ADDRESSING OPPRESSION IN LITERATURE

Abstract

Postmodernist theory and practice tend to turn truth into an unreliable construction and to relativize the validity of commitment and protest within literature. This paper analyses the specific strategies used by certain Indian or Indo‐Anglian writers to denounce bigotry and oppression and pay homage to resistance, without glorifying or romanticizing it: strategies such as irony and irreverence, the humanization of perpetrators of crime and the refusal always to place readers into comfortable superior positions of anger and indignation. A retrieved, reclaimed and defended truth, however relative and incomplete, is better than no truth at all, and much better than a lying, official “Truth”. The courageous, passionate stance of committed writers who put their ideals above their fear for their own lives is a comforting feature within the postmodernist intellectual landscape of cynicism and nihilism.

Keywords:

• strategies of irreverence
• humanizing the perpetrator
• fundamentalist terror
• Rushdie
• Devi
• Aslam
• Saraogi

Notes

1 Mahasweta Devi writes in Bengali and here the references are to the French translation. The few quotations given here are my own translation into English. “Draupadi” was first published in 1978 and “Murti” [The Statue] in 1979.

2 This opinion was stated during a seminar held in Cambridge by the British Council, in July 2005.

3 A chilling detail that is reminiscent of Popeye’s use of a corn cob as a replacement phallus in William Faulkner’s Sanctuary.

4 The choice of weapons becomes almost a leitmotiv: “His weapon of choice had always been the knife” (Shalimar 273); “The arrow was her weapon of choice” (6); “The arrow was her weapon of choice” (397).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Catherine Pesso‐Miquel

Catherine Pesso‐Miquel studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Fontenay‐aux‐Roses and at the University of the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. She was an Assistant Professor for 10 years at the Sorbonne and is currently a Professor of Anglophone Literature at the University Lumière in Lyon, France. She is the author of books and articles on postmodernist and postcolonial novels in English.