That I came to be teaching at Paris VIII, a cluster of run-down buildings in St. Denis in the northern part of the city with a predominantly immigrant student population, is one of my own life’s latter-day adventures—a different kind of adventure from going to India but in its own way as eye-opening. I had been a regular visitor to France for many years because my son had lived there since his 1994 graduation from college. He had married a Frenchwoman, and now with three children, they had settled in the Ardèche, my daughter-in-law teaching elementary school and my son restoring old houses. People often remarked how lucky I was to have an excuse to visit France, but in truth it was hard to have my son and his family so far away. When the opportunity arose for me to spend a semester in Paris as part of a Paris VIII-Brooklyn College faculty exchange, this seemed a welcome way, thanks to the vitesse of the TGV from Paris to the South, to see them more easily and more often. I was unattached at the time (meeting Mary Edith lay two years in the future) and mindful as well that I’d soon be sixty-five and unlikely to have many more chances to teach in a foreign country. So, despite a tug of reluctance to leave home for so long, off I went for the semester to be part of the départment de la littérature anglaise et anglophone at Paris VIII, while the professor from France, a specialist in postcolonial theory, took my place at Brooklyn College. The Paris department head seemed especially pleased to have me offer my course on Indian English fiction.
Soon I found myself installed in a rented apartment in Montmartre, spare in its furnishings but crammed with books (French and English) in floor-to-ceiling shelves that lined a long corridor. There was an upright piano in the small front room, which inspired me to revive a few short Bach and Chopin pieces I had learned in childhood. I wandered about Paris a lot on my own, lonely at times but also enjoying the freedom of anonymity as I observed the life around me. And twice a week I took the metro to St. Denis to teach my two courses.
Paris VIII had been founded in the 1970s by Hélène Cixous and other French intellectuals as an experimental, more democratic option within a hierarchal university system. But by 2007 it was in serious difficulties—underfunded, chaotically administered, and beset by internal feuds than absorbed much of the energy of my colleagues. My own six-person department of English and Anglophone literature was in danger of a takeover by the larger department of English language and engaged in ongoing efforts to ward this off. I was surprised to learn that our department was not permitted to teach American literature—that was the purview of the language department. This seemed silly to me (what turf wars don’t?), but I devised my syllabi accordingly, content to remain a marginal figure, lunching sometimes with two of my colleagues (one from littérature the other from langue—our own mini détente) at the neighborhood kebab place and otherwise going my own way. I also found myself drawing closer to my students.
My undergraduate course on Memoir and Autobiographical Fiction had only six of them: a young man from Senagal, a young woman from Poland, three young women who were French, and another woman, a Berber from Algeria, who as a graduate student was auditing the class for the help it might be to her English writing. I assigned the students some exercises in creative writing and was surprised at how constrained they were, especially at first, by a certain French pudeur about revealing anything personal. We need to know more, I would respond to the hint of some childhood mishap or disappointment. Oh non, Madame, c’est trop personel, came the answer. I realized that in English we say “I” without shame, but the first person in French is habitually buried beneath the impersonal “on.” On est allé, not I. By the end of the semester, though, the class did some wonderful work, and the student from Senegal had us all on our feet teaching us “dance kuku.”
In the MA-level class in Indian English fiction, the major challenge was getting students the texts they needed for the course. You can get anything copied, I was told, but warned at the same time that asking the students to buy books was problematic. English books were hard to find; the students didn’t have the money to buy them; and, in any case, you couldn’t expect them to read more than one book or two since English was for many of them a third language. With these warnings in mind, I tried to steer an intermediate course. I had the students buy A Passage to India and Midnight’s Children, readily available at W. H. Smith and other English-language bookstores. But for R. K. Narayan’s The Guide, I just stepped into the department Xerox room, made a master copy of its 219 pages, and delivered this to Reproduction Services. No questions asked.
I taught in English, taking pains to speak clearly and slowly, beset by a heightened awareness of the nuanced vocabulary, syntax and contexts of our English-language texts. Midnight’s Children posed the most extreme challenge. I assigned only the book’s first section with the hope that at least some of the students would be motivated to read on after the semester. Rushdie’s tumbling, eclectic language and layers of allusion made this book daunting for most of them, but I could feel how much its energy and iconoclasm engaged the class.
I have said that no one in the class was Indian or had ever been to India, but coming as many of them did from former French colonies in North Africa, they understood the colonial experience in an acutely personal way. Unlike the immigrant students I taught in New York, who by and large had come to the United States as children as part of their families’ search for a better life, the Paris students had left families behind in Algeria or Tunisia or Morocco. I was surprised to learn that in France they had to submit letters from their professors every semester to the prefecture of police saying they were students in good standing in order to have their student visas renewed, and, ultimately, most of them would have to leave and go back to their poor countries. They encountered reserve, suspicion, and even contempt from the French, of whom they, in turn, were highly critical. Yet above all else, they wanted to stay in the country that, despite its drawbacks, offered them far greater opportunity. They responded to Rushdie’s arrogance and bravado and hoped to make it their own. It’s our turn now. The empire writes back.
I, too, was a foreigner in Paris, and despite all the times I’d been there, despite the ties to my son and his family, I got at least some small sense of what it can mean to uproot from your own country and be plunged into a foreign system with its own rules and cultural signs that are not always easy for the outsider to decipher. No one was sending me off to the police or threatening to deport me, but many small differences from the procedures at the university to my not knowing the French have only chocolate eggs at Easter, not hard-boiled ones, kept catching me unawares and making me feel my American identity more keenly. I also found myself accentuating this identity. When the grades I gave turned out to be too high—French professors, so my students informed me, don’t give 18 or 19 sur vingt the way in America we give “A’s—I considered correcting my “mistake” but decided not to. Since I was an American, I would give American grades—that is, as long as the students honored their part of the bargain and did the work.
My nationality also came into play when I discovered that two of our weekly meetings fell on French national holidays and I scheduled a make-up session of the Indian Lit class at my apartment combined with a potluck supper. One of the colleagues I lunched with was highly disapproving. “We are workers, and these are our holidays,” she told me. “You are introducing dangerous capitalist ideas.” But I persisted with the make-up idea, and the students seemed grateful to participate. They had never been invited into a professor’s home before. A Polish young woman brought pizza; a French young woman a casserole. We sat together for hours over some bottles of red wine, while Hussein from Morocco told us what it was like driving a cab around the city. I was especially fond of Leila, the Berber from Algeria who was also auditing the memoir class, and her friend Kossaila, a soft-spoken young man from a small Algerian village who was probably my most sophisticated student of English literature. These two went together to the Paris Salon du livre, which that year featured Indian authors, and came back to
class full of their excitement at having heard Vikram Seth. When I left to return to the States, Kossaila, who was also an artist, presented me with an oil painting he had done of a brightly plumed parrot. “Flaubert’s Parrot, Madame,” he said as he handed me the canvas. He hoped to go to England. I wonder where he is now.
Kossaila’s painting now hangs in my house in East Hampton, New York, a reminder of this gentle talented person and of my four months teaching in Paris. Soon enough it came time to say goodbye to the bookcases and piano in the Montmartre apartment, turn in my perhaps overly generous grades at Paris VIII, make a final trip south to my family in the Ardèche, and then fly home to New York City and to Brooklyn College. I felt sad to be again on the other side of an ocean from my son but relieved, nonetheless, to be back with the friends and known routines of home. Paris, strangely more than India, had made me aware of cultural differences. I can’t say to what extent this was my own state of mind, to what extent the maddening arrogance of the French. But I know that experiencing myself often as the outsider, I had drawn closer to my immigrant students and understood, in ways I hadn’t done at home, their struggles to advance their lives in a foreign culture. My sympathies were unequivocally with them. I hoped it really could be their turn now.
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THERE WERE MOMENTS ON that first trip to India when, looking about me at all that was strange and wonderful, I worried it would fade from memory, that I wouldn’t properly retain what I had seen and understood. I’d never been much of a photographer, but I fretted that I should have been taking more pictures as an aid to retention. “Can’t you just let it pass through you?” asked my friend. Her words acted on me as a kind of release. Yes, I could do that, I thought—let the experience pass through me in a way that would keep me free and clear and open to whatever came next, which, in turn, would pass through as well. I have always thought of myself as a staunchly secular person. But that being said, there is a way in which I see India as encouraging an aspect of self I might venture to call spiritual. I was encouraged to relax caution and control, be less tied to the fixed and the familiar, more willing to follow the path of surprising transmutations and transfigurations, feel safer in a state of flux. The Indian gods are shape shifters. There are ten incarnations of Vishnu. All seem different yet are essentially one. If this is a core reality, then the wanderer will never lose her way. At least that seemed an appealing philosophy.
This leads to my saying that my course on Indian English Literature was shape-shifting as well, and eventually it shifted into something quite different from its original incarnation. Somewhere I read Arundhati Roy’s rather acerbic comment that she was the only writer of current Indian English fiction who actually lived in India (in Delhi). I thought about this and made a list. There was Michael Ondaatje in Toronto, Bapsi Sidhwa in Houston, Vikram Seth in London, and Salman Rushdie in New York. Manil Suri taught at George Mason in Virginia, Bharati Mukherjee at Berkeley. And so on. And in addition to the Indian writers who had started life in India before moving abroad, there were those born abroad in diasporic families: Jhumpa Lahiri in the US, Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali, and Hari Kunzru in England, among others. Some of these writers turned back to India in their work, as Rushdie did reclaiming his “imaginary homeland” in Midnight’s Children. Others wrote of the diasporic experience, the straddling of two or more cultures. This is when I first thought about the immigrant as the representative figure of the late twentieth-century and decided to develop a new course in which the Indian transnational narratives that by this point I knew well would mix with ones from other heritages.
My new course, “Transnational Narratives and Theory,” looked at the stories that get told when people leave one home for another and may no longer know to which nation they belong. Among postcolonial critics terms such as globalism, diaspora, displacement, borders, multinationalism, transnationalism, migrancy, nomadry, refugeeism, and hybridity were gaining currency—umbrella words under which to group writers of wide-ranging cultural experience. Crossing all sorts of national boundaries, I could bring together Rushdie, Roy, Lahiri, Hari Kunzru, and Kiran Desai (Indians with links to Britain or America), Talik Sali (Sudanese with a sojourn in England), Sandra Cisneros and Gloria Anzaldua (Latinas), Ariel Dorfman (North and South American), Chang-rae Lee (Korean-American), Eva Hoffman (Polish immigrant to Canada, now resident of London), and Junot Diaz (Dominican-American), among others. I had not been to many of the countries these authors wrote about. Often my students had, but even when they hadn’t, together we could try to make sense of a world in motion.
I have become a bolder traveler, especially in books, someone much freer to go where I haven’t been before. Because my reading for the India and transnational courses led me to books that were very contemporary, in 2008 I had an idea for yet another new course that I called “The Shape of Twenty-First-Century Literature.” The title, of course, begs the question. I’m not sure twenty-first-century English literature can as yet be said to have a shape, though 9/11 might serve as a date that sets a before and after. Global terrorism, the Internet explosion, climate change—these were some of the new century’s markers I used to organize the course. I imported Lahiri, Kunzru, and Diaz from my other syllabi and also read a spate of new authors—Jennifer Egan, Kate Walbert, Cormac McCarthy, Rick Moody, among others—another steep learning curve. Again, as in teaching about India, I wondered about my qualifications. Surely someone my age (now nearing seventy), never especially avant-garde, and with a primary attachment still to Victorian fiction, might not be the likeliest person to take on literature of the twenty-first century. But why should such qualms stop me now?
THERE is no single work of fiction, or pair of works, I have read in the last twenty years that I can confidently choose as pivotal to this chapter of my story—no David Copperfield or To the Lighthouse that I knew I had to write about, no Jane contending with Becky, or Isabel in dialogue with Tess. The books of this chapter sparkle for me in their accumulation and abundance. They might be said to resemble the plethora of gods on the walls of a Hindu temple, so many of them, embodying principles of fecundity and generation, each pointing the way to another on a journey that seems unbounded. But just as Hindu worshippers choose allegiance to a particular diety—Vishnu or Shiva, Ganesh or Lakshmi—as their path to a divine essence, so I, too, have my particular devotions, books I praise and recommend to others and need to keep where I can find them on my shelves. Among these, I have chosen three to round out this saga of a reading life or at least to bring these pages to a close.
Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa (1991), The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (1997), and Brick Lane by Monica Ali (2003) are works that range in their settings and the cultural traditions they derive from, though all fall within the rubric of Indian English fiction that has reached an international readership. Cracking India, set in Lahore in the Punjab at the time of Partition, has a Parsee child as its narrator, a young girl with a limp, who witnesses the sectarian changes that “crack” the world around her; Arundhati Roy, moving between 1969 and the 1990s, tells the story of a Syrian Christian family in Kerala rent by issues of class and caste; and Monica Ali, born in Dacca to a Bangladeshi father and an English mother, raised in London and educated at Cambridge, writes of the struggles of present-day Muslim Bangladeshi garment workers both in India and in the East End of London. Before reading these books, I knew little or nothing about Parsees, Syrian Christians, or Bangladeshi Muslims. At the same time there are aspects of these novels that reverberate as deeply familiar.
All three books, as in much Indian English fiction, draw the reader into the intimacies of family life—what it feels like, for example, to be a young child dependent on parents who both protect and fail to protect that child, or a young mother with secret yearnings for herself that conflict with commitments to a husband or children. In many respects Indian English fiction, for all the ways that it introduces Western readers to foreign cultures, continues in the great bourgeois tradition o
f the novel in which individuals are important but so are families and customs, and the struggle between the individual’s impulse towards freedom and self expression and the pressures to keep him or her within castes and classes and patriarchal strictures play out what for readers of Western fiction are very recognizable themes. Such struggles occur, in one way or another, in the books I have cited here.
But these books have also surprised me in touching some of the most sensitive recesses of my personal history, and I am led again to reflect on the ways we bring ourselves and our own stories to everything we read. Lenny’s limp in Cracking India comes from her having had polio. On a symbolic level the polio is the wound of colonialization. “If anyone’s to blame, blame the British,” says Colonel Bharucha, the doctor who operates on Lenny. ‘There was no polio in India till they brought it here.” But if Lenny’s lack of eagerness to be cured says something about India’s internalized dependency on its colonizer, it also reflects conflict within a young girl’s psyche. The polio and the limp it leaves her with make Lenny feel special in many ways—for one thing, she gains her access to her parents’ bed.
For me Lenny’s polio brought back my conflicted feelings when my younger brother had a bout of what his doctors thought was polio when he was two. He spent a few months with his leg in a cast and got a lot of attention. What I remember most from that time—a stretch of summer—is that other children at the beach were told not to play with me, and I felt quite dreary and lonely. I don’t know if this links to my fantasy a few years later—I must have been six or seven—that I was a wounded soldier in the jungle. The wound was to my leg, and I would get down on the floor in my bedroom and crawl around dragging it behind me. My object was to get to the nursing station—this involved hoisting myself onto my bed—where I would be taken care of.
I had always been ashamed of this fantasy—it seemed so perverse and peculiar. But once I mentioned it to a friend, who said that she, too, as a child had pretended to have a crippled leg and used to limp around for hours at a time. We marveled at this coincidence, but perhaps it’s not so amazing. Special and wounded—isn’t this the sense so many of us have of ourselves?
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