23 Women’s Life Writings: Caste and Race

Sanchayita Paul Chakraborty

1. Objectives

This chapter has four objectives.

• To introduce Dalit and indigenous women’s life writings to the
• To show how the Dalit and indigenous women’s life writings become a prominent voice in the larger arena of New English
• To explore some representative texts of Dalit and indigenous women writers like Bama’s Karukku, Baby Kamble’s The Prison We Broke, Urmila Pawar’s The Weave of My Life and Maya Angelou’s I know why the Caged Bird Sings.
• To argue how these women’s writings engage with the politics of representation and the presence of the resistive voices in the

2.Introduction

With the arrival of postcolonial theory in the academia in 1980s, a considerable focus has been shifted to exploring literatures in the third world and commonwealth countries, both written in vernacular and English languages. Hence issues of marginalisations, subalternity, transculturation, various indigenous and ethnic positionality immediately drew scholarly attention to reflect on newer writings which are sometimes composed in the form of oral documentation, community folklores, recreation of epical anecdotes and life-writings. The Dalit and indigenous women writings are largely dealing with these issues in diverse forms that expose the dominant power discourses, areas of coercion, exclusion and binary formations. Power in a geometric understanding of sociality invariably imagines a periphery to a distinct powerful Center. This is the same Center that intermittently (re)appears as patriarchy in contrast to gendered subject, upper caste hegemony over the lower caste, and last but not the least, white supremacy ingrained in layers of racial prejudices. Women’s writing emerges as a significant factor in the formation of the English syllabi in the colleges and universities. It has been a neglected terrain for a long time and only some mainstream canonical women’s texts have found their space in the English curricula. But the reformation of the English syllabus after the arrival of New English Literatures and Commonwealth Literatures make us attuned to the women’s writing out of the canonical spaces. These women’s writings come up from the marginalized sections of societies, from black and aboriginal communities and from women writers of the third world countries. These texts do not only reinforce the matrix of difference in understanding the woman question but also it retrieves a large chunk of new literatures hidden from the general readership. These texts sprout up from the everydayness of the women’s lives which are documented in the forms of life writings. The methodology of translation plays a very crucial part here to bring the vernacular texts of the life writings of these marginal women to the larger readership. The inclusive space of the genre of New English Literature helps into incorporating the texts in enlarging the liminality of English literature.

‘Dalit’ and Dalit Women’s Writings

2.2.Postcolonialism,Dalitude and Subalternity 

The central axis of postcolonial theory has been to decenter the Eurocentricity in knowledge paradigms. The imperial project of colonising other countries was successful because of this epistemological underside that helped the economic project achieving its ideological basis. Hence any attempt to resist this Euroecentric bias should begins first at the level of epistemic encounter. Postcolonial theory is precisely about this, to take the phrase from Althusser, aleatory current that constantly contested this cognitive and rationalist reasoning which foregrounded universal knowledge paradigms. Questions of body, affect, performativity, contingency therefore found prominence in the postcolonial theory that predominantly concentrated on areas of ‘difference’, ‘otherness’ and ‘outside’. Dalitude, which has been recently used in some of the writings on Dalit identity, is a direct reference to the political term, Negritude. It mainly talks about the Dalit subjectivity, its caste background that informs the subaltern ontology and the possible markers of resistance. Unlike Negritude, Dalitude speaks of double-colonization, of being subjected to the dual oppression of Colonialism and Brahminism. The self of the ‘Dalit’ is therefore entangled in a much more complex web of power discusses which are institutionally and culturally inflected. The term ‘Dalit’ means a disenfranchisement of the certain section of people from the basic rights, equality and social prestige. Dalits have been subjected to continuous dispossession, stigmatization and subordination in the prevalent economic, political and socio-cultural system. The Dalit women suffer double colonization and subordination as they are subjected to repression and subjugation both by the upper class and upper caste men and women as well as by the Dalit men. The process of dual subversion relegates their presence to the nadir point of marginalization in the social system. Dalit women’s writings voice the resistance against this politics of seclusion and subversion. The following discussion on the Dalit women writers both engage with the re–presentation and representation of the marginal voices and the problematisation of the colonial/Brahminical/patriarchal power formations.

Life Writings, More Than ‘Auto/biography’

Life Writings, within its wide ambit, incorporate autobiographical accounts, testimonies, memoirs, oral histories, confessional and trauma narratives, collective documents of suffering and oppression and personal histories. Thus it projects more than auto/biography. Therefore, the genre of ‘Life Writing’ offers a more flexible and dynamic self-projection of the indigenous and Dalit women more than autobiographies. Dalit Women’s life writings sprout up from their experiential existence. The paradoxical simultaneity of both untouchability and intimate exploitation inform their narratives. As Urmila Pawar in a moment of self-analysis says,

My mother used to weave aaydans, the Marathi generic terms for all things made of bamboo. I find that her act of weaving and my act of writing are organically linked. The weave is similar. It is the weave of pain, suffering and agony that link us.

The everydayness of their constant marginalization, the negation of their identity under the dual stranglehold of upper caste and Dalit patriarchies and their perseverance in the struggle for survival characterize their life writings.

Indigenous Women’s Life Writings

Indigenous women’s life writings on the one hand become a very poignant document of their experiential daily lives where they have to negotiate with the multiple forms of patriarchy, racial discriminations and marginalization. On the other hand, their narrative becomes a resistive voice which defies the dominating politics of representation, thus reclaiming and re- presenting their own tales. Indigenous women’s life writings, especially the Black and Aboriginal writings of Africa, North America and Australia challenge the supremacy of White feminist theorizations by derecognizing the inferiority status ascribed to them in the hierarchised binary opposition. Therefore, through the indigenous women’s writings, alternative feminist theories emerge to engage with the lived realities of oppression, subjugation and dual colonization of the Black and aboriginal women. These indigenous women’s writings also become live commentaries on the community, collective and social groups from a woman’s perspective, thus providing an alternative mode of historicisation.

3. Indigenous Women’s Writing: Maya Angelou

The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of male prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power.

–Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Maya Angelou, born as Marguerite Anne Johnson, became ‘Maya’ in her elder brother Bailey Johnson’s mispronunciation of her name. Maya began her life as a civil activist raging  against racial and patriarchal discrimination which persisted through her life. Later in her long writing career consisting of poems, series of life writings, plays and columns for newspapers, her personal touches and resistive voices gather prominence. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is first of her life writings which were published in 1969. Critically acclaimed, this life writing becomes a powerful testimony from a Southern Black woman against racial, imperial and patriarchal subjugation. Hence, I Know Why the Caged Bird  Sings is a ‘coming-of-age story’ to demonstrate how Maya’s inherent strength of character and literary bent of mind enabled her to move beyond racism and the consequent trauma. The text can also be read as an indigenous woman’s bildungsroman as it maps the growth of a young girl locked up in her experience of racial discrimination, rape, trauma and inferiority complex to a ‘phenomenal woman’, a young unmarried mother with inner strength to resist social taboos, prejudice and patriarchy. Maya’s text resonates with the dominant themes of Black woman’s autobiographies such as the celebration of Black motherhood, significance of family and community, critique of racism, quest for independence and identity and self- survival.

The memory of Maya’s rape at the bare age eight haunts throughout the narrative. But rape is used here as a metaphor of patriarchal oppression. The most pervasive metaphor is of ‘the caged bird’. The symbolical singing of the bird even in an imprisoned state signifies her quest to break the cage and achieve the immanent Black woman’s subjectivity on the face of racism and dual colonization of White supremacy and Black patriarchy.

The title ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ comes from the poem ‘Sympathy’ by Paul Laurence Dunber, who along with William Shakespeare exerts a shaping influence on Maya Angelou’s writing career. In fact, this life writing shows how one can find life in the power of the word and literature to reawaken her own consciousness as a living being. The book begins with the abandonment of three-year old Maya along with her elder brother, Bailey by their parents and their lonely travel like a baggage to their paternal grandmother whom they called ‘Momma’ at Stamps in Arkansas. The early part of the book captures her childhood memories in the Black community and at schools which were tinged with racial discrimination. Maya’s rape by her mother’s boyfriend which made her numb, voiceless and reclusive for a long time , is a turning point of her book. But the subsequent narrative becomes a survival story of Maya beyond the rape, trauma and racism.

Thus, Angelou’s life writing in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings imports a unique perspective in the Black American autobiographies where the Black woman not only retells her own story but also the collective history of her Black community. Angelou was hailed by the writer, Hilton Als as the “pioneers of self-exposure” with an honest revelation of the negativities and personal choices of one’s life. Feminist scholar Maria Lauret praises Maya Angelou as “a role model for Black woman” who, through I know Why the Caged Bird Sings contributes in the “formation of female cultural identity”, woven in the tapestry of the narrative. The undulating flow of the text indicates Maya’s conceptualization of the self “as perpetually in the process of becoming, of dying and being reborn, in all its ramifications”. Therefore, Maya’s narrative, as African-American literature scholar Dolly McPherson points out, is a creative representation of Christian mythology and theology to present the Biblical themes of death, regeneration and rebirth. Maria Lauret also figures out a similitude between Maya’s life writings which Lauret calls “fictions of subjectivity” and “feminist first-person narratives” and fictional first person narratives such as Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room and Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, belonging to the same time frame.

Angelou’s treatment of racism throughout the narrative develops from “helpless rage and indignation to forms of subtle resistance, and finally to outright and active protest.” The theme of racism and resistance against racism provides a thematic unity to otherwise episodic structure of the narrative, subsequently attaining a strong political undertone. As Maya writes in her poem ‘Caged Bird’

The caged bird sings

with a fearful trill

of things unknown

but longed for still and

his tune is heard

on the distant hill

for the caged bird

sings of freedom.

—The final stanza of Maya Angelou’s poem ‘Caged Bird’

The power of word, literacy and intense love for literature are synonomised with the attainment of freedom in Maya’s text. Her constant refuge in the world of books and her self- assertion through writing pay a pivotal role in shaping her indigenous womanhood and in retrieving her subaltern voice.

4. Dalit Woman’s Life Writing: Bama’s Karukku

We who are asleep must open our eyes and look about us. We must not accept the injustice of our enslavement by telling ourselves it is our fate, as if we have no true feelings; we must dare to stand up for change. We must crush all these institutions that use caste to bully us into submission, and demonstrate that among human beings there are none who are high or low. Those who have found their happiness by exploiting us are not going to go easily. It is we who have to place them where they belong and bring about a changed and just society where all are equal. – Bama in Karukku 

The three identities of Dalit, Tamil and Christian intersect together to inform Bama’s life writing, Karukku. The text, in a non-linier narrative structure, captures the progress of life from the childhood to the early adulthood of Bama who is also known as Bama Faustina Soosairaj. From a Dalit feminist standpoint, the text articulates Bama’s attempt to understand the multiple intersecting identities of Dalit, Tamil and Christian and how it has an impact on the oppression and subjugation she had to face. Bama’s life writing is not a factual documentation of the events of her life, rather it becomes a voice of the oppression inherent in her lived reality. Casteist discrimination is an integral part of this lived reality which is not only personal but it has a pervasive presence in her community. Bama’ writing does not present her community under the image of a homogeneous caste identity. Rather she unfurls the discriminating practices through which the community is always already branded with a caste identity. The little narratives of everydayness, like the little Bama playing with her friends, having a good-meal together or the oppression faced by the upper castes and the police enrich her text with an effect of immediacy.

Bama’s life writing retells the drudgeries of servitude her family and community had to face to the upper caste Naickers, substantiating Ambedkar’s definition of caste as the “division of labourers”. Bama writes in Karukku,

 All the time I went to work for the Naickers [upper-caste] I knew I should not touch their goods or chattels; I should never come close to where they were. I should always stand away to one side. These were their rules. I often felt pained and ashamed. But there was nothing that I could do.

Bama’s high school and college life resonates with the same castiest discrimination she had to face in her community. The educational spaces were also tinged with the caste prejudices which made the struggle tougher for Bama for whom the education was hard earned for being a Dalit as well as being a woman. Her constant quest for something substantial to hold on beyond her class, caste and gender identity moved her to join the Christian convent in her twenties, only to discover the multilayered oppression in and outside. Her ultimate resolution in leaving the convent and staying alone in her path reflects her exiled existence outside her community, but it is also a living testimony of the resistance she put on the face of the subjugation of the “triple monsters”-caste, class and gender which intersect together to form a structure of subjugation. Karukku, along with Bama’s other fictional autobiographical works, Sangati (1994), Kusumbukkaran (1996) and Vanmam (2002) voice out the presence of the subaltern woman in the re-presentation of her life-stories.

5. Dalit Woman’s Life Writing: Urmila Pawar’s Aaydan or The Weave of My Life

A Marathi Dalit writer of Konkan district of Maharashtra, Urmila Pawar represents her Dalit feminist voice through her life writing, Aaydan, translated as The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoir in 2003 by Maya Pandit. Urmila was quite conscious of her converging identity of both as a Dalit and a woman and her self-consciousness enables her to retrieve the silent voices from the suppressed peripheries. Besides Daya Pawar, Shantabai Gokhale and Baby Kamble, Urmila Pawar establishes herself as a prominent voice in the emerging genre of Dalit Women’s Life Writings. The term ‘Aaydan’ means the weaving of cane baskets which is one of the key economic activities of the Mahar, a Dalit community. The Mahar was earlier a Hindu community. But following the call of B.R. Ambedkar to renounce Hinduism, the Mahars converted to Buddhism. Urmila is the representative voice of this Mahar community and her memoir in ‘Aaydan’ combines the different strands of personal history, familial history and the community’s history in the weaving of the narrative. To chose the term ‘Aaydan’ as a title of her first life writing, Urmila deliberately establishes a metaphorical relationship between the act of weaving of the cane basket which becomes a representative identity of the Mahar community and the act of writing which reinforces Urmila’s identity as the woman writer. Urmila explains, “My mother used to weave Aaydan and I was writing this book, both were activities of creation of thought and practical reality of life.” For a woman whose mother was engrossed in weaving of cane baskets to provide sustenance to her children after the death of Urmila’s’ father, a scholarship of twelve rupees was a huge achievement which honoured both the mother and the daughter’s struggle for survival. The poignant moment comes alive in Urmila’s language which also shed a mellow light on the mother-daughter relationship:

Aye was weaving her baskets as usual. She did not see me when I crossed her and entered the house. Her face looked worried. She was engrossed in her own thoughts and her fingers flew over the basket. Going to her, I told her about the scholarship and held the twelve rupees before her. Suddenly her face lit up with a sunny smile and eyes sparkled.

The whole narrative manifests how the multilayered discrimination and domination operated in multiple levels to subvert woman’s identity across generations. The text does not only documents the surmounting struggle to overcome personal tragedies, but it also becomes a testimony of how this process of becoming a Dalit woman writer is interlarded with a process of awakening consciousness in the post-Ambedkaraite movement era. In the book, We Also Made History: Women in Ambedkarite Movement, Urmila Pawar along with Meenakshi Moon recorded the experiences of the Dalit women who participated in the Ambedkarite movement in forms of interviews. The Weave of My Life records Urmila’s own experience as a Dalit woman. Sharmila Rege, another important Dalit feminist critic, rightly points out that The Weave of My Life is not an autobiography; rather it is “historical narrative of experience”. As a Dalit woman, a Dalit writer and a Dalit feminist activist, Urmila Pawar responds against the structure of subjugation formed by the intersection of caste, class and gender discriminations. Thus the text becomes both a self-revelation and a powerful mode of resistance.

6. Dalit Woman’s Life Writing: Baby Kamble’s The Prison We Broke

Baby Kamble’s Marathi text Jina Amucha, originally published in 1982 and translated in English by Maya Pandit in 2009 as The Prison We Broke is another Life Writing by a Dalit woman writer against the casteism and patriarchy. On the one hand, the text, like other Dalit women’s life writings, represents the oppressions of the Dalit by the upper castes and the insurmountable struggle of the Dalits on the face of this oppression to survive. On the other hand, the text delves deep into the domination of the Dalit women in and outside the family and the community. Kamble shows how the Dalit woman is subjected to dual stranglehold- the domination exerted by both the upper caste men and women and the subjugation by the Dalit men within family and community. Thus Baby Kamble’s narrative is a powerful response against the casteist discrimination by the upper caste and it also raises the restive voice against the multiple patriarchies inherent in the larger socio-political, economic and cultural set up in India. The text probes into the ignorance, humiliation and poverty of the Mahars, a Dalit community in Maharashtra to which Baby Kamble belongs. Her life writing becomes a collective life writing of the Mahars as she cannot detach her own identity from her community identity. She writes, I wrote about what my community experienced. The suffering of my people became my own suffering. Their experiences became mine. So I really find it very difficult to think of myself outside of my community.

The unquestionable obedience to the upper caste masters, the internalization of servitude, the unending poverty, the overwhelming superstition, and the life lived on left-overs characterize the Mahar’s life. Kamble’s narrative offers a biting consciousness of these demeaning conditions of the Mahars. The text becomes more poignant when it moves to portray the everydayness of the Mahar women. As a Mahar woman herself, Baby Kamble suffers the harsh patriarchal treatment by her husband and her in-laws. The poverty is doubled in a Mahar woman’s life as besides overwhelming household work, the Mahar woman had to sell woods to feed her children, often remaining unfed for days.

Amidst this darkness of dual domination, Baby Kamble only finds the light of solace in Ambedkar. Her life writing speaks volume of the Ambedkarite influence in her life and as well as among the Mahar community members. Ambedkar urged them to move against the blind superstition and protest against the atrocities of the upper caste. He showed them the way to survive through the literacy of the Mahar children. Baby Kamble along with her relatives also actively participated in the Ambedkarite movement, motivated to live a life of dignity in spite of the scores of oppression and negation. May be this Ambedkarite philosophy empowered Kamble and her friends to survive the casteist discrimination even in the educational spaces and to attain the power of words. Baby Kamble’s life writing is one of the first Dalit Women’s life writings and it manifests how the Dalit woman reclaims the language to voice against the casteist discrimination and how their self-revelation in the form of life writing retrieves the marginalized presence.

7. What We Have Learned… 

These polyphonous marginal women voices represent diverse binary formulations to first contest their structural limits and secondly, to offer a whole different discourse of everyday life, myriad forms of struggle and negotiation, contradictory and contingent modalities of living in a conjunctural space of oppositional forces. Hence, the postcolonial frame can both help decipher these voices, their different materialities, it can also help us from transcending the notion of binary and see life as a continuum where goodness is not necessarily opposed to evil, rather these are separate and discrete moments in a singular linearity of life comprised of tribulation and triumphs, trials and jubilation. On the other side, Dalit women writings bring to the board a third category of gender, therefore takes the critique to a trifurcated register of Colonial-Brahminist-Patriarchal centricity. Subalternity of dalit women self is overdetermined within this triangular formation. What we have seen in these fictions and life writings is how life is lived in its everyday moments of becoming, its contingent and tangential interconnection with other lived and non-lived entities. The question of domination and exclusion are an integral part of that essential and complex weave of life that matures and mutates in the face of all oddities.