigolds is his flee from a state of dystopia which do not lead him to any meaningful end.Instead he meets “failed dreams of completion” (Sartre) where all his efforts to transcend are doomed to “nothingness”.Though he rigourously tried to force order onto nothingness,ultimately his “whole existence”succumbs into a “bad faith”.Such experiences of recurring terror,loss and unsettlement result in discrepant temporalities which permanently eradicated “serenity” from Chetram’s life.He is forever entrapped in a life where freedom will never come,where nothing happens (as in George Lamming’s The Emigrants) except for some “futile gesture.”

Debanjana Nayek

PG I

Blossom

Dionne Brand’s Blossom: Priestess of Oya, Goddess of winds, storms and waterfall, tells the story of Blossom, a Trinidadian woman who maps out a mystical life, freeing herself from the pangs of the “nothing ain’t breaking” despair of the life in Canada. The story begins with a mystical and supernatural strain, where we learn that Blossom’s place is the "obeah house". Blossom had an indomitable spirit, “nothing not even snarky white people could keep [her] under”, she keeps trying to form a secure life for herself in the unknown land, takes courses to help her find work and also baby-sits. In spite of constantly failing, facing hardships like white rapists as employers she doesn’t allow her spirit to be shaken. Finally after continuing for ten years, at the age of thirty-six she decides to “figure out she life”. Blossom suddenly feels very tired and old. She discovers the uselessness of her marriage to Victor and of her life of hardships and “nothing shaking”. The sudden realization of the void and the nothingness of her life shake her and the violent rage and repressed emotions and desire bursts forth, breaking her. She screams and cries uncontrollably, but gets a grip on herself and turns to spirituality to guide her through.

Blossom creates a bifocal perspective, not only is she a Black immigrant but also a female. Her repeated failure to create a life for herself makes her create a powerful alter ego. This new self which she embraces is drawn from her native Trinidadian roots- its language and its beliefs, “Oya was a big spirit Blossom known from home.” Oya the Goddess of the winds, storm and waterfalls possesses her. Oya helps her view the traumatic life lead by the Black people. The knowledge strengthens and helps her rise above her grief. She enters Oya‘s “lovely womb of strength and fearlessness”. The transformation in her is marked by the way she dresses in bright colours-yellow and red, symbolizing joy and war against suffering. The Apollonian-Dionysian juxtaposition is seen in her, where she speaks in native African tongues, liberating her self from the cruel world, drawing in the strength from the Goddess Oya. Blossom entwines her powerless self with the powerful warrior Goddess-uniting the sacred and feminine in her. She becomes a force with the "power to fight, power to feel pain and the power to heal." The transformation in her, her understanding of the plight of Black people and her escape into trance like state helps her earn “fame as a obeah woman”. She rises above the marginalization and the vacuum which represented her life in Canada to an independent powerful woman who learns to “live peaceful” and have “speakeasy business”.

The city beyond its social, historical and political dimensions and its role as a crucible, offers Blossom an ideal projecting canvas for the construction of a self-image. The cityscape provides the opportunity to recompose the inner and aesthetic space, mapping out new territories for the self. Blossom's double-consciousness(Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B DuBois) helps her balance her identity as the Black immigrant and the powerful Oya and enables her to create her new self.

Suchismita Dattagupta

PG II