'Opening a Window and Cracking an Egg' Contemporary Women Literature: Questions of self, sexuality and cultural identity

The search of self to the search of a cultural identity, and the self within that identity is indeed a difficult one. In trying to define ourselves in a particular cultural milieu, we find that we have to keep breaking the boundaries.

It is not that we have not made progress. Last winter, in my interactions with a British artist, Clarissa Upchurch, conversation over coffee did turn to women and their sexuality. She talked of past times where women had to fight their sexuality to achieve equality with the likes of men. Today women flaunt their sexuality and wear it on their shoulder like a badge of their liberation, she said. They are comfortable in their skins and are proud to be women.

And yet, there is so much more than this that needs to be dealt with.

The larger issues confronting us of multi-culturism, migration, globalization, war and peace, commercialization of self, importance of girl child, right to education, right to meaningful work, human rights, etc., all come under the purview of women literature today. But the writing is a comment on these issues through the microcosm of the domestic or the family, and how political issues create upheavals in the personal lives of those affected.

Kiran Desai in her book, “The Inheritance of Loss”, which won her the Man Booker Prize for 2006, writes on colonialism, national identity, immigration, cultural displacement, religion and race conflict. All this is entwined in a love story between and Indian girl and her Nepali tutor, along with the reminiscences of an old man, her grandfather.

Sai, the Indian girl, is appalled at where Gyan, her young Nepali tutor lives, when she goes there unexpectedly to make up with him. Class conflict becomes poignantly evident here:

“The house didn’t match Gyan’s talk, his English, his looks, his clothes, or his schooling. It didn’t match his future. Every single thing his family had was going into him and it took ten of them to live like this to produce a boy, combed, educated, their best bet in the big world.”

Kiran Desai also writes about the ire of the Nepalis at their exploitation in their own land:

“In our own country, the country we fight for, we are treated as slaves…”

“Jai Grokha! Jai Gorkha! Jai Gorkha! The crowd screamed, their own blood thrumming, pulsing…”

She talks of the Indian angst against the white man:

“…Bloody white people. They are responsible for all the crimes of the century!”