The Vintage Book of International Lesbian Fiction

by Naomi Holoch

  “Then you are one of the monarchs of the djinn?” I asked eagerly. “Why do you not bring me treasures and riches as we hear about in fables when a human takes as sister her companion among the djinn?”

  She laughed at my words, shaking her golden hair, which was like dazzling threads of light. She whispered to me, coquettishly: “How greedy is mankind! Are not the pleasures of the body enough? Were I to come to you with wealth we would both die consumed by fire.”

  “No, no,” I called out in alarm. “God forbid that I should ask for unlawful wealth. I merely asked it of you as a test, that it might be positive proof that I am not imagining things and living in dreams.”

  She said: “And do intelligent humans have to have something tangible as evidence? By God, do you not believe in His ability to create worlds and living beings? Do you not know that you have an existence in worlds other than that of matter and the transitory? Fine, since you ask for proof, come close to me and my caresses will put vitality back into your limbs. You will retain your youth. I shall give you abiding youth and the delights of love—and they are more precious than wealth in the world of man. How many fortunes have women spent in quest of them? As for me I shall feed from the poisons of your desire, the exhalations of your burning passion, for that is my nourishment and through it I live.”

  “I thought that your union with me was for love, not for nourishment and the perpetuation of youth and vigor,” I said in amazement.

  “And is sex anything but food for the body and an interaction in union and love?” she said. “Is it not this that makes human beings happy and is the secret of feeling joy and elation?”

  She stretched out her radiant hand to my body, passing over it like the sun’s rays and discharging into it warmth and a sensation of languor.

  “I am ill,” I said. “I am ill. I am ill,” I kept repeating. When he heard me my husband brought the doctor, who said: “High blood pressure, heart trouble, nervous depression.” Having prescribed various medicaments he left. The stupidity of doctors! My doctor did not know that he was describing the symptoms of love, did not even know it was from love I was suffering. Yet I knew my illness and the secret of my cure. I showed my husband the enlarged hole in the wall and once again he stopped it up. We then carried the bed to another corner.

  After some days had passed I found another hole alongside my bed. My beloved came and whispered to me: “Why are you so coy and flee from me, my bride? Is it fear of your being rebuffed or is it from aversion? Are you not happy with our being together? Why do you want for us to be apart?”

  “I am in agony,” I whispered back. “Your love is so intense and the desire to enjoy you so consuming. I am frightened I shall feel that I am tumbling down into a bottomless pit and being destroyed.”

  “My beloved,” she said. “I shall only appear to you in beauty’s most immaculate form.”

  “But it is natural for you to be a man,” I said in a precipitate outburst, “seeing that you are so determined to have a love affair with me.”

  “Perfect beauty is to be found only in women,” she said, “so yield to me and I shall let you taste undreamed-of happiness; I shall guide you to worlds possessed of such beauty as you have never imagined.”

  She stretched out her fingers to caress me, while her delicate mouth sucked in the poisons of my desire and exhaled the nectar of my ecstasy, carrying me off into a trance of delicious happiness.

  After that we began the most pleasurable of love affairs, wandering together in worlds and living on horizons of dazzling beauty, a world fashioned of jewels, a world whose every moment was radiant with light and formed a thousand shapes, a thousand colors.

  As for the opening in the wall, I no longer took any notice. I no longer complained of feeling ill; in fact there burned within me abounding vitality. Sometimes I would bring a handful of wormwood and, by way of jest, would stop up the crack, just as the beloved teases her lover and closes the window in his face that, ablaze with desire for her, he may hasten to the door. After that I would sit for a long time and enjoy watching the wormwood powder being scattered in spiral rings by unseen puffs of wind. Then I would throw myself down on the bed and wait.

  For months I immersed myself in my world, no longer calculating time or counting the days, until one morning my husband went out on the veranda lying behind our favored wall alongside the bed. After a while I heard him utter a cry of alarm. We all hurried out to find him holding a stick, with a black, ugly snake almost two meters long lying at his feet.

  I cried out with sorrow whose claws clutched at my heart so that it began to beat wildly. With crazed fury I shouted at my husband: “Why have you broken the pact and killed it? What harm has it done?” How cruel is man! He lets no creature live in peace.

  I spent the night sorrowful and apprehensive. My lover came to me and embraced me more passionately than ever. I whispered to her imploringly: “Be kind, beloved. Are you angry with me or sad because of me?”

  “It is farewell,” she said. “You have broken the pact and have betrayed one of my subjects, so you must both depart from this house, for only love lives in it.”

  In the morning I packed up so that we might move to one of the employees’ buildings, leaving the house in which I had learnt of love and enjoyed incomparable pleasures.

  I still live in memory and in hope. I crave for the house and miss my secret love. Who knows, perhaps one day my beloved will call me. Who really knows?

  Translated by Denys Johnson-Davies

  Yasmin V. Tambiah

  The work of Yasmin V. Tambiah from Sri Lanka represents a unique contribution to this volume. Having spent several years in North America, the author returns to a country torn by ongoing civil war and finds herself experiencing a series of exiles. Although not a work of fiction, the pieces (1988–1991) pose many of the questions that shape this collection. How does a lesbian writer sustain herself in the face of complex and contradictory national histories and personal choices? In what ways does language both confine and allow for expression of the imagination? Through the use of vivid detail coupled with analytical language that here takes on an immediacy far removed from academic musings, Tambiah gives voice to crucial struggles that reach beyond national frontiers.

  THE CIVIL WAR

  September 1984: Three months since I returned to Sri Lanka with an American college degree. The civil war has spilled beyond the Northern Province. Metal gates to my parents’ house still bear the dents of rock-throwing mobs. There are ax marks on the wooden doors. New plaster hides a ceiling charred by a burning tire. Embattled elsewhere I relive the horror of July 1983 through my siblings’ eyes. It is difficult to articulate the deep loss within, the negation of familiar fictions, the awareness that exile in one’s own country is even less bearable than at a distance. It is a loss compounded by my family’s fear.

  February 1985: Carrying the national ID card is mandatory. It will protect me from arbitrary arrest, they say. But the civil war has spilled beyond the Northern Province. Authorities have collapsed many identities into a Tamil last name. The card does not attest that I am also Sinhalese, speak no Tamil, and dream in English. It is silent on conflicting loyalties and the struggle to recover myself from colonialisms. I am reduced to someone else’s definition, terrorized into keeping boundaries I neither constructed nor consented to.

  December 1985: Exile. Four months in North America. White graduate classmates are puzzled that a twentieth-century South Asian might share the experiences of a Medieval Jew. Their imagination stops at my brown skin. There has always been a civil war beyond the Northern Province. Those at risk cannot afford ignorance. I have learnt to recognize the languages of domination and gather a community of resistance for a dangerous journey toward necessary transformations.

  1988–1990

  SANDALWOOD

  AS i step through the door your scent meets me, mingling intimately with incense burnt for Devis. Enclosed by your strong brown arms, bangles tinkling their w
elcome, i taste melted jaggery on your lips, sea salt within. In your eyes i forget time, collapse space. Your well-ordered apartment outside washington d.c. transforms into dense lush jungle heady with araliya, jasmine, magnolia, sandalwood. My fingers sink into moist soil rich with life. Rounded, like the elephant yogini we celebrate, you claim me. Familiar endearments roll off your tongue teasing nipples dark as your own. Fierce, passionate, protective, reflections dancing where our Kalis meet, you bring me home.

  I am no longer cracked earth hidden between asphalt sidewalks in north america waiting for the monsoon that comes only in my dreams to drench, heal, close fissures through which i bleed. Your firm knowing touch re-members sensations grown distant … tired limbs massaged, face caressed, head stroked to lessen pain, to calm a restless spirit. That touch you cook with, food we both know, grew up on, still eat making do with american substitutes and precious imports. Tastes of jeera, koththamalli, pepper, star anise blend easily on your fingers. You name us “rasam and rice sisters,” “ovaltine dykes,” laughing, voice concepts made alien here. Dravidian warrior, friend, lover, you bring me home.

  1990

  TRANSL(ITER)ATION I

  How does the decolonizing tongue move? Speak, erupt, disrupt? Does it roll words, familiar-tasting yet illegitimate? Singlish. Tamilian english. English with an “educated” sri lankan accent. South asian english. From approbation of whiteness to defining destinations. From exoticized other to subject self. From exile to return.

  It is risky to say my lover tastes of jaggery, to write that we reflect Kali in our lovemaking, to refuse translation of cultural specificities, transliteration with asterisked explanations, decontextualized descriptions, dislocated selves. It dares the privileged to leap chasms of imagination, rejects their referents, refuses voyeurism. It presumes an audience familiar with these requisites, engaged, like me, in returning. But this return is not comfortable, not guaranteed. Decolonization is not about coming back to unchanged fictions. I do not defy translation to recover the world of my fathers. In the dialect(ic)s of nationalism, there is no room for me.

  How then does this decolonizing self speak?

  With old concepts reworked to reflect realities of turbulence, to mouth visions of the dead, to secure spaces where the silenced may find voice. With new ideas birthed at subverted boundaries, in erotic constellations, outrageous dreams. With expressions from many places, unfragmented; accessing many identities, self-named. With wisdom of many wanderings, inscribing home.

  1990

  TRANSL(ITER)ATION II

  (for Aruna and Giti)

  WHERE I come from, to roll my tongue talking sex is to blaspheme against the “pure” woman, the essential sri lankan. To be sexual, even by myself, is deviant, pollution by western values. Some south asian progressives claim we were comfortably erotic before british victorianisms permeated our psychic and somatic languages. But they too would erase a woman inscribing herself without the phallus. In such a text where do I locate my desire? How do I grasp the apsara-princesses of Sigiriya? Or dark Tara with her full rounded breasts, firm-swelling stomach, exquisite long fingers that play with me in my dreams?

  Here, in the united states, to roll my tongue talking sex is heretical. I mean, where north atlantic inhabitants control the discourse on eros, a south asian lesbian is a contradiction in terms.1 Erotic. Exceptional. But can she kiss, make fierce love? Things some south asian lesbians wonder even about one another. So effective the circumscriptions we must transform violently to acknowledge verities that predate vedic domestications and white colonizers, to comprehend the undivided feminine. Creatrix-warrior-lover-devourer. Self-referent. Self-revering.2

  To talk sex as a south asian lesbian decolonizing myself is to communicate eros dangerously. Tracing my lover’s inky-purple lips my tongue speaks an old power, serpent’s fire. Raging passion and passionate rage flow from the same source. Knowledge to rend imprisoning fictions, articulate forbidden truths, consume with desire. Tara needs no mediation, no translation. Wisdoms that arm and pleasure me on the treacherous journey home.

  1990–1991

  1 My thanks to V. K. Aruna for this concept.

  2 I am indebted to Giti Thadani for these insights.

  Dionne Brand

  The Trinidadian-born fiction writer, poet, and filmmaker Dionne Brand celebrates the playfulness of young lust in her story “Madame Alaird’s Breasts.” A resident of Toronto, Canada, for over twenty years, Brand is part of a flourishing Caribbean Canadian lesbian writers community. In this story, taken from her collection Sans Souci (1989), Brand uses the classroom and language learning as a site for sexual curiosity, normalizing young girls’ fascination with a mature woman’s body. Her characters’ joyous energy as they innocently focus on their well-endowed teacher gains a new dimension when juxtaposed to the Trinidadian immigration act that forbids homosexual women and men from entering the country.

  MADAME ALAIRD’S BREASTS

  MADAME Alaird was our French mistress. “Bonjour, mes enfants,” she would say on entering the classroom, then walk heavily toward her desk. Madame Alaird walked heavily because of her bosom, which was massive above her thin waist. As she walked her breasts tipped her entire body forward. She was not tall, neither was she short, but her bosom made her look quite impressive and imposing and, when she entered our form room, her voice resonated through her breasts, deep and rich and Black, “Bonjour, mes enfants.”

  We, Form 3A, sing-songed back, “Bonjour, Ma-dame A-lai-air-d,” smirking as we watched her tipping heavily to her desk.

  We loved Madame Alaird’s breasts. All through the conjugation of verbs—aller, acheter, appeler, and écouter—we watched her breasts as she rested them on top of her desk, the bodice of her dress holding them snugly, her deep breathing on the eu sounds making them descend into their warm cave and rise to take air. We imitated her voice but our eu’s sounded like shrill flutes, sharpened by the excitement of Madame Alaird’s breasts.

  We discussed Madame Alaird’s breasts on the way home every Tuesday and Thursday, because French was every Tuesday and Thursday at 10:00 A.M. They weren’t like Miss Henry’s breasts. We would never notice Miss Henry’s breasts anyway because we hated needlework and sewing. Miss Henry was our needlework and sewing mistress.

  Madame Alaird wasn’t fat. She wasn’t thin either, but her breasts were huge and round and firm. Every Tuesday and Thursday, we looked forward to having Madame Alaird’s breasts to gawk at, all of French period. Madame Alaird wore gold-rimmed bifocals, which meant that she could not see very well, even though she peered over her bifocals pointedly in the direction of snickers or other rude noises during her teaching. But this was merely form; we doubted whether she could see us.

  Madame Alaird’s breasts were like pillows, deep purple ones, just like Madame Alaird’s full lips as she expressed the personal pronouns.

  “Je-u, tu-ooo, ell-lle, no-o-us. Mes enfants, encore….”

  “No-o-us, vo-uus, ell-lles,” which we deliberately mispronounced to have Madame Alaird say them over. Madame Alaird’s breasts gave us imagination beyond our years or possibilities, of burgundy velvet rooms with big-legged women and rum and calypso music. Next to Madame Alaird’s breasts, we loved Madame Alaird’s lips. They made water spring to our mouths just like when the skin bursts eating a purple fat mammy sipote fruit.

  Every Tuesday and Thursday after school, bookbags and feet dragging, we’d discuss Madame Alaird’s breasts.

  “But you see Madame Alaird breasts!”

  “Girl, you ever see how she just rest them on the table!”

  “I wonder how they feel?”

  “You think I go have breasts like Madame Alaird?”

  Giggles.

  “But Madame Alaird have more breasts than anybody I know.”

  “She must be does be tired carrying them, eh!”

  Giggles, doubled over in laughter, near the pharmacy. Then past the boys’ college.

  “And you don’t see how they stick
ing out in front like that when she walk is like she falling over! Qui! Bon jieu!”

  “But Madame Alaird ain’t playing she have breast, oui!”

  “And girl she know French, eh?”

  “Madame Alaird must be could feed the whole world with them breasts, yes!”

  Giggles reaching into belly laughs near Carib Street in chorus, “BONJOUR, MES ENFANTS!” rounding our lips on the bonjour, like Madame Alaird’s kiss.

  Madame Alaird was almost naked as far as we were concerned. It did not matter that she was always fully clothed. She was almost puritan in her style. Usually she wore brogues and ordinary clothing. Madame was not a snazzy dresser, but on speech day and other special occasions, she put on tan heels, stockings seamed up the back, a close-fitting beige dress with perhaps a little lace at the bosom, and her gold-rimmed bifocals hung from their gold string around her neck, resting on her breasts. Madame Alaird was beautiful. The bifocals didn’t mean that Madame Alaird was old. She wasn’t young either. She was what we called a full woman.