‘Home was always far away’: intertextual and intermedial poetic appropriations of double consciousness in Sujata Bhatt's Pure Lizard

Abstract

In her poems, Indian-born, American-educated and German-based poet Sujata Bhatt examines the relationships between literature, diaspora and memory. Specifically, she employs a variety of personae (lyrical voices) that bridge continents, languages and identities. In her most recent poetry collection, Pure Lizard [Bhatt, S. 2008. Pure Lizard. Manchester: Carcantet], Bhatt uses intertextual and intermedial poetic strategies to explore and convey the heterogeneity of the Indian diasporic experience. Echoing Stuart Hall's notion of diaspora, I argue that Bhatt's recent poetry collection explores a poetics of diasporic transformation by renegotiating and appropriating W.E.B. Du Bois's term, ‘double consciousness’, as she draws on the idea of the individual who is characterized by several, albeit warring, identities. In this light, I will analyse the ways in which Bhatt's writings as well as her larger poetic project both overcome and re-enact the unsettling predicament of her own as well as her personae's displaced cultural identities.

Keywords:

• intertextuality
• intermediality
• ekphrasis
• double consciousness
• poetry
• South Asian diaspora
• Sujata Bhatt

Notes on contributor

Cecile Sandten holds the Chair of English Literatures at Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany. Her research interests are Postcolonial Theory and Literature, Children's Literature and Literature for Young Adults, Indian English Literature, Black and Asian British Literature, Shakespeare and comparative perspectives, as well as adaptation studies, media transfer and urban studies. Her publications include the monographs Broken Mirrors. Interkulturalität am Beispiel der indischen Lyrikerin Sujata Bhatt (1998), Transcultural Re-Readings of Postcolonial Shakespeare Adaptations (forthcoming) as well as edited collections on Zwischen Kontakt und Konflikt: Stand und Perspektiven der Postkolonialismusforschung (with Gisela Febel 2006), Transkulturelle Begegnungen (with Martina Schrader-Kniffki and Kathleen Starck 2007), Industrialization, Industrial Heritage, De-Industrialization: Literary and Visual Representations of Pittsburgh and Chemnitz (with Evelyne Keitel and Gunter Süß 2010), Stadt der Moderne (with Annika Bauer and Christoph Fasbender 2013) and Detective Fiction and Visual Popular Culture (forthcoming). Her current research focuses on an interdisciplinary project, titled ‘Postcolonialism in the Metropolis’.

Notes

^†The line is taken from Sujata Bhatt's poem ‘She Slipped Through the Suez Canal’ (2008, 72).

1. Bhatt has been living in Germany and thus outside a South Asian community for a very long time, since Germany has only a comparatively low number of migrants from that region.

2. As I have written elsewhere,

[t]he title of her first book, Brunizem (1988a), refers to the dark brown (‘bruni’) prairie soil (Russian ‘zem’) that can be found in Asia, Europe and North America, the three very different worlds of her imagination. In her second and third volumes, Monkey Shadows (1991) and The Stinking Rose (1995), she continues to fuse different cultures, environments and perspectives, writing with equally sensitive comprehension about other species and surroundings. As she has stated in an [unpublished] autobiographical essay, she […] enjoys this hard-won, lucky versatility, this power to comprehend, interpret and thus enter into the depths of almost any environment by writing about it imaginatively. […] In her poetry, Sujata Bhatt uses linguistic variations and multilingual mixings, thereby employing language as a means to represent cultural identity and difference. She does this by interlacing or intercalating her poems with passages in some of the official Indian languages such as Gujarati (mainly) and also Hindi and Sanskrit, though English is her main creative language. She also uses German, Low German and Spanish (mainly single words) in some of her poems. This playful incursion into the poetic text of different languages serves the specific cultural context of each poem, which can be defined as one of the characteristics of her intercultural mode of writing. Further, […] Bhatt acknowledges her indebtedness to a mosaic of writers, both poets and novelists, from various literary and cultural backgrounds and countries. Although most of the writers she names are located in the Western literary tradition, she says that they all trigger Indian memories in her. (Sandten 2000, 99–100)

3. In 1817, a New York journal called the Medical Repository reported the case study of Mary Reynolds, a 19-year-old woman who fell into a deep sleep and woke up without any memory of who she was as well as with a totally different personality. Upon falling into a deep sleep a second time, and waking up again thereafter, she awoke as her old self.

4. For useful definitions of intertextuality see also Plett (1991) or Broich and Pfister (1985).

5. White is the colour of mourning in the Hindu context in India.

6. For an extensive use of food and food metaphors see also Bhatt's third poetry collection The Stinking Rose (1995) in which many poems are dedicated to garlic as the title also implies and on which I have commented on extensively with regard to Bhatt's cultural and intercultural way of playfully appropriating garlic (cf. Sandten 1998b, 147–162).

7. Ahmed writes, ‘the alien […] is not simply the one whom we have failed to identify […] but is the one whom we have already identified in the event of being named as alien’ (2000, 2, my italics).