Women Writers At Home And Abroad: Changing Notions of Identity And Belongingness

Women Writers At Home And Abroad: In the early 90s, books like Famous Five by Enid Blyton were widely available in libraries at Durbar in South Africa. Author Shubnum Khan grew there, where she read those adventure books and passionately argued about them. Parallelly, she became an audience to her grandfather's colourful tales from India, the country which he left at the age of 12 and moved to South Africa. Like most kids in India, she too heard The Fox and the Grapes Story.

These stories influenced the kind of image she cultivated as a kid which later influenced her writings as an adult. As the fourth daughter of a quintessential Indian family, when she expressed the desire to travel, it was shut down with “how can you travel alone”.

Instead of letting her dream of travelling go, she pursued harder and finally travelled alone at the age of 27. There started a journey of writing a lot of her books about her travelling to different places and reacting to them. Khan’s first novel Onion Tears was shortlisted by the Penguin Prize for African Writing and she holds a Masters degree in English.

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Like her many women writers have dealt with identity and gender as a creative force for someone living far from home and narrating their stories. Whether it be influenced by tales or personal situations from their home, women have been telling stories through the gendered lens.

Shubnum Khan was joined by writers like Selma Carvalho from London, who has written three non-fiction books revolving around themes of migration, memory and belonging and  Rijula Das from Wellington in New Zealand, who has done a PhD in creative writing and written the book A Death in Shonagachhi. All three of them discuss their novels, identity and struggle to identify the nuances of writing on gender with Deepshikha Chakravarti, senior editor at SheThePeople in a segment of Women Writers at Home and Abroad.

Women Writers Home And Abroad

Selma Carvalho's Sisterhoods of Swan has many women characters of different shades. The main character is a first-generation immigrant, who is the mother and a second-generation immigrant, who is the daughter.

Her novel is about belongingness with a main component of the class, as it influences the kind of experience one has as an immigrant. The novel addresses the changing British-Asian identity. Carvalho addresses questions like, how do we belong to the country we inhabit? How do we belong to its public spaces, how do we belong to its politics and landscape? However, she admits the equations for the second generation change as they are more assimilated.

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Carvalho considers herself as a Black Asian and Minority Ethnic and believes with  such identity comes advantages and limitations.

She says “when you pigeonhole people like that there is also a subtle expectation that a certain type of writing will emerge from this community and that is unsettling because as a writer you want to explore as many diverse topics, areas and emotions as you can." While adding, “Personally, I am a writer first and I have my own experiences which are unique and hopefully that is what I bring to my writing.”

Single Mother As An Identity

Women have encountered a loss of sexual agency over the last decade and single parenthood is one of them. Single mothers struggle with their identity in the face of new challenges uncoiled in a new land.

While men usually move on with their lives, it is not easy for single mothers. Selma highlights the underlying financial perils and disruption in the life of a woman who has shifted their entire life into a new space.

By being a single mother, the identity as an Asian does not come into play as women across the spectrum be it English, Pakistani, Indian face this difficulty of single parenthood. This still remains an unresolved issue and according to Selma, writing is all about that and how she grapples with it.

Sexuality and Agency

Talking about sexuality and agency Rijula Das author of  A Death in Shonagachhi elaborated that Shonagachhi is considered a red light area in Kolkata which houses sex workers and their families in a huge settlement. The book takes a deep dive into the topic of agency and choice.

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“It is a lot more complex in people that at first glance appear oppressed and are and that you do not have to be a sex worker against your will. Honestly, you do not have a sexual agency if you are a wife and a mother without any financial means of sustaining yourselves, not many wives and mothers in traditional Indian societies have sexual agency,” Das said. According to Das, one does not have to be completely marginalised to lack sexual agency.

Although Das wrote this book sitting away from Kolkata. Talking about how the distance from one's home changes the writing process, Das said that the creative lens is formed way before the process of writing a book begins.

"It's all sort of churning somewhere in the background. All of us had gone away and come back home or not, but who we are as artists travel with us. As novelists, we are working in a lag and I am definitely 15 years behind emotionally in my artistic lens. I cannot write about something that happened to me yesterday," Das said.

Experiences Shape Ideas

The book How I Accidentally Became The Global Stock Photo too is a snippet of what happened to Khan when she was young. Khan was part of a photoshoot and unknowingly gave consent to the use of that image as a stock photo. Years later she came across that image in an advert for immigrants coming into Canada. It was found by her friend in Canada and passed on to her.

It was on that day she came to know that her photo has been used in multiple adverts across the globe and she was unknowingly and without any profit was advertising tourism in Cambodia and anti-acne, after pregnancy products in the United Kingdom. Later, after speaking with the photographer who clicked the pictures, she came to know that she signed a legal paper with the person on her picture being used as a stock photo.

"It was overwhelming, I was young and I thought it was my fault and stupidity. Over the years, as I developed, I realised that it is a bigger problem. White photographers who are doing this brown and black women and are exploiting them. For me sharing this story was to inform other girls that you should be aware of what you are signing for," Khan said.

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For women writers writing their stories away from the comfort of the homeland, the process of writing does change a little and gets influenced by their lived experiences, place of work and childhood nostalgia. Das grew up in a Bengal with the Communist party as a ruling party and the Russian, Ukrainian children stories translated into Bengali left a deep mark in her creative ideas while writing too.

Amidst influences like holding on to one's intersectional identity and gender, the writing of each of these authors develop into a storytelling format. If for Carvalho it is exploring the lives of women immigrants and single mothers in uprooted households, for Khan it is about reflecting on her thoughts on a place she calls a second home.

Authors develop over time and some by the end of finishing a book. Khan initially wanted to dedicate her book to her grandfather and the tales he inspired her creative writing with, but by the end of it, she developed and recognised her dream to travel and write. She dedicated it to all the women who dream because "just keep dreaming if you stop then you will be stuck with what society tells you to do."