suniti namjoshi feminist fables analysis

The poems that accompany this edition are from various books and reveal the textured and multivalent satire that characterises Namjoshi’s political poetry.

That was enormously exhilarating and it allowed me to think and to explore and to write.” There was the sense that a strong feminist movement existed, and for a writer this meant that there was an audience - a readership - to whom I might make sense. It wasn’t just particular friends and important writers that mattered though. It was books like Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and the work of writers like Virginia Woolf and Adrienne Rich that made me understand the extent to which sheer brutal power in the form of wealth and social ascendancy intersected with the literary enterprise and determined not just who could write what, but who could write at all and what constituted the literary canon.

I had also assumed that literature had nothing to do with power. I hadn’t realized that it had something to do with ethics. Up till then I thought that politics was something unpleasant that vaguely unpleasant people indulged in. She was active in both Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation. What’s more I could see that she was fighting my battles for me, while I stood aside and did nothing and that shamed me.

She had more brains than me, she could out-argue me and she had a literary mind. “A major influence,” she writes in an email exchange, “was my friend, Hilary Clare (alias Christine Donald). Namjoshi says she got politicized during her sabbatical from the University of Toronto which she spent in England in 1978 – 79.

Suniti namjoshi feminist fables analysis