When Shauna Singh Baldwin was born, her mother received telegrams,
and they all said pretty much the same thing: poor thing, you had a
girl. Don’t worry, next time it will be a boy. “So my mother named
me Shanaaz,” Singh Baldwin says, “a Muslim
name that means
‘That of which emperors are proud.’ It was her way of saying,
‘Damn you all.’”
Strong-willed women, girl-children, and their struggle against
patriarchy is something Singh Baldwin understands. Her first novel, What
the Body Remembers (published
in September by Knopf Canada and reviewed on p.59), begins and ends with
the birth of a child, angry that she has been reincarnated once again as
a girl. What is to some merely a circular literary
device –
wherein the epilogue is also a prologue (and vice versa), the birth of
the same soul destined to live the same story – is to Singh Baldwin a
statement of profound importance.
What the Body Remembers begins
in 1937 in Rawalpindi, in the Indian state of Punjab, amid the mounting
tension that precedes partition, 10 years away. The capable Satya (whose
name means “truth”) is over 40 and has given her husband, Sardarji,
no children. So Sardarji, a wealthy Sikh landowner and canal engineer,
takes a second wife, the beautiful Roop. Roop (whose name means
“form” or “body”) is 16 years old and eager to leave her village
and escape the drudgery of women’s work. Satya treats Roop like a
younger sister but secretly hates her, and, as Roop bears Sardarji’s
children, the household is divided by passion and politics, much like
the country around them. The partition metaphor also applies in another,
far more insidious sense: Singh Baldwin’s characters illustrate how
the lives of girls and women are unknown – almost foreign countries
– to the men.
“To write this, I had to pull Sikh women’s history out from under
Sikh men’s history,” Singh Baldwin notes. “It’s depressing,
because Indian
women writers have
been around since the 16th century. We haven’t been silent, just
undiscovered.
“Yet I can’t condemn my own men,” Singh Baldwin sighs over a cup
of chai at Toronto’s Bombay
Palace restaurant. “I may write about them with satire, or with
a certain amusement, but I can’t condemn them. I have to see them in
relation to the dominant
culture. When I see them in relation to that oppression, I have
to forgive them. Unfortunately.”
Singh Baldwin’s fiction has so far stuck to a central theme. Her last
book, the 1996 short-story collection English
Lessons and Other Stories, was a bleak excursion into the lives of
Indian women and their attempts to establish identity in the face of
masculine domination. Some readers have accused Singh Baldwin of being
“sucked in” – in the words of one critic – by Western feminism.
But non-Western culture is not synonymous with female oppression, and
neither is equality of the sexes a new idea. Western society didn’t
invent everything.
“I’m going back to feminism, as far as I’m concerned!” Singh
Baldwin exclaims. “My religion says that women and men are equal.
I’m going back to the Sikh faith and describing the difference between
theory and current practice. The Sikh
religion says
I’m equal, so the men had better do something about their
attitudes!”
Writers of colour are often told by their own communities that to
display internal strife is to betray one’s own people, to open up a
non-dominant culture to further misinterpretation and vilification.
Writers of colour take an enormous risk when they critique their own
cultures, one that leaves them vulnerable to censure from all sides.
“I’m a writer first,” Singh Baldwin states unequivocally. “I
have no nationality as a writer. I do not assume that only the white
community is oppressive. Our entire caste
system in India is
an oppressive society. We need to examine ourselves just as much as the
white community does.
“I’m not a traitor. If I didn’t love my culture, I couldn’t
write about it,” she says. It’s the literary equivalent of the
“this hurts me more than it hurts you” school of discipline. Despite
her criticisms, Singh Baldwin is obviously proud to be Sikh.
The author was born in Montreal, but her parents returned to India soon
after her birth, where they remain. “My father went back to India
because it wasn’t much fun being a Sikh in Canada in the 1960s,”
Singh Baldwin says. “So he went back thinking that was the place he
could wear his turban. Well, ha ha ha. He’s not part of the dominant
[Hindu] culture there either. It’s dangerous to be a Sikh in India,
dangerous to wear a turban.”
Singh Baldwin completed secondary school in India, but moved to
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she still lives, to complete her MBA. She
writes literary
fiction, but also works as an information technology consultant
to banks and data processing companies. She grew up in a country that
boasts a distinctive traditional dress, yet spent most of her childhood
in pants. (“I used to play polo with the army guys. They let me
exercise their horses in the morning. So I was always dressed in
britches.”) These days she wears Sikh dress more often then not, but
she has short hair. (“I cut my hair because otherwise I would have
come out of school with an MBA and been given a secretarial job. I
didn’t wear a nose ring either.”) She is a curious amalgam of three
cultures – Canadian, Indian, and American – and she likes to keep
people guessing.
“I hate purity with a passion. I refuse purity. I’m pure blood, but
my religion is a hybrid – it takes from the Hindu and the Muslim
faiths. I love the hybrid world,” Singh Baldwin says. “I take what I
like and I chuck the rest. Use what I can use. I’m reinventing myself
every day.”
And reinventing what it means to be Canadian too. The author – who is
a Canadian citizen by birth and a landed immigrant to the United States
by marriage – was living in Milwaukee when she won the Saturday
Night/CBC Literary Prize for the short story “Satya,” which
became the first chapter of What the Body Remembers.
“I wrote, ‘Yes, I am Canadian’ on the outside of the envelope,”
Singh Baldwin laughs, “because I didn’t want them to see the return
address and throw my entry out. I also wrote: ‘Nationality:
Canadian’ on the cover page just to make sure.” The Great White
North is, well, a little less white for her loyalty: she is a member of
The Writers’ Union of Canada, and her two books have been published
first by Canadian houses.
Which doesn’t mean that she simplifies her writing for the
non-hyphenated crowd. What
the Body Remembers is
set in India and is written outside the English
language’s Judeo-Christian symbology. The book has a different
cultural context, employs a different set of symbols – Sikh, Muslim,
and Hindu – and wields a different language. Indian terms, often
denoting complicated cultural philosophies, are scattered throughout the
text and left undefined, contrary to accepted practice.
“I think in English,” Singh Baldwin allows.
“But I also think in Punjabi, in Urdu, and in French, depending on
what is the most applicable word. There are problems with English –
one of my characters once said that English has a lot of words for
doughnut, but not enough words for members of one’s family – but
there are problems with Punjabi too. There are problems with every
language. There are problems with every computer language, which is why
we have a plethora of them. You have to know how to map between
databases.
“At the same time, I know the reader may be monolingual, so I have to
make allowances without short-changing the bilingual or mutilingual
reader. My assumed audience is global. That’s why there’s no
glossary, no explaining, no italics for Indian words. They are not
foreign,” Singh Baldwin says firmly. “They are part and parcel of
this universe. People of the dominant community don’t have to explain
anything. So I refuse to explain.”
One thing she will explain is the difficult process of writing, and how
Satya and Roop’s stories affected her emotional and physical
well-being.
“This book moved into my life. It had to be fed in the morning and
cleaned up in the evening,” Singh Baldwin remembers. “My husband
would come into the room when I was writing and not know whether I was
going to be curled up into the fetal position, or in tears. This book
was a whole-body activity. I had to feel it to write it.”
The writing took its toll, but Singh Baldwin had help getting through
it. “I always put on a shawl when I write, because it takes me back to
India. Any shawl will do, as long as it’s around my shoulders. It’s
the symbolism of the shawl: as protection.”
She may need that protection again soon. Singh Baldwin will not talk
about her new projects, except to say that she is going “deeper.”
She’s inviting back that house guest, the difficult one that demands
care and feeding and tears.
Writers, like Satya’s unforgetting soul, just never learn. They are
destined to repeat their path, to stumble around their central theme,
greedy for the knowledge that keeps their eyes wide open, gives them
words that fall to the page. Why, if writing is so hard, does Singh
Baldwin do it?
“To live twice,” she answers. “One life is not enough. I need a
few more.”
