Sarah Joseph
Sarah Joseph emanates more light and heat as she climbs up the literary horizon, and as a result her fiction draws serious critical appraisal. Both the Kerala Sahitya Academy A w a r d a n d t h e K e n d r a S a h i t y a A c a d e m y A w a r d f o r Aalahayude Penmakkal (Daughters of God the Father) have alerted serious rethinking on woman’s writing and subaltern literature in the literary circles of Kerala.
Sarah Joseph was born at Kuriachira in Thrissur in 1946. Her father Louis was inclined to Marxian ideology and was keen on reading periodicals and books related to it. Her mother Kochumariam was a typical conservative Christian housewife who took special care to marry her daughter off before the age of fifteen. As Sarah could continue her studies, the only difference that she felt after her marriage to Joseph was that she could wear a ‘davani’ (half–saree). She went for the teacher’s training course and got a job as a school teacher. Later she did her M.A and joined the collegiate service. That phase of her teaching career at Pattambi Sanskrit College was the smithy of her formation as a feminist . She has retired from government service and lives at ‘Geethanjali’, Mulamkunnathukavu in Thrissur.
Sarah Joseph’s literary career began very early, in her teens. Many poems – for poems were her first mode of expression – appeared in Malayalam weeklies while she was in her High School classes. She was also good at reciting her poems at poets’ meets, which spoke ardently of love, youthful melancholy and starlit night, much to the appreciation of veterans like Vyloppilli and Edasseri. There came a lag and a pause, and then came the realization that fiction was her realm of creativity. Whether it be her short story collections like ManassileTi Matram, Kadinte Sangeetham, Papathara, Nilavu Ariyunnu or novels like Thaikulam and Mattathi, there is one and only one theme - the marginalized woman struggling for releasefrom the oppressive and dominant social, cultural and economic structures.
The fictional world of Sarah Joseph is a panorama where she portrays woman in her discriminative and self conscious phases. As the collective noun “woman” disguises the many differences between women, she is to be portrayed as the individual woman, different in each phase of her life. So, her stories offer a blue print of individual woman’s specific reactions to the power relations operative in society. Thus, together they become a commentary on the female experience in a patriarchy; also a commentary on the socio cultural and ethnic identity of the subaltern of a nation or race from the “other” perspective. “He is the subject, he is the Absolute – she is the ‘other’ (Simon de Beauvoir). It is imminent that, a woman writer as she is, Sarah Joseph should come up with new militant reactions, because, to quote Beauvoir again, “the category of the ‘other’ is as primordial as consciousness itself and it is inevitable that the self – and in turn culture be defined in terms of‘otherness’. In stories like Oro Ezhuthukariyude Ullilum or (Inside Every Woman Writer) Mu d i t h e y y a m u r a y u n n u t h e r e a r e t h e e p i p h a n i e s o fwomanhood. In Papathara or Chavunilam or Balidhanam, the feminist agenda of survival against social and cultural deprivations specific to woman are dealt with. The story Ee Udalenne Chuzhumpol is the subverted text of Methil Radhakrishnan’s story, and affirms that a rape is more than physical damnation for a woman.
There is complex yet fantastic symbolism for each story which makes it radiantly different from other women’s writing. Interwoven into the mosaic of imagery is the focalization from the woman perspective. Every story has a splash of magic realism (Magic realism or magical realism is an aesthetic style or genre of fiction [1] in which magical elements blend with the real world. The story explains these magical elements as real occurrences, presented in a straightforward manner that places the "real" and the "fantastic" in the same stream of thought. ) in the denouement, clearly giving the hint that a realisticconclusion will only jeopardize the feminist agenda.
Aalahayude Penmakkal is a unique novel in Malayalam, of that fully transmits the marginalised history and experience of a subaltern group of people, in their own socio - linguisticmilieu. The novel deals with the waxing and waning of “world’s cheapest people” living at a place, “full of the dead, decayed and desecrated”. One cannot escape from one’s own past or predicament. The pa thos of marginalization and the pains of suffocated subordination are unveiled through the life sketches of three generations of women at Kokkanchara.
The feminist activist in Sarah Joseph is the other sideof the woman writer. She was the harbinger of feminist movement in Kerala and the founder of ‘Manushi – organisation of thinking women’, the first of its kind. Manushi was strong apolitical force in Kerala in the eighties, especially when one remembers its protest against the Thankamoni raid. To her also goes the credit of forming the first feminist theatre group in Kerala. The play Sthree, written and directed by her, about dowry death, was an immediate success. The song, “unaruka yuvasodhari” (get up young sister), was an instant hit and was the theme song
for all feminist groups and their meetings. Yet, more than a feminist to the last, she will be a writer to the last. She is proud to be a woman and prouder still tobe a woman writer. Declares Sarah Joseph in her Preface to Papathara : “I am proud of the fact that I was born a woman.
… My foremost duty is to write fearlessly about the gender biased, marginalized and body-bound woman. … And I am proud of myself when I perform this duty”. No doubt she is the precious daughter of Malayalam. “I feel fortunate to be living in an age that hearkens to the promising voice of women. As I am not a ‘male writer', I have no compulsions to reproduce the values of the ruling class. The culture of the dominant class is against women, just as it is against those low of caste [….] My duty is to write fearlessly about the world of women — women, who are denied self-determining rights over their own bodies by the oppressive gender regime.” Sarah Joseph's engagement with women's issues continues even now, though the nature and language of protest have changed colours. She has distanced herself from the Marxist Party, disenchanted with its shifting positions with reference to issues ranging from globalisation to violence against women. She is now seen more as a public intellectual who voices the concerns of women who are silenced by hegemonic forces. She is resolute in her opposition to all structures and institutions that formalise power; be that of the family or the church.
The politics of Sarah Joseph's writings is in the specificity of women's writing. Sarah Joseph maintains that women cannot think, act or desire except in narrative. It is the mandate of the woman as writer to identify how narratives have hereto sought to naturalise oppression and legitimise its own status. The woman writer in “Inside Every Woman Writer” recognises this. Purushothaman will decree that it is enough to write just as I used to before. A few hymns, chants and romantic lyrics are all that I have written till now. Of these, many deal with love, centering on the image of Radha and Krishna. Seemingly innocuous themes that will not, in any way, upset the establishment! Her major collections of short stories, Papathara (1990), Nilavariyunnu (1994) and Oduvilathe Sooryakanthi (1998) and the three novels that constitute a trilogy, Aalahayude Penmakkal (1999), Mattathi (2003), and Othappu (2005) reflect this political stand. Writers from Virginia Woolf to Alice Walker have warned against the regressive patriarchal reflex of such pronouncements by the ideal men, uthama purushas. In Malayalam, Sarah Joseph has articulated her anxieties over such de-politicising moves in the name of an aesthetics that has universal validity. Her creative obsession with the Ramayana tradition can be seen as one of the ways in which a writer can undo the layers of signification that have supported male-centric views in our epics. Manthara in “Karutha Thulakal” (“Black Holes”), Soorpanakha in “Thaikulam” (“Mother Clan”) and Sita in “Asoka” speak in their own voices about their particular thoughts and emotions. In consciously doing away with the mediating role of men who interpret women's experiences for the women themselves, Sarah Joseph shows how epics can be used to construct a link between events in the past and how we view them today. The pain of a sensitive soul to the violence that acts as a sub-text to history and literature that are essentially men's stories of maintaining mastery and control over woman's body and land is evident in every word that she has uttered. She feels strongly the need to challenge the play of power that occasions this violence. Freed of this blind desire for power, boundless love will wash over this earth. It will vest words with new meanings especially words like ‘love' and ‘freedom’. Choice founded on love will lead to freedom. She says: Freedom is something that has its foundations in love. To put it metaphorically, when I write and let my hair down, it should cover this whole world with love.
Pennezhuthu("woman-writing").
What is pennezhuthu ? Is writing gender differentiated? Must we have a separate category of pennezhuthu? Pennezhuthu ("woman-writing"). Pennezhuthu revolve around the published fictional productions of women, much of these explore the connections between women's experiences and their writings. The mainstream has vigorously flayed pennezhuthu as a space that is cobbled together only so that pseudo-intellectual women can parade their minimal genius. Sarah Joseph has defined it as a form of writing that contests all hegemonies. She holds that women writers in Malayalam have to actively negotiate a man-made language and that they cannot simply wish away its gender-parochialism. Most women writers assemble on other points of concord. Most of them profess, for instance, to write from a woman's standpoint. Most also admit that they get a curt reception from the literary theocracy. One of the compelling reasons they site for wanting to distance themselves from pennezhuthu is the fear of ghettoization and of further marginalization. Their fear is that a constricting female identity will be conferred and consolidated upon them and that everything they write will be expected to contribute and confirm this identity. They would rather infiltrate the "malestream" and find a place under the arc lights. This determination is undoubtedly commendable, but it also raises certain outstanding questions. Most of these women are short story writers. In fact it has been repeatedly pointed out that the short story is the most popular genre among women writers of Kerala. The validity of the above assertion is built by ignoring expressive forms which are not elevated as "literary"; expressive forms that women use in prolific measures. It is easier for women who write short stories to find a respectable place in an unrevised mainstream than it is for women who write personal narratives. To even begin to think of the latter as women-writers demands a political move that interrogates, destabilizes and dismantles conventional norms of inclusion and canonization. By staking their identity as ungendered authors and by resisting the possibilities of collective mobilizations, it is precisely this political space that women writers, who position themselves against pennezhuthu, rescind. It is another and grave matter that even the political assertions of pennezhuthu, have not begun to address "outlaw genres" - genres that have been cast aside by literary establishments. Neither has it begun to seriously address the relations between the social profile of women and their differential accesses to genres of writing.
Another significant issue that has scarcely been examined is the matter of aesthetics. There is widespread fear that pennezhuthu would entail feminist sloganeering to the resultant detriment of aesthetic merit. The literary establishment thought that Sara Joseph was guilty of just that when she set out to effect changes in the masculine ownership of Malayalam. They criticised her language experiments as clumsy and ugly. She retorted that they would find all struggles to overthrow hegemony hideous. Despite this exchange, there has been very little sustained examination of the institutional interests which underpin prevailing notions of aesthetics and creativity.
Then too there is the abiding way in which the "autobiographical" and the "personal" attaches to women's writing, even when these are self-avowedly narratives of fiction. Works of criticism routinely read women writers as "exploring the inner-spaces of the experiential world". "Emotionally too, they [women short story writers] placed emphasis on the personal and the subjective experiences, whereas the men were attracted to the objective narrative structure." Such descriptions seem to offer ready ways for placing women's writings in the larger literary-scape. These rather indolent critical gestures conflate all women's writing with the autobiographical. In turn, they further sharpen the resistance of many women writers to the label of pennezhuthu, for they perceive it as a way of tenaciously straitjacketing their fictions into the experiential. Gracy, a leading short story writer has been particularly forceful in pointing out the fallouts - both on women's lives and on their works - of autobiographical readings which equate the female protagonists with the writers themselves. This, she concludes, is a particularly effective route to threaten, censure and slander women writers. Gita Hiranyan is another writer who has voiced her reservations on the subject. She attributes the tragic suicide of the writer Rajalakshmi to the sanctioned voyeurism unleashed by such criticisms. Her own works, she testifies have been reductively interpreted as commentaries of her familial and sexual life. The impatience of these women writers with the obstinate conflation of their fiction with autobiography is more than justified. But what goes un-addressed here is the predicament of women who want to rehearse their selves in writing. How would women who want to write the autobiographical, dodge the witch-hunt that appears bound to follow every time women produce their selves in language? C.S.Chandrika has argued that instead of seeing pennezhuthu as a constraining category that keeps women in the unthreatening margins, it should be used for a political advance. Even if this were to be effected, it would clearly not be easy to read personal narratives as pennezhuthu, at least as it stands defined now. If women writers wish to "secure the space to graze freely" they undoubtedly have to picket the posts of "malestream" literature. What is woman-writing?" If it is truly an open-ended poser, then it should not pre-judge and dismiss the claims of personal narratives for inclusion. women should continue to write experiential narratives even in the less than conducive atmosphere that seems to prevail. They sometimes privileged their experiential writing and at other times devalued them. There were of course a few who were certain that the personal narratives constituted a study-worthy genre. women's writing in contemporary Kerala. It seeks to stress that women who write themselves into existence are not doing so in a social vacuum. They are in fact engaging in a crucial translation of their selves from mere objects of social discourse to articulating subjects. They are resisting the silences and erasures that come from being, at best, the "spoken for" and the "spoken about".
Sarah Joseph emanates more light and heat as she climbs up the literary horizon, and as a result her fiction draws serious critical appraisal. Both the Kerala Sahitya Academy A w a r d a n d t h e K e n d r a S a h i t y a A c a d e m y A w a r d f o r Aalahayude Penmakkal (Daughters of God the Father) have alerted serious rethinking on woman’s writing and subaltern literature in the literary circles of Kerala.
Sarah Joseph was born at Kuriachira in Thrissur in 1946. Her father Louis was inclined to Marxian ideology and was keen on reading periodicals and books related to it. Her mother Kochumariam was a typical conservative Christian housewife who took special care to marry her daughter off before the age of fifteen. As Sarah could continue her studies, the only difference that she felt after her marriage to Joseph was that she could wear a ‘davani’ (half–saree). She went for the teacher’s training course and got a job as a school teacher. Later she did her M.A and joined the collegiate service. That phase of her teaching career at Pattambi Sanskrit College was the smithy of her formation as a feminist . She has retired from government service and lives at ‘Geethanjali’, Mulamkunnathukavu in Thrissur.
Sarah Joseph’s literary career began very early, in her teens. Many poems – for poems were her first mode of expression – appeared in Malayalam weeklies while she was in her High School classes. She was also good at reciting her poems at poets’ meets, which spoke ardently of love, youthful melancholy and starlit night, much to the appreciation of veterans like Vyloppilli and Edasseri. There came a lag and a pause, and then came the realization that fiction was her realm of creativity. Whether it be her short story collections like ManassileTi Matram, Kadinte Sangeetham, Papathara, Nilavu Ariyunnu or novels like Thaikulam and Mattathi, there is one and only one theme - the marginalized woman struggling for releasefrom the oppressive and dominant social, cultural and economic structures.
The fictional world of Sarah Joseph is a panorama where she portrays woman in her discriminative and self conscious phases. As the collective noun “woman” disguises the many differences between women, she is to be portrayed as the individual woman, different in each phase of her life. So, her stories offer a blue print of individual woman’s specific reactions to the power relations operative in society. Thus, together they become a commentary on the female experience in a patriarchy; also a commentary on the socio cultural and ethnic identity of the subaltern of a nation or race from the “other” perspective. “He is the subject, he is the Absolute – she is the ‘other’ (Simon de Beauvoir). It is imminent that, a woman writer as she is, Sarah Joseph should come up with new militant reactions, because, to quote Beauvoir again, “the category of the ‘other’ is as primordial as consciousness itself and it is inevitable that the self – and in turn culture be defined in terms of‘otherness’. In stories like Oro Ezhuthukariyude Ullilum or (Inside Every Woman Writer) Mu d i t h e y y a m u r a y u n n u t h e r e a r e t h e e p i p h a n i e s o fwomanhood. In Papathara or Chavunilam or Balidhanam, the feminist agenda of survival against social and cultural deprivations specific to woman are dealt with. The story Ee Udalenne Chuzhumpol is the subverted text of Methil Radhakrishnan’s story, and affirms that a rape is more than physical damnation for a woman.
There is complex yet fantastic symbolism for each story which makes it radiantly different from other women’s writing. Interwoven into the mosaic of imagery is the focalization from the woman perspective. Every story has a splash of magic realism (Magic realism or magical realism is an aesthetic style or genre of fiction [1] in which magical elements blend with the real world. The story explains these magical elements as real occurrences, presented in a straightforward manner that places the "real" and the "fantastic" in the same stream of thought. ) in the denouement, clearly giving the hint that a realisticconclusion will only jeopardize the feminist agenda.
Aalahayude Penmakkal is a unique novel in Malayalam, of that fully transmits the marginalised history and experience of a subaltern group of people, in their own socio - linguisticmilieu. The novel deals with the waxing and waning of “world’s cheapest people” living at a place, “full of the dead, decayed and desecrated”. One cannot escape from one’s own past or predicament. The pa thos of marginalization and the pains of suffocated subordination are unveiled through the life sketches of three generations of women at Kokkanchara.
The feminist activist in Sarah Joseph is the other sideof the woman writer. She was the harbinger of feminist movement in Kerala and the founder of ‘Manushi – organisation of thinking women’, the first of its kind. Manushi was strong apolitical force in Kerala in the eighties, especially when one remembers its protest against the Thankamoni raid. To her also goes the credit of forming the first feminist theatre group in Kerala. The play Sthree, written and directed by her, about dowry death, was an immediate success. The song, “unaruka yuvasodhari” (get up young sister), was an instant hit and was the theme song
for all feminist groups and their meetings. Yet, more than a feminist to the last, she will be a writer to the last. She is proud to be a woman and prouder still tobe a woman writer. Declares Sarah Joseph in her Preface to Papathara : “I am proud of the fact that I was born a woman.
… My foremost duty is to write fearlessly about the gender biased, marginalized and body-bound woman. … And I am proud of myself when I perform this duty”. No doubt she is the precious daughter of Malayalam. “I feel fortunate to be living in an age that hearkens to the promising voice of women. As I am not a ‘male writer', I have no compulsions to reproduce the values of the ruling class. The culture of the dominant class is against women, just as it is against those low of caste [….] My duty is to write fearlessly about the world of women — women, who are denied self-determining rights over their own bodies by the oppressive gender regime.” Sarah Joseph's engagement with women's issues continues even now, though the nature and language of protest have changed colours. She has distanced herself from the Marxist Party, disenchanted with its shifting positions with reference to issues ranging from globalisation to violence against women. She is now seen more as a public intellectual who voices the concerns of women who are silenced by hegemonic forces. She is resolute in her opposition to all structures and institutions that formalise power; be that of the family or the church.
The politics of Sarah Joseph's writings is in the specificity of women's writing. Sarah Joseph maintains that women cannot think, act or desire except in narrative. It is the mandate of the woman as writer to identify how narratives have hereto sought to naturalise oppression and legitimise its own status. The woman writer in “Inside Every Woman Writer” recognises this. Purushothaman will decree that it is enough to write just as I used to before. A few hymns, chants and romantic lyrics are all that I have written till now. Of these, many deal with love, centering on the image of Radha and Krishna. Seemingly innocuous themes that will not, in any way, upset the establishment! Her major collections of short stories, Papathara (1990), Nilavariyunnu (1994) and Oduvilathe Sooryakanthi (1998) and the three novels that constitute a trilogy, Aalahayude Penmakkal (1999), Mattathi (2003), and Othappu (2005) reflect this political stand. Writers from Virginia Woolf to Alice Walker have warned against the regressive patriarchal reflex of such pronouncements by the ideal men, uthama purushas. In Malayalam, Sarah Joseph has articulated her anxieties over such de-politicising moves in the name of an aesthetics that has universal validity. Her creative obsession with the Ramayana tradition can be seen as one of the ways in which a writer can undo the layers of signification that have supported male-centric views in our epics. Manthara in “Karutha Thulakal” (“Black Holes”), Soorpanakha in “Thaikulam” (“Mother Clan”) and Sita in “Asoka” speak in their own voices about their particular thoughts and emotions. In consciously doing away with the mediating role of men who interpret women's experiences for the women themselves, Sarah Joseph shows how epics can be used to construct a link between events in the past and how we view them today. The pain of a sensitive soul to the violence that acts as a sub-text to history and literature that are essentially men's stories of maintaining mastery and control over woman's body and land is evident in every word that she has uttered. She feels strongly the need to challenge the play of power that occasions this violence. Freed of this blind desire for power, boundless love will wash over this earth. It will vest words with new meanings especially words like ‘love' and ‘freedom’. Choice founded on love will lead to freedom. She says: Freedom is something that has its foundations in love. To put it metaphorically, when I write and let my hair down, it should cover this whole world with love.
Pennezhuthu("woman-writing").
What is pennezhuthu ? Is writing gender differentiated? Must we have a separate category of pennezhuthu? Pennezhuthu ("woman-writing"). Pennezhuthu revolve around the published fictional productions of women, much of these explore the connections between women's experiences and their writings. The mainstream has vigorously flayed pennezhuthu as a space that is cobbled together only so that pseudo-intellectual women can parade their minimal genius. Sarah Joseph has defined it as a form of writing that contests all hegemonies. She holds that women writers in Malayalam have to actively negotiate a man-made language and that they cannot simply wish away its gender-parochialism. Most women writers assemble on other points of concord. Most of them profess, for instance, to write from a woman's standpoint. Most also admit that they get a curt reception from the literary theocracy. One of the compelling reasons they site for wanting to distance themselves from pennezhuthu is the fear of ghettoization and of further marginalization. Their fear is that a constricting female identity will be conferred and consolidated upon them and that everything they write will be expected to contribute and confirm this identity. They would rather infiltrate the "malestream" and find a place under the arc lights. This determination is undoubtedly commendable, but it also raises certain outstanding questions. Most of these women are short story writers. In fact it has been repeatedly pointed out that the short story is the most popular genre among women writers of Kerala. The validity of the above assertion is built by ignoring expressive forms which are not elevated as "literary"; expressive forms that women use in prolific measures. It is easier for women who write short stories to find a respectable place in an unrevised mainstream than it is for women who write personal narratives. To even begin to think of the latter as women-writers demands a political move that interrogates, destabilizes and dismantles conventional norms of inclusion and canonization. By staking their identity as ungendered authors and by resisting the possibilities of collective mobilizations, it is precisely this political space that women writers, who position themselves against pennezhuthu, rescind. It is another and grave matter that even the political assertions of pennezhuthu, have not begun to address "outlaw genres" - genres that have been cast aside by literary establishments. Neither has it begun to seriously address the relations between the social profile of women and their differential accesses to genres of writing.
Another significant issue that has scarcely been examined is the matter of aesthetics. There is widespread fear that pennezhuthu would entail feminist sloganeering to the resultant detriment of aesthetic merit. The literary establishment thought that Sara Joseph was guilty of just that when she set out to effect changes in the masculine ownership of Malayalam. They criticised her language experiments as clumsy and ugly. She retorted that they would find all struggles to overthrow hegemony hideous. Despite this exchange, there has been very little sustained examination of the institutional interests which underpin prevailing notions of aesthetics and creativity.
Then too there is the abiding way in which the "autobiographical" and the "personal" attaches to women's writing, even when these are self-avowedly narratives of fiction. Works of criticism routinely read women writers as "exploring the inner-spaces of the experiential world". "Emotionally too, they [women short story writers] placed emphasis on the personal and the subjective experiences, whereas the men were attracted to the objective narrative structure." Such descriptions seem to offer ready ways for placing women's writings in the larger literary-scape. These rather indolent critical gestures conflate all women's writing with the autobiographical. In turn, they further sharpen the resistance of many women writers to the label of pennezhuthu, for they perceive it as a way of tenaciously straitjacketing their fictions into the experiential. Gracy, a leading short story writer has been particularly forceful in pointing out the fallouts - both on women's lives and on their works - of autobiographical readings which equate the female protagonists with the writers themselves. This, she concludes, is a particularly effective route to threaten, censure and slander women writers. Gita Hiranyan is another writer who has voiced her reservations on the subject. She attributes the tragic suicide of the writer Rajalakshmi to the sanctioned voyeurism unleashed by such criticisms. Her own works, she testifies have been reductively interpreted as commentaries of her familial and sexual life. The impatience of these women writers with the obstinate conflation of their fiction with autobiography is more than justified. But what goes un-addressed here is the predicament of women who want to rehearse their selves in writing. How would women who want to write the autobiographical, dodge the witch-hunt that appears bound to follow every time women produce their selves in language? C.S.Chandrika has argued that instead of seeing pennezhuthu as a constraining category that keeps women in the unthreatening margins, it should be used for a political advance. Even if this were to be effected, it would clearly not be easy to read personal narratives as pennezhuthu, at least as it stands defined now. If women writers wish to "secure the space to graze freely" they undoubtedly have to picket the posts of "malestream" literature. What is woman-writing?" If it is truly an open-ended poser, then it should not pre-judge and dismiss the claims of personal narratives for inclusion. women should continue to write experiential narratives even in the less than conducive atmosphere that seems to prevail. They sometimes privileged their experiential writing and at other times devalued them. There were of course a few who were certain that the personal narratives constituted a study-worthy genre. women's writing in contemporary Kerala. It seeks to stress that women who write themselves into existence are not doing so in a social vacuum. They are in fact engaging in a crucial translation of their selves from mere objects of social discourse to articulating subjects. They are resisting the silences and erasures that come from being, at best, the "spoken for" and the "spoken about".