Playing with Saris: Material and Affective Unfoldings of Violence and Resistance in Shailja Patel’s Migritude

Abstract

Shailja Patel’s Migritude engages in strategies of addressing, negotiating, and ultimately opposing violence that all play out along differing visual, textual, and material routes. Migritude can best be described as multi-modal and hybrid; it initially originated as a spoken-word performance and has since metamorphosed and become a conglomeration of art, poetry, and autobiography in book form. It is not only the story of Patel’s own movements across the world, but is also intertwined with her family’s transoceanic migration stories from Gujarat to Nairobi as one possible narrative of the Asian-African diaspora. What lies at the heart of Migritude is a suitcase full of saris which Patel inherited from her mother: working with and through the cloth of the saris, Migritude showcases both female vulnerability and resistance. By transferring the saris’ affective materiality onto the stage and onto the page, Patel engages in processes of visually and physically engaging with the cloth of the sari to excavate stories of violence, trauma, and healing. This essay will outline how Migritude facilitates processes of resistance and of community building via performance, via intermedial and textual strategies, and via the physicality of its stage show. It posits that Migritude can be regarded as a visual and material text that words the oceanic travels of the Indian and African diaspora, and through its textile and textural indebtedness to the violent histories of colonization produces alternative spaces that further the notion of diasporic connectivity and encounter.

Keywords:

• Affect studies
• East African Asian Literature
• migration studies
• new materialism
• Shailja Patel
• sari
• textile studies

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my colleague Baldeep Grewal at Potsdam University for their invaluable input and especially for nudging me in the direction of the Museum of Material Memory, which I have used as an entry point for my discussions in this essay. I was honoured to meet, listen to, learn from, and eat together with Aanchal Malhotra in Delhi in early 2020.

Notes

1 Before Kaya Press published its multi-layered version of the book, the Italian publishing press LietoColle issued a bilingual English/Italian edition under the title MIGRITUDE: An Epic Journey in Four Movements. Part I: When Saris Speak – The Mother (2008), which is no longer available.

2 The word “migritude” also evokes the concepts of Négritude and Coolitude. Both are concerned with the reclamation of previously muted voices and strategies of resistance that oppose the violence of imperialism. For discussions on Négritude, see the philosophical works of Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor. For Coolitude, see Torabully (1992) and Hofmeyr (2010). Chevrier (2004) has referred to post-independence Francophone writers from Sub-Saharan Black Africa and their specific modes of expression as migritude writers; his usage of “la migritude” pre-dates Patel’s. Patel herself has said of her indebtedness to these different intellectual traditions, this “trail of resistance” (quoted in Monegato 2008, 237): “When I coined the term I was looking for a word that would draw from the legacy and traditions of Négritude that reclaimed and celebrated African cultures, black cultures around the world as powerful and central in their own right … I wanted to claim that same power for migrant cultures” (2013).

3 For historical context on the complexities of Indian Ocean textile trade, see Desai (2013), Riello and Roy (2009).

4 Regarding notions of the archive and performance, Taylor (2003, 2012) has contrasted the archive, an official and authorized system of classification and location for storing objects, with the repertoire. The archive preserves a form of knowledge that is linear and rational, whereas “the repertoire, on the other hand, is embodied, ephemeral, requires presence and is a kind of ‘knowing in place’” (2012; Pratt, Johnston, and Banta 2017, 63).

5 Patel contributes to an already existing discourse on the semiotics of dress which challenges easy conflations of women’s clothing and patriarchal, sexist, and Orientalist tropes and which highlights the way gender, caste, and race are produced and circulated. For further discussion, see Grewal and Kaplan (2000), and Ahmed (2011) on Muslim women’s cultural practices such as hijab or burka.

6 What also needs to be addressed in this context, however, is the freedom Patel has to do art with and through the sari; a freedom achieved due to her distance from India as a third-generation Indian immigrant daughter in Kenya, and then once more removed as she – partly – lives and performs in the West. The sari, as closely interwoven with Indian nationalistic, gendered, and caste politics as it is, becomes a more free, loose material in Patel’s hands, as it travels in her suitcase around the world.

7 For an extended discussion of the historical realities of the British involvement in East Africa, see Elkins (2005).

8 This notion of having to earn the right to see, to listen, to engage, returns in one of Migritude’s poems, “Born to a Law” (62–3), which I have quoted at the very beginning of this essay: “before we claim a word, / we steep it / in terror and shit, / in hope and grief, / in labour, endurance, / vision costed out / in decades of our lives. / We have to sweat it and curse it, / pray it and keen it, / crawl it and bleed it / With the very marrow / Of our bones / We have to earn / its meaning.”

9 Asked about the specific target audience at her début show in Berkeley (and if it predominantly encompassed members of the Indian diaspora), Patel remains cognizant of the economic circumstances of how to disseminate her work: “From a marketing point of view, of course we begin by targeting audiences who are likely to relate to the themes – migrants, women, members of the South Asian and African diasporas” (2010, 141). Patel appears well aware of the tension between commodification of the exotic (“the marketing value of ‘exotic’ images that will attract audiences”, 141), and the power of art and imagination, of telling stories. She goes on to argue, however, that from her international tours she has learned “never to make assumptions about who [her] ‘target audience’ should be”, asserting that her “work genuinely crosses all boundaries of race, gender, culture, and even language” (141).