Salaam, Postcolonial Blues

Paul Zachariah is a unique modernist in Malayalam fiction in several ways.

Although, the literary establishment, even in the wildest dream, would not trace his
lineage to the Progressive Literary Movement of the Forties and Fifties, several of his
stories bear the unmistakable stamp of social realism. One cannot look at this lineage the
way one looks at the same lineage in O V Vijayan. In Vijayan it is possible to dismiss
the social realism of his early stories as the teething troubles of a budding modernist
(although such attempts stumble upon stories like Oru Yudhathinte Aarambham – “The
Beginning of a War” – one of the best stories written in the social realist mode in
Malayalam). In Zachariah one finds this lineage in Annamma Teacher Oru
Ormmakkurippu (Annamma Teacher – An Obituary), Bhaskara Pattelarum Ente
Jeevithavum (My Life with Bhaskara Pattelar) and a number of other stories. That
Zachariah is uneasily at home in the High Modernist school in Malayalam fiction with
the likes of Sethu, Kakkanadan, K P Nirmal Kumar and Methil Radhakrishnan is also
quite evident. There are just a few stories like Oridath (Once Upon a Time), the title
story of his first collection that mark Zachariah as a quintessential High Modernist. More
interestingly Zachariah made remarkable forays into Political Modernism (the movement
in Malayalam literature described by the late critic and theatre activist Narendra Prasad as
“the red tail of Modernism”) with stories like Kannada, Vaal Thudangiyava (About
Eyeglasses, Tails and other Paraphernalia) and Kuzhiyaanakalude Udyaanam (The
Garden of Ant-lions).

It is Zachariah’s language, more than anything else that enables his border
crossings from Modernism. His diction has the felicity of the dialects of both his region
and his community. The deployment of these dialects gives to Zachariah’s fiction both
flexibility and strength. In this respect, Zachariah is the writer in Malayalam who can
claim the most intimacy with Vaikom Muhammed Basheer. Remarkably like in
Basheer’s stories featuring the Malayalee Muslim community, Zachariah’s stories show
him by turns to be indignant, sympathetic and amused at the lifestyle and attitudes of his
Syrian Christian community of the Highlands of Kerala. Annamma Teacher Oru
Ormmakkurippu and Oru Nasraani Yuvaavum Gaulisaastravum (A Young Christian’s
Brush with Gaulisaastra) follow up the incisive observations of the community by
Ponkunnam Varkey, one of the pioneers of social realism in Malayalam fiction.

Salaam America moves in a terrain which has been little explored in Malayalam
fiction – the life of the expatriate Malayalees , or NRKs (Non-Resident Keralites) as they
are now known in official parlance. Although official estimates are not available, the
number of Malayalees living abroad would run into more than five million. The impulse
of the Malayalee to emigrate is legendary. There is a story of a Malayalee offering a cup
of tea in his ramshackle restaurant to Neil Armstrong on the moon! But the struggles and
conflicts in the life of expatriate Malayalees have not been seriously documented in
Malayalam fiction. It is astounding that even the “Gulf Malayalee” has not been visibly
located in Malayalam fiction. In contrast there are at least three writers (Kovilan,
Parappurath and Nanthanar) who have written extensively about the life of Malayalees in
the country’s armed forces. Their fiction has even been collectively discussed as Pattala
Kathakal (Tales from the Barracks).

Salaam America is one of the few stories which trace the vicissitudes of
Malayalee life abroad. One of the professions in which Malayalees are in great demand
all over the world is nursing. It is difficult to find any major city in Europe or America
where there are no Malayalee nurses in hospitals. A large number of such nurses are
from the Christian community, often securing their jobs through a network of NGOs,
many of which are related to church organizations of various denominations. Quite often
these nurses secure family visas after a short tenure and take their husbands with them.
Tessy and Josey in the story are such a typical couple.

Josey’s protestations of innocence about the ways of the White Man sound almost
incredible in a region like Kerala which is going through a phase of rapid globalization.
In fact his infatuation for fast cars and scotch whiskey in New York would indicate that
he is very much part of the game. “Ayyo, is this the same Josey who once sat angling on
the mud bank of our family’s paddy fields at Machanattu”, he asks himself. But it is a
fact observable to any visitor to any village or town of Kottayam or Ernakulam district in
Kerala that young men like Josey have changed incredibly over the last quarter of a
century (Salaam America was published in the mid-Nineties of the last century). The
nostalgia for one’s native village or town (not for Kerala as a homeland) is indelibly
etched in the Malayalee psyche and expressed ad nauseum in Malayalam poetry and
fiction (and ridiculed by political modernists like K G Sankarappillai). This nostalgia
often functions as an escapist device or an antidote to the occasional bouts of ennui or
alienation.

If Josey is the archetypal Malayalee in his nostalgia, he is more so in his

unqualified admiration for the White man’s goodies. The story begins with the
statement: “I had a great time while I was in America.” There is no irony here. Josey
notes with delight that America has the best tapioca in the world, baby soft when cooked.
“Even the bread-tapioca we get at Kadathuruthy comes nowhere near it.” The Johnnie
Walker is equally fascinating. Overcome by its caressing of his insides, Josey asks: “Tell
me, do we have one whiskey which can match Johnnie?” “When all is said and done, the
fact remains that in things like this, the White Man definitely knows what he is doing”, he
concludes. Josey’s only grouse is that the White Man is “the very devil when it comes to
his possessions.” This strikes the reader as all too obviously self-righteous. Neither
Josey nor Tessie are shown to be particularly generous or altruistic in the story. Nor are
there memories of any acts of generosity or altruism back home in Kadathuruthy. Later
on in the story one finds Josey resorting to sheer tomfoolery to gain the sympathy of the
cops in the highway patrol who booked him for speeding.

But the postcolonial in Josey cannot help going into subversive moods, even if
they are rare: “That damned Lincoln Family! It seems there was once a leader called
Lincoln in America. What a terrible thing to have given his name to that devil of a car!
Family indeed! That bitch of a car dug the grave of my family life.” In a P G
Wodehouse novel published sometime during the Thirties of the last century, a young
man who turned vegetarian reluctantly under his girlfriend’s influence is caught raiding
the larder at night for a slice of beef steak. His friend advising him to be more in
possession of himself points out a role model to him: “Think of Gandhi. He hasn’t had a
square meal for years.” The reference to Lincoln is Zachariah’s tit for Wodehouse’s tat.
“Leader” is a poor translation for “nethavu” in the original, a term which has undergone
considerable semantic deterioration in Kerala’s political culture in recent times.

The faultlines in the ‘nativist’ mindscape in the story can easily be detected – as it
can be in much of post-colonial fiction which revolves around the black-and-white
duality of the colonizer and the colonized. Finding fault with the White Man’s lifestyle
comes easy: “ . . these white men have minds that are always depressed; they have all
sorts of anxieties and hallucinations. How else can it be, what with all this running about
and all this crazy going up and down in lifts and driving around in a frenzy!” But such
censoriousness lacks conviction. The awe and veneration for the White Man’s glittering
world overcomes all cynicism: “Ho! America. Spreading far and wide and distant . . .
New York city is down below at my feet. Hey Josey, I tell myself. Look! This is New
York! You are standing on top of it. This is the same New York you hve seen in pictutes
in the newspapers, the New York where the white man lives! Thrills run up from my feet
to the crown of my head.” One hears echoes of Whitman’s hymns to America in such
rhapsodies. Whitman was certainly one of Zachariah’s mentors. He quotes Whitman’s
famous lines “Camerado, this is no book/Who touches this touches a man” in his
introduction to O V Vijayan’s path-breaking novel Dharmapuranam (translated by the
author into English as Saga of Dharmapuri).

The patriarchal slant of much of postcolonial nativism is also badly exposed in the
story. Modernist fiction in Malayalam already had an overdose of patriarchal attitudes,
and many of the canonized writers have been hauled up by feminist and other schools of
criticism for it. Tessy is scared stiff of an unwanted pregnancy – like any other slogging
immigrant woman who has her installments to pay, not to speak of supporting a
struggling family back home. Josey’s reaction to her refusal to have sex with him is
typical of the stereotyped Mallu male: “All right then, if you don’t want it, I have other
things to do. Do men go down on their knees for this?” This serves as a convenient
excuse for his dalliance with Josephina. To Josey Josephina looks very much like a
Knaanaya Christian girl from Thrissoor, never mind her Spanish origins. But his
anxieties about his son growing up in America verges on racial paranoia: “No kith and
kin nearby. He too will become one of those people driving around in some worthless
car, one more in an endless stream of cars. And then some multi-coloured white woman
will snatch him.” Perhaps there are few woman characters in Malayalam fiction who are
as marginalized or misrepresented as Tessy.

As postcolonial fiction ‘Salaam America’ lays bare the contradictions and

conflicts of identities in a postcolonial society at the historical juncture when the Trojan
horse left behind by retreating colonialism has begun to disgorge its hidden soldiers. The
irony of the title “Salaam America!” fades away as one peers into the recesses of the
story. But it should be remembered that Zachariah went on to write another story
“Jaraparvvam”(The Canto of the Secret Lovers) which till date is probably the most
incisive statement in Malayalam fiction on collaborators of neo-colonialism in post-
colonized societies.