Asian Diasporas, Contending Identities

and New Configurations: Stories by

Agnes Sam and Olive Senior

Miki Flockemann

Her arrival represented a loosening of the bonds that had previously

bound her, that bind all of us to our homes. Cut free from her past,
she was thus free of the duties and obligations that tie us so tightly
to one another, sometimes in a stranglehold.
Olive Senior, "Arrival of the Snake-Woman" (1989, 44)

"I am cut off from India. I am cut off from South Africa. I am not
rooted anywhere .... I am not part of the Asian community; I am
not part of the British community and I have never really been part
of the exiled community. My interests are in Africa. I am African."
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Agnes Sam, Interview (Myburg 1991,4)

In the introductory section to his Southern African Literatures (1995),

Michael Chapman notes the need for a comparative study of Southern
African literatures across genre, language and geographic boundaries within
Africa as part of a broader process of democratisation (1995, 10). However,
one detects in his concluding remarks some apprehension at the possible
stifling of a distinctly South African accent in the "currently fashionable
cultural diffusion" of a '''black Atlantic' creolisation of Africa and the West"
(1995, 429). What then of South African writers whose works express
cultural affiliations not only with Africa and the West, and who write from
an exile not enforced but chosen?
Rather than enter into the already extensive debate around the project of
writing a Southern African literary history, I I intend extending the scope of
comparison in order to sharpen rather than "stifle the 'South African'
accent" (Chapman 1995, 429). The aim here is to show that the work of a
writer of Indian descent like Agnes Sam, who calls herself an African and
maintains her South African accent, can usefully be compared with a writer

English in Africa 25 No. 1 (May 1998)

 72 MIlG FLOCKEMANN

situated in the diaspora, like Olive Senior, a West Indian of African descent.
Discussion will focus on the two title stories from Sam's Jesus is Indian and
Other Stories (1990), and Senior's Arrival of the Snake-Woman and Other
Stories (1989). Instead of resulting in "cultural diffusion," such a
comparison will demonstrate how, despite their different geopolitical
contexts, Sam and Senior use representations of "Asianness" to destabilise
dominant discourses of identity in ways that have implications for the
processes of democratisation referred to by Chapman. This is not to suggest
an "authentic" South East Asian or Indian identity within the South African
or Afro-Caribbean contexts. As Shamiel Jeppie points out in his discussion
of recent attempts to project or re-claim an ethnic Malay (or Malaysian)
identity for Cape Muslims, the dynamic and ambivalent aspects of identity
become particularly evident during a "liminal moment" such as "the end of
the old and the inauguration of the 'new' South Africa." Jeppie reminds us
that identity "needs constant restatement, there are always others to be
displaced. This fact alone makes identity part of the political field" (1996,
87; see also Fakier, 1996).
It is interesting to speculate why Sam's Jesus is Indian, which was
published while she was in exile in the UK, has not received the same critical
attention locally as Zoe Wicomb's You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (1990),
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since both explore issues of "minority" identity and exile as well as the
coming to consciousness of the child/woman. Sam, however, uses a variety
of narrative perspectives and locations whereas Wicomb's is a more
coherently organised short story cycle. Wicomb's stories also de~l in a more
familiar and direct way with the politics of identity ~nd the
"in-betweenness" of coloured experience, whereas the experiences
described by Sam are complicated by an "alternative" Indian (but Catholic,
not Hindu) identity which tends to be subsumed in the oppositional
black/white discourses. 2 More recently a number of studies concerned with
South African Indians have appeared. For instance, commenting on the
scant scholarship on the history of Indian women in South Africa during the
early years of indenture, Devarashanam Govinden draws on her own family
history in an attempt to redress this absence. According to Govinden, such
transnational projects of reclaiming past histories will play an important role
in foregrounding "contradictions in our projects of nation-building,"
particularly in the context of the relationship between gender and
colonialism (1997,2).3
In Olive Senior's "Arrival of the Snake-Woman," the recollections of the
boy Ishmael are used describe the impact of the arrival of an outsider, Miss
Coolie, on a Jamaican village at the end of last century. Even before her
 STORIES BY AGNES SAM AND OLIVE SENIOR 73

arrival Ishmael is half in love with and half terrified of the "heathen" woman
from India with "snake-like hips" (3) who has chosen to cross the mountains
to be SonSon's new wife and who, in the process, becomes the catalyst for
changes that transform the rural community. From school Ishmael "knew
all about India and the Ganges and the Heathens who lived there" (3), but
the community's prejudices become evident when SonSon's friend Moses
describes the "coolies" as the "wutlessess [most worthless] set of people,"
particularly the men, for coming all the way from India and then being
willing "to work in de cane fe nutten" (3). The women are something else
though, says Moses, "their body so neat and trim and they move their hip
when they walk just like a snake and they don't wear proper clothes ... yu
can see every line of their body when they walk" (3). When Ishmael first
sees the snake-woman his "heart somersaulted" (5) at the sight of her framed
in the doorway of SonSon's house, with her gold bracelets and necklaces-
complete with nose ring (the sure mark of a heathen) - her garment "like
bits and pieces of spider's web" (5). However. the exoticism of the
snake-woman is complicated by the ambivalent markers of her hair and
skin: Ishmael notices that while her hair is as straight as the white parson's
wife's, her skin "was as dark as ours" (5).
The system of Indian indentured labour referred to in Senior's story has
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echoes in the South African indentured labour system described in Agnes

Sam's introduction to Jesus is Indian when she describes how the
importation of Indian labour frustrated Zulu attempts to bring about the
failure of the sugar-cane economy. Sam notes that Indian women were
essential to the processes of adaptation to the new conditions and bore the
brunt of the discriminatory labour practices, often having to mediate
between their own cultural value systems and the demands of plantation
managers. Interestingly, she quotes a description of the Indian woman as
exotic object of colonial desire in the Natal Mercury of 1860 which echoes
Moses' description of the "coolie women" in Jamaica, " ... the women, with
their flashing eyes, with their half-covered bodies, evidently beings of a
different race and kind to anything we have seen yet" (Sam 1989, 10).
While for Olive Senior "Miss Coolie" represents the cultural outsider as
catalyst, Agnes Sam's work is concerned with the Asian woman as
"cultural insider." Writing from exile in Britain in 1989, Agnes Sam says:
South African Indians like myself have lost mother tongue, family
name, religion, culture, history, and historical links with India. Cut
off from India, apartheid has further separated us from the other
communities in South Africa, thereby exacerbating our isolation.
(Sam 1990, II)
 74 MIKI FLOCKEMANN

Unlike Agnes Sam, many South African Indians do see themselves as part
of a cohesive group, and are generally perceived as such by other South
Africans. However, Sam's reference to a sense of "rootlessness" quoted in
the epigraph can be compared to Olive Senior's description of moving
between two very different households while growing up in rural Jamaica.
According to Senior, this resulted in "pretty much being shifted between
two extremes of a continuum based on race, colour and class" (author's note
to A rrival of the Snake- Woman). Significantly, her title story has been
described as "a moving exploration of cultural convergence in which a shift
in power relations among people of African, European and Indian ancestry
signals the emergence of a modem creole society" (Patteson 1993,28).
Despite similar histories of displacement and colonialism, however, the
concept of creolisation has a far more problematic history· in the South
African than in the Caribbean context. 4 Wilmot James describes coming
across references in the State Archives to a proposition couched in the
language of "a manual for dog breeders" for "mongrelising" the Indian
community in South Africa. This plan (rejected by Eben Donges for being
"impractical") was the brainchild of one of the architects of apartheid, Jan
Raats. Raats "had a particularly dastardly plan for the Indians," says James,
for, "like many Nationalists of the time he regretted that the repatriation of
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Indians was not possible because their cultural distinctiveness and

community cohesion were a threat to apartheid." To this end, Raats
proposed that "the Indian community would become 'mongrelised' by
actively allowing African blood to enter the Indian breeding pool" (James
1996). Obviously this reference to "mongreIisation" has a very different
ideological history to the Caribbean experience of cultural creolisation as
imbricated within the processes of modernity. Nevertheless, the concept of
a creole continuum which involves a non-hierarchical relationship between
a variety of cultural influences has some bearing on the two stories by Agnes
Sam and Olive Senior, especially in the light of Patteson's reference to the
"emergence of a modem creole society" represented by Senior's "Arrival of
the Snake-Woman."
As Sam points out, her work has been neglected in the country of her birth
for a number of reasons, and I will argue that re-reading these stories in the
context of post-election South Africa offers scope for a fresh look at some
of the debates around the emergent South African nationhood and identity
in this currently fluid political field (see Jeppie 1996, 87; Crehan 1997). In
considering how "Indian-ness" is constructed as unsettling dominant
discourses of identity, Senior's "Arrival of the Snake-Woman" should be
read against a pragmatic cultural creolisation in the Caribbean, while in the
 STORIES BY AGNES SAM AND OLIVE SENIOR 75

South African context the Population Registration Act (1950) catered for a
separate "Indian" racial classification as distinct from "Cape" and "Other
Coloureds." One can, however, detect a shift from representing Asian
women as "in-between," perceived as not-quite white, and not-quite black,
to re-c1aiming their cultural "difference." As mentioned earlier, this does not
posit an "authentic" Indian identity, but, rather, offers a challenge to the
totalising systems of both apartheid and patriarchy by refusing to co-operate
with hegemonic naming systems.
This shift becomes evident when comparing "Jesus is Indian" with a
story by another South African of Indian descent, namely Jayapraga
Reddy's "Friends" (1987). Referring to the way "race stratifications are
reinforced by internal stratifications in oppressed communities themselves,"
Annemarie van Niekerk describes "Friends" as an "excellent fictional
illustration of the practical operation of overlapping and interacting power
hierarchies" in the way that the chain of oppression is maintained through
the "co-operation" of oppressed peoples (1992, 38). However, in Reddy's
story, the Indian child Asha can hardly be described as "co-operative";
instead, Asha is caught up in a complex hegemony of desire when she and
her friend Phumza, the daughter of the woman employed by Asha' smother,
become involved in a fight over the possession of a "large lifelike doll with
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a blue dress and golden hair" (Reddy 1987, 109). The doll is associated with
values that result in the girls' exclusion from the dominant culture, but is at
the same time an object of desire for both the Indian and the African child:
"She [Phumza] was drawn irresistably towards it" (109). When Asha
recognises in Phumza's eyes the "unspoken yearning" indicative of the
insidious power of hegemonic culture, she "felt something stir and uncoil
within" (109), and viciously tramples the doll in inarticulate rage, just as she
wishes she could smash the television screen that appears to have such a
powerful control over her mother who evades responsibility for her life by
compulsively watching soap operas. Situated within the apartheid
dichotomy of black and white, European and African, Reddy's "Friends"
illustrates the familiar class/race/gender nexus when Phumza learns the
lesson of "the unfairness of it all" (Ill). Despite her apparent friendship
with Asha, the battle over the doll has mapped out her future as distinct from
Asha's: "Reluctantly she relinquished her hold [on the doll]. She turned and
followed her mother to the washing line" (11l). The television screen and
the washing line here each exert their respective class-based hold over the
two mothers, Indian employer and African employee.
Reddy's story reflects a common trope, namely the child's gendered rite
of passage into a given South African class/race hierarchy. However,
 76 MIlG FLOCKEMANN

instead of the crude conflict depicted in "Friends," a different direction is

offered in Sam's Jesus is Indian which deals with the relationships between
women and across generations in a range of South African contexts. Sam is
at pains in her introduction to her collection to show that the history of
Indians in South Africa is not just a story of conquest (1989,2). She achieves
this by focusing on choices that do not appear possible to Reddy's Phumza
and Asha. In her introduction Sam comments on the w~ South African
Indians have been "excluded from South African history," and it is a matter
of concern, says Sam, that such a marginalised group "becomes an easily
identifiable scapegoat" because they are placed "as a buffer between whites
and Africans" (1989, 9). The apparent contradiction in Sam's claim quoted
in the epigraph to this article, "I am an African," despite her sense of
"rootlessness," and belonging neither to an Asian nor to an exiled
community in Britain, develops into a counter-discourse to the master
narrative of apartheid. "Indian-ness," instead of being perceived as a
"buffer" or a marker of marginalisation, becomes an enabling position that
offers what Caroline Rooney in a review of Sam's collection suggests are
explorations of the past and present histories in anticipation of "new
configurations in the future" (1990, 6).
The first two stories in Sam's collection use the narrative perspective of
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a child and are set in the present, whereas the final stories are about a lost
childhood, set in the past; this suggests that these stories should be read in
relation to one another. "High Heels," the first story, uses the disingenuous
voice of a small child, Ruthie, to weave together two motifs, each involving
a test. The first test is provided by her friend Lindiwe's taunt that she must
earn the right to be of an age to wear high heels by entering the "secret room"
that Ruthie has discovered in her home. When Ruthie completes her part of
the bargain by crossing the threshold into what turns out to be a secret Hindu
prayer room situated within a Christian household, Lindiwe challenges her
to a second test, to explain what the secret means - and why the room must
be kept secret. The "meaning" of the secret Hindu prayer room within the
Catholic house that Ruthie fails to grasp at this stage emerges as a trope
running through the collection as a whole, and this establishes a dialogue
between the present and the past. For instance, the second last story, "The
Story Teller" is presented as oral history that has "come down to us with
slight changes when told by different members of the family" (125), and
relates the tale of children who are "shanghaied" from India by being tricked
onto a ship carrying indentured labourers to South Africa (as Sam suspects
her own grandfather was). The last story, "And They Christened It
Indenture," traces the gradual resistance of Indians to this form of "slavery
 STORIES BY AGNES SAM ANI? OLIVE SENIOR 77

by another name" as well as Christianity's endorsement of the indentured

labour system; this then provides a meaning for the "secret" Ruthie failed to
grasp in the first story.
While Jesus is Indian is apparently not composed as a typical South
African short fiction cycle with its emphasis on a distinctive region and
community (as defined by Sue Marais 1995), it is nevertheless interesting
to look at the collection in the context of such short fiction cycles. After all,
in her introduction Sam identifies the theme running through her collection
as the figure of Ruth (from the Book of Ruth 1.16), "the epitome of the
migrant wife [who] is still willing to adapt" (13). Similarly, it is useful to
read these stories in relation to other short fiction produced by South African
women during the 1980s, particularly in view of the increasing popularity
of fictional autobiography (see Daymond 1996). At the same time, as Sam
points out, one should be wary of assuming that black women generally
write autobiographically (Sam 1988,73; see also Wicomb 1993). Just as the
West imposed an identity on the Orient, says Neloufer de Mel, the
hegemony of a patriarchal literary establishment and tradition has gi ven
women writers a particular space - that of autobiography and domestic life
(1995, 244). However, drawing on the debate concerning identity
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formation between Edward Said and Aijaz Ahmed, who warns that
identities "should not be seen in purely Manichean terms as polarities which
contaminate but never enablingly inform each other" (quoted in De Mel
1995, 244), De Mel claims that far from being constrained by this
"categorising," women writers as gendered subjects have made "creative
use of the space conceded to them" (1995, 244). The fact that the first two
stories in Jesus is Indian are told from the perspective of a child seems
significant in terms of the way "new" South African writing uses
recollections of childhood to explore South African subjectivities from a
variety of perspectives, informed in interesting ways by the writers' own
race/Class/gender positions. 6 It will become evident that, while Sam is
concerned with the absence of Indians from South African history, her
stories which deal with childhood, though written in the 1980s, ultimately
address the future South African society of the 1990s.
Like "High Heels," the narrative voice in "Jesus is Indian" is situated
inside a child's consciousness, though the narrator here, perhaps
appropriately (mis)named Angelina, is slightly older than "baby girl"
Ruthie. Two narrative strands are interwoven in "Jesus is Indian": the first
- indicated by the use of parentheses - records the thoughts and feelings
going through Angelina's mind under the st.ern surveillance of Sister
Bonaventura in her Catholic school. This is interspersed with dialogue as
 78 MIlG FLOCKEMANN

the "cheeky" Angelina as pupil-narrator fires uncomfortable questions at

Sister in the classroom, while at home her Hama (mother) complains that,
"these electric light children know too much" (29), whenever Angelina
challenges traditional expectations. Then there is the story Angelina herself
is writing - indicated by italics - which deals with relationships between
her mother and older sister, Honey, as well as Honey's transition into young
womanhood. A number of motifs are introduced in the first paragraph when
Angelina reflects:
(Who invented school? Who said little children must sit still in a
desk pretending they wide awake when they dreaming of comics
and swings and stealing fruit from Mrs Mumble?)
(Me, I'm not a good girl, but I'm even praying for the bell to
ring, frighten even to look at Sonnyboy standing behind Sister,
moving every way Sister moves and making monkey faces behind
her back. You know me, once I start to laugh, I won't never stop.)
(24)
One could argue that when Angelina claims that she is "not a good girl" she
is accepting the judgement passed upon her failure to conform to the
demands of both Catholic education and Indian tradition. At the same time,
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her question, "Who invented school?" challenges one of the very authorities
that she is forced to obey, as well as indicating her awareness ofthe pretence
involved in this. The mimicry of the "monkey faces" which Sonnyboy
enacts behind Sister's back as well as the threat of ensuing laughter serve to
disrupt the colonial educational system in which Angelina is forced to excise
Hindu words from her story, and to re-name her mother for the convenience
of Sister who refuses to recognise the lang!Jage of her pupils: "Sister say she
never come to learn. She come to teach!" (28). In addition, Sister attempts
to censor references in Angelina's story to the emerging sexuality of Honey.
After a brief expulsion from the school Angelina is allowed to return, but
offers a final challenge to Sister Bonaventura, "Hama say Jesus is Indian
because Jesus wear dhoti and Jesus can understand our language" (33).
Angelina's claim that she will never use an English name for her Hama is
prompted by Harna saying:
"What that sister kno w? Hey? Don't Jesus wear a dhoti like Ghandi?
Don't Hama talk to Jesus in our language? Don't Jesus answer all
Hama's prayers? Don't Honey get a rich husband? You so clever,
what you think that means? Hey? You electric light children and
you don't know? Jesus is Indian. You go to school and tell that
sister." (33)
 STORIES BY AGNES SAM AND OLIVE SENIOR 79

Although Hama effectively turns the tables on Sister Bonaventura by

appropriating Christianity, but on Indian tenns, Angelina's challenge raises
a number of questions. Should we see this as merely an amusing but naive
rebellion against an authority figure, or are we being invited to see the
apparently disingenuous account as offering "new configurations of the
future"? According to Caroline Rooney one can read this in different ways,
namely, either as "expressive of a desire for syncretism, as a metaphoric
equation, or as a teasing, deliberately provocative contradiction" (1990, 6).
While I am not suggesting a conflation of the fictional Angelina with Agnes
Sam, it is nevertheless significant, in view of Rooney's comment, that in
interviews Agnes Sam has stressed the importance of speaking and writing
in her own accent and voice, and in a style that is not dictated by publishers'
perceptions of what and how black women write (Sam 1988, 74). One can
thus safely argue that "Jesus is Indian" represents an example of what De
Mel refers to as the "creative use of the space conceded" (1995, 244). A
comment on Olive Senior's stories, which explore similar challenges to
authority figures (parents and teachers) and the ideologies embodied by
them, is pertinent to Angelina's (and Hama's) challenge in "Jesus is Indian."
As Patteson puts it, such apparently naive defiance involves "the
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deconstruction of repressive cultural and psychological codes [which are]

an essential prerequisite for the construction of an adult identity - whether
for an individual or for a society as a whole" (1993, 21), and the complex
analogies between familial and colonial relationships explored by both
Senior and Sam should be viewed in this light.
As mentioned previously, Jesus is Indian is not typical of the South
African short fiction cycle with its emphasis on a cohesive region,
community and identity in the face of apartheid dislocations. Unlike these
"composed cycles," Sam's stories, a number of which were previously
published elsewhere, are set in different locations, sometimes undefined,
and use a variety of narrative voices and fictional styles, ranging from
realism to parable and oral story-telling traditions. However, the "new
strand developing in the genre" identified by Marais (1995) can also apply
to Sam's collection, particularly in relation to the self-reflexivity of "Jesus
is Indian" in which the processes of story-writing are integral to the challenge
that Angelina offers to Sister Bonaventura. According to Marais:
These works are more radical than the cycles mentioned earlier since
they not only set out to expose the fictionality of the grand myth of
apartheid as a "master narrative," but also self-consciously meditate
on their own (re-) presentations of South African reality as
discursive constructs. (1995,32)
 80 MIla FLOCKEMANN

Earlier it was suggested that when the stories in Sam's collection are read
as part of a "discursive continuum" (Rooney 1990,6) provided by Sam's
introduction and the last story, "And They Christened It Indenture," a
dialectical relationship is established between the different stories.
Moreover, re-reading "Jesus is Indian" in the post-election context appears
to confirm Rooney's suggestion that the understanding introduced by
Angelina's "interrogation" of adult taboos is a "deferred one," and one
"which the reader may only reach at the end of the book" (1990, 6). Each
story, read in this context, offers scope for a more complex, richer
interpretation, than if read individually.
In her discussion of short fiction written by South African women in the
1980s, Margaret Daymond refers to the development of two different
traditions which are embodied in the work of Bessie Head, on the one hand,
and Nadine Gordimer on the other; namely, "the traditional tale telling of
black communities and modernism's short story" (1996, 193). These
comments are interesting in view of some of the criticisms of Sam's
occasional lack of verisimilitude. For instance, referring to the
"unevenness" in Sam's writing, Sally-Ann Murray says that "Sam is a
realist writer who paradoxically has a healthy distrust of the conventions of
storytelling - fact often slips into fiction and vice versa, so as to tell a larger
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story of life within and without a particular community" (1991, 187).

Murray says that while Sam avoids essentialising or universalising her
women, readers might want "more concrete evidence of the effects of the
environment," though the dust cover claims that the stories are "set among
the Indians of South Africa ... the larger story seems to apply to Indians as
minorities in the West" (Murray 1991, 187). Rooney, however, asks
whether the lack of contextual grounding is not a deliberate strategy "to
make us experience for ourselves the lack of access to 'secret rooms'"
(1990,6). This "risks a certain whimsicality," yet, as Rooney rightly says,
the stories do not intend to give information, but to ask questions (1990,6).
Looking at Sam's work in relation to the two paradigms referred to by
Daymond - that is, tale-telling, as in Sam's "The Story Teller," and her
modernist-style "Child and Dove" - it becomes evident that Sam moves
easily between these two paradigms. Sam describes how three of her stories
(including "Child and Dove") are associated with a European work of art:
"I had in mind an African exile wandering through the galleries in Europe
and reminded of situations at home." She refers to her unpublished
experimental novel What Passing Bells as "impressionistic. its form
suggestive of a fractured society ... its purpose was to frustrate the reader's
need for continuity," and angrily questions the assumption that "a black
 STORIES BY AGNES SAM AND OLIVE SENIOR 81

woman experimenting with language and form has no business in writing"

(Sam 1988, 75). A similar concern with the experimental use of language
is evident in Patteson's comments on Olive Senior's "command of voice"
as a way of "transcending and transforming ... the sense of displacement
that can accompany creolization into a new culture" (1993, 19). According
to Patteson, Senior is aware of contradictions manifested in language; "in
the politics inherent in the spoken word versus the written, in Jamaican
creole versus the language of the Bible, Shakespeare - and the
schoolroom" (interview, quoted in Patteson 1993, 19). Instead of
unevenness, then, it might be more appropriate to see the variety of styles
and voices adopted in Sam's stories in relation to Senior's similar use of a
"medley of discourses" which "represent the countercolonization of a
language once associated with hegemonic authority" (Patteson 1993, 15).
In a review of the work of Farida Karodia, another exiled South African
of Indian descent, Lauretta Ngcobo criticises Karodia's "honest" first novel,
Daughters of the Twilight, because "it portrays life in the seams of South
Africa rather than in the mainstream" (1988, 306). However, this emphasis
on the "seams" rather than the "mainstream" seems relevant to Sam's
impatience (expressed during a writers' forum) with the emphasis on the
overtly political rather than the more intimate processes of subject formation
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and the choices that are available. 7 Daymond also stresses the question of
choice, seeing it as a feature distinguishing writing by black and white
women of the last decade. While black writers in the 1980s were generally
engaged in sociopolitical realism rather than in tale-telling, says Daymond,
"their writing can still be distinguished from Gordimer's example in the way
they tend to give importance to the ordinary choices made by women in their
daily lives" (Daymond 1995, 199). Referring to Gcina Mhlophe's
much-anthologised autobiographical story, "The Toilet," which describes
how she became a writer in defiance of her ideological and physical
exclusion from South African society, Daymond says: "It is a long step from
a woman's writing a story to a people's attaining freedom, but this glimpse
of a woman's spirited choice, even of the capacity to imagine it, represents
an inner strength which promises its external equivalent" (1996,204). Such
choices and the powerful subtext provided by the self-reflexivity of the
process of writing are also evident in "Jesus is Indian" where Angelina
decides to complete her essay and continue with English despite the fact that
she hates school, because she recognises that the alternative would be to
succumb to the equally constraining demands of Indian tradition: "I rather
go to school than stay at home and do cooking and housework with Hama"
(30).
 82 MIIG FLOCKEMANN

Unlike "Jesus is Indian," in which Angelina's "story-writing" offers

imagined choices and "new configurations" for the future, in Olive Senior's
story Ishmael uses his story to make sense of his past and of a changing,
modem Jamaica: "And this is why I sometimes sit and write down the things
that happened in the old days, so that my children will be able to see clearly
where we are coming from, should they ever need signposts" (45). In the
two stories by Senior and Sam, "Asian-ness" is shown as destabilising both
the dominant and the traditional social structures. The position of the
migrant woman, far from resulting in marginalisation within her
community, is seen as a force for introducing changes, which are, however,
in the case of Miss Coolie, not always positive. When her son Biya does not
respond to traditional healers and the parson refuses to treat her dying child
because she is a "heathen," Miss Coolie decides to undertake on her own
the hazardous journey to the Bay to see a medical doctor. This decision
results in a liberation of sorts for Miss Coolie, who now "began to firmly
control her own destiny" (39), On her return she converts to Christianity, as
this is the only way to ensure that her son will have access to education, but
once the government school has been established, she returns to her Hindu
faith.
This pragmatism identifies Miss Coolie as "the embodiment of the spirit
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

of the new age" (44); her rupture from her cDuntry of birth provides her from
the start "with an understanding of the world that the rest of us lacked" (43).
Insisting that Ishmael continue his schooling despite his gradual
disillusionment with Christianity after witnessing the parson's treatment of
her, Miss Coolie tells him, "you don't know nothing bout world" (34). Her
"knowledge" enables her to "become a free agent," to "do business" with
whomsoever she pleases, and in the process, she acquires the most
prestigious property, Top House, which formerly belonged to the "old-time
white people." However, while the "new age" brings the medical expertise
that can cure her son Biya and enable him to become a lawyer and return the
title deeds of the land to the community, it (or Miss Coolie) also introduces
the community to "butter instead of coconut oil, to sweet-smelling salts,
powders and pomades, toothpaste instead of chews tick, healing oil and
liniment for our pains ... boots and shoes, hair-straightening combs and skin
bleaches, the first sewing machine" (40). In both cases, "new Con-
figurations" of the future for Angelina and the "new age" of a modem creole
society for Ishmael and Miss Coolie come as the result of an encounter
between Asian-ness and dominant and/or traditional values. This also
entails loss, however, and for Ishmael, Miss Coolie always remains "a
mystery." He wonders whether she has accepted her new life without regret:
 STORIES BY AGNES SAM AND OLIVE SENIOR 83

"I can never be sure, for there is the evidence of the saris, the red dot, the
Indian names. And sometimes, when I look into her eyes, I can still see the
Ganges" (45). Comparing the creolisation and "cultural convergence"
suggested in Olive Senior's Jamaican story with Sam's South African
stories suggests the possibility for similar pragmatic cultural creolisations in
the South African context as we move away from discourses of identity
based on apartheid oppositions and engage with the tricky discourses of an
apparently "new" nationhood.
In light of this it is interesting to note how another voice from the Asian
diaspora, that of Shirley Geok-Iin Lim, eloquently describes how it was the
intersection of Confucianism and Catholicism which she encountered while
growing up in Malaysia that enabled her to imagine a possible
non-patriarchal social structure. Referring to herself as an "already multiply
colonized subject," Lim says these oppressions do not come from a
hegemonic centre: "Instead, I see a colonial subject as the cultural site for
the contradictions inherent in the intersections of multiple conserving circles
of authority" (1993, 244). One is reminded here of Angelina challenging
Sister Bonaventura's censorship of her writing at school, but also hiding
under the kitchen table at home when her mother tries to beat her with a
featherduster for her un-Indian behaviour. But Sam's story does not merely
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

pose Angelina as a "site of contradictions," a Catholic Indian (like Sam

herself); rather, Angelina's resilience offers alternatives not possible to
either her mother or Sister Bonaventura, precisely because she is able to
negotiate a position between both English-speaking Catholicism and
Indian-ness. Describing herself as situated in the cross-ways between
Confucianism, Malay feudalism, Roman Catholicism and British
colonialism, Shirley Lim emphasises the effects of a multilogical rather than
mono logical environment in which none of these cultural systems on their
own "offered a girl-child a stable, established, supporting society."
However, "Each system; oppressive alone, became interrogative and
subversive in the matrix of multiculturalism" (1993, 246). Given the
problematic status of multiculturalism in the South African context with its
apartheid legacy of separate but unequal development and the inequitable
power dynamics involved in this, Lim's comment recalls the debate
between Said and Ahmed referred to earlier which suggested the possibility
of identities which do not contaminate, but "enablingly inform each other"
(De Mel 1995, 244). Looked at this way, the different values and beliefs
encountered by the Asian woman in the diaspora do not "co-exist in parallel
structures but [react] on each other, calling into question their differences"
(Lim 1993, 246). A similar point is made by Samir Dayal who argues the
 84 MIla FLQCKEMANN

need to theorise ethnicity, race, class, gender and nation more explicitly and
strongly with reference to "diaspora":
Cultural difference is a theoretically useful concept not primarily
because it points to the discreteness of one culture from another but
because it reminds of the constitutiveness of difference. That is to
say, among other things, that sovereignty is denied to the subject,
and organic self-identity and self-sufficiency are denied to a culture
as such. (1996, 54)

Clearly, Lim's account of the way "points of escape" are offered at the
intersection of different cultural systems could be useful for the renewed
focus on the politics of identity in the South African context, and will no
doubt strike a chord with many caught between conflicting systems of value
and knowledge during this time of transition and returned exiles. Despite the
continuing movement of dispossessed peoples, refugees and illegal
immigrants throughout Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, Sam
suggests that it is possible that migration is not only the reaction of a victim,
but can be the enactment of choice. As she claims rather provocatively in
her introduction to Jesus is Indian, for the woman in modern and
post-modem society, migration need no longer emphasise the migrant
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

woman's "chattle nature"; instead, she says, "it can signal our independence
and status as individuals" (13) when migration is a choice, not merely a
historical necessity.

NOTES

1. For detailed engagement with the parameters of Chapman's project see Leon
de Kock (1997) and Stewart Crehan (1997). See also Johannes A. Smit et aI., ed.
(1996).
2. The dust cover of Ronnie Govender's recently published prize-winning
collection At the Edge and Other Cato Manor Stories claims that during the 1960s
Govender was the first to "ventur[e] to explore the lives, tragedies and patois ofthe
Indian community" (Arcadia: Manx Publishers, 1996).
3. Quoted by kind permission ofthe author, who is also working on images of
social and cultural history in Jayapraga Reddy's unpublished autobiography ''The
Unbending Reed."
4. This is suggested by Chapman's reservations about "black Atlantic"
creolisation and cultural diffusions referred to at the beginning of this article. See
also Samir Dayal's interesting discussion on "Diaspora and Double Consciousness"
in relation to Carol Boyce Davies's discussion of both the transformative and
resistant aspects of Afro-diasporic culture in which she "rejects concepts ofhybridity
and syncretism in favour of repetition and re-memory" (Dayal 1996).
 STORIES BY AGNES SAM AND OLIVE SENIOR 85

5. In her introduction Sam objects to the minimal coverage devoted to Indian

peasants in Colin Bundy's The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry, seeing
it as a further example of the exclusion of Indians from South African history (9).
It is interesting to note that in keeping with recent re-writings of South African
history for the school curriculum, a popular history like the Reader's Digest
Illustrated History of South Africa (updated 1992, with Bundy as advisor) perhaps
prematurely sub-titled ''The Real Story," devotes a chapter to Indian indentured
labour, titled "No more than units of labour." Commenting on the way bigotry and
discrimination were increasingly "written into the law," the article quotes a Bengali
newspaper which claimed that, ''The only difference between Negro slavery and
coolie emigration is that the former was open slavery and the latter is slavery in
disguise" (225), echoing the point made by Sam in her last story which frames the
collection, "And They Christened It Indenture."
6. See Flockemann (1998).
7. Hosted by the Mail & Guardian, ''Transforming South Africa: The Power
of Imaginative Writing." Cape Town, Sept. 1995. To illustrate her point, Sam read
from the first story in her collection, "High Heels."

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