Jabeen Akhtar: The South Asian woman is oppressed, and she should behave accordingly. Perhaps authors and publishers think they’re helping by “illuminating” the plight of women through literature, but the continuous portrayal of South Asian women as victims and little else helps normalize the very oppression they oppose. In fact, South Asian diaspora novels expose little about the flesh-and-blood people they are trying to portray and everything about the hypocrisy of the publishing enterprise: South Asian authors characterizing immigrant life with clichés and co-opting third-world problems for insta-tragedies; White Guilt readers who feel that they are doing something about third-world problems by proxy just by reading novels about them; and the Western publishing elite who think they’re multi-culti because they make their own hummus and wear earrings from World Market when they are, in reality, only comfortable seeing foreigners behave within the confines of their stereotypes.
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Writer and Bookslut columnist Daisy Rockwell explains that South Asian literature published in English has a certain shared aesthetic which is quite different from what we find in literature from SA that has not been written in English. The English varietal is “lush” and “magical” — the “vernacular” varietal tends to be progressivist, unadorned and heavily wedded to realism. In short, it is not as “fun” as the kind written in English.
Publishers should allow the walls they have erected around the genre to become permeable to literature that isn’t “fun.” To books that take risks and make readers uncomfortable and represent more obscure South Asian voices. Basically they should follow what the subcontinent has been doing all along.
Writers should rid themselves of the burden of presenting their culture to the world. Many authors feel handicapped by the industry’s need for a South Asian novel to have a hook — an undertone of familiarity that comforts white readers and enables them to sympathize with their foreign characters. Conversely, if the stories or characters remain too ethnic, holding on to their alien status too tightly, the author piles on exposition about culture, politics, and history to fill in knowledge gaps.
Those authors should take another look at some of the classic, non–Anglo Saxon novels whose authors didn’t try to make things palatable for the Western reader. They didn’t change their foreign recipes. In fact, those authors didn’t care much about the reader at all.
For example, the Russian epic The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky is absolute hell to read. It’s a chore to just keep track of all the complicated Russian names. The same could be said of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, a matter-of-fact portrayal of Nigerian tribal life pre- and post-colonialism. All of these novels explore universal themes but unapologetically eschew explaining their respective cultures. The authors don’t waste time making the text readily comprehensive or relatable to you as a Western reader. They plunge you into their stories and you sink or swim — you either put the book down, or you challenge yourself to finish it. Readers seem to like the challenge, or these novels would have faded into obscurity long ago. More here.