Review: Outside Looking In

Reviewed Work(s): Anita and Me by Meera Syal

Review by: Rosellen Brown
Source: The Women's Review of Books , Apr., 1997, Vol. 14, No. 7 (Apr., 1997), pp. 7-8
Published by: Old City Publishing, Inc.

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kids are still spending most of their days the capitalist market, when applied to

away from home.
Besides, can't something be "histori-
cally constructed ideology" and still be the
right thing to do? If you're about to laugh
at my naivet? here, let's pretend this book
is about domestic violence; let's pretend
it's asking how come more men these
days, whatever their actual behavior, now
subscribe to an ideology that says it's not
good to beat their wives. Why would men
believe this? the imaginary author won-
ders. Wouldn't marriage be more efficient
if the husbands exercised more control?
Now consider Karen, one of the moth-
ers interviewed by Hays. Karen refuses to
spank her four-year-old daughter; she ne-
gotiates instead. Negotiation with a four-
year-old takes a lot of time and energy-l
know. Karen's tired. Hays comments: "[ILt
is not at all surprising that Karen often
finds herself exhausted by eight o'clock in
the morning." But whether she's ex-
production
hausted or not, whether it's efficient or not,
Karen shouldn't hit her daughter. It's mo-
ments like this that made me want to yell
at Hays: she's writing, often so intelli-
gently, about something I know so well-
but sometimes, really, she doesn't have a
clue.
T HE REFRESHING THING about The Poli- women. Potentially, not necessarily; but it
tics of Motherhood is the way it
shifts the discussion-destabilizes
the very notion of a "good mother"-and
pushes all its mothers out onto a much
broader stage. I welcomed both the
collection's international perspective and
its unusual (to me) focus-not on mother-
ing, but on politicized motherhood,
"motherist" politics. As co-editor Annelise
Orleck explains in her introduction, "Our
concern here is with the many ways that
motherhood has been politicized, both as a
means to control women-through state
regulation, medical intervention, and bru-
tal military assault-and as a means by
which women have sought to regain con-
trol over their lives and the lives of their
children."
It's easy for me, especially after readingerywhere most children are cared for by
a stack of these books, to become so ab-
sorbed in my own story that I forget how
wide is the world. How startling, how use-
ful, after days spent wrestling with Roiphe
women's bodies and reproductive power,
institutionalize women as breeders and de-
value motherhood."
I believe the truth-the story of real
women making difficult choices-is much
more nuanced, much more interesting. Of
course high-tech reproduction is mainly
available to "white, middle- or upper-
class, able-bodied, heterosexual women"
-but that's a criticism of our health care
system, not of the technologies them-
selves. Of course the technologies are ex-
perimental-most medical innovations are
experimental at some point. Of course in-
fertility clinics address their literature to
"couples," but Arditti's claim that they
don't serve "childless single, lesbian and
heterosexual women in 'nontraditional'
family situations" is simply wrong.
Arditti complains that the "central met-
of welcoming a new novelist, experienced
aphor" of technological reproduction is
"separation"-that "we can now have re-
without intercourse"-but
frankly, that seems like a good thing movie
to me.about teenaged Indian girls in Eng-
I'm hardly an advocate of high-tech repro-
land. Meera Syal's first novel, Anita and
duction-and no, it didn't work for me
(I'm damn glad it didn't, since I wouldn't
have given birth to Ben)-but I think all
(okay, almost all) alternative forms of fam-
culture facing the temptations and losses
ily-building are potentially good for
disturbs me that a sort of feminist-
fundamentalist position seems to be hard-
ening around this issue. To encounter that
view in a collection that includes such
thoughtful, complicated, introspective es-
the fact that it revisits (though very differ-
says as Marianne Hirsch's, or Sara ently) the cultural conflicts of Bhaji, the
Ruddick' s "Rethinking 'Maternal' Poli-
tics," disturbs me even more.
Motherhood, like sisterhood, may be
powerful. It's certainly complicated. Just
as we learned, slowly and painfully, not to
make generalizations about "women"; just
as we learned that there are many femi-
nisms; so we have to recognize the multi-
ple, contradictory forms of mothering. Al-
most nothing I want to say about "moth-
ers" really feels true-and yet, most
women everywhere are mothers, and ev-
women. This fact, so obvious, has long
been recognized by feminists as key; our
mothering has been a source of both our
oppression and our strength.
Outside. looking in
by Rosellen Brown
Anita and Me, by Meera Syal. New York: The New Press, 1996, 336 pp., $23.00
hardcover.
W R RITERS HAVE PLENTY OF REASONS to
be jealous of other writers for
their work-if they're like me, a
good novel stirs up in them equal parts of
pleasure and envy. What, then, are we to
feel when we read a fine book by an author
who's also an actress and screenwriter?
Unfair! There ought to be an anti-monop-
oly law where talent is concerned.
All of which is a rather ungracious way
in television, theatre and film, who a few
seasons back wrote the screenplay for
Bhaji on the Beach, a very satisfying
Me, is preoccupied with the same terrain,
the unavoidable inner (and sometimes
outer) conflicts of a child of a minority
that come with living far from one's (or
one's family's) homeland.
It would be very surprising to learn that
this story of the single Indian child in the
English mining town of Tollington is not
somewhat autobiographical. Aside from
house room with another newly ar-
texture of detail is so precise and, for much
of the book, so leisurely, yielding up the
pleasure of foods and smells, habits and the
intricacies of backyard childhood politics,
that it seems a safe guess that Syal is bring-
Original Voices
_~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ .....
..I .. . ..
ing to bear a good bit of highly relished
memory.
But that's always a dangerous specula-
tion, and in the end it's irrelevant. A title in
The New Press's International Fiction Se-
ries, Anita and Me, whether pure fiction or
hybrid memoir, is a delightful and
illuminating view of yet another kind of
immigrant life in the mid-twentieth cen-
tury. (It takes place in the seventies, its
narrator born just after Kennedy' s assassi-
nation.) We've seen, on screen and in re-
cent fiction, Pakistanis in London, Indians
and Pakistanis in Canada, and now we
have a slightly different venue in which to
witness the slow acculturation of a lonely
Punjabi family abroad.
Tollington is a smallish, unfashionable,
distinctly non-urban town whose mines
have given out and whose prosperity,
never great to begin with, is withering.
Meena speaks sympathetically of her
parents' journey to this unprepossessing
place, of
the early years of struggle and disillu-
sion, living in a shabby boarding
rived immigrant family...my father ar-
riving back from his sweatshop at
dawn to take his place in the bed being
vacated by Havel [of the other family]
who would be off to do his shift on the
..

and Hays, to read about "disappeared" Ar-
gentine radical Alicia Partnoy, abducted
from her home by soldiers as "her daugh-
ter, then a year and a half old, was left
behind crying in the empty house." Or
about Patsy Ruth Oliver, an African Amer-
ican Texas grandmother who lived near
one of the worst toxic waste dumps in the
country-Carver Terrace, the "black Love
Canal"-until she organized the mothers
of her neighborbood to fight Congress for
the dangerous, seductive "family values"
a buyout, sparking a widespread move-
ment for environmental justice. Or even
about the mothers who enlist their infants
in the Ku Klux Klan. "'Good' motherhood
can provoke reactionary politics," com-
ments Kathleen Blee in "sMothers in Race-
aren't mothers (and really mean it!). It
Hate Movements,7' "when, as for manywould
in
the twentieth century United States, it is
defined fairly narrowly, as protecting and
providing for one's own children, rather
than as having a responsibility toward all
children."
The Politics of Motherhood is im-
pressively wide-ranging, satisfyingly com-
plex, sometimes dry but often juicy. My
one disappointment was the choice of Rita
Arditti to discuss the new reproductive
technologies (that's kind of like asking
Phyllis Schlafly to evaluate feminism).
Arditti belongs to that (small, 1 hope) wing
Women may share mothering, but not
its many meanings. It's true, as Anne
Roiphe says, that most women want to
mother, but we can't simply build our pol-
itics around that desire (as she sometimes
seems to suggest). Motherhood has always
been prescribed, controlled, required; it's
no wonder that some feminists rebelled. Dialogue on the The Worth of Florentine
I'd love to develop a feminist family poli- Infinity of Love Women Drama for
tics, but only if it's radically different from TULLIA D'ARAGONA Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Convent and
Their Nobility and Their
Celebrated as a courtesan and Festival
politics engulfing us. Superiority to Men
poet, and as a woman of great
Seven Sacred Plays
For starters, it would have to allow for intelligence and wit, Tullia MODERATA FONTE
many different brands of mothering, all d'Aragona (1510-56) entered ANTONIA PULCI
Through this witty and ambi-
the debate about the morality
sorts of alternative family forms. It would Exploring the choice that
tious work, Fonte seeks to ele-
of love that engaged the best
have to grant equal status to women who Renaissance wonien had
vate women's status to that-of
and most famous male intellects
between marriage, the convent,
men, arguing that women have
of sixteenth-century Italy. First
or uncloistered religious life,
the same innate abilities as men
have to value fatherhood too-but published in Venice in 1547,
Pulci's female characters con-
and, when similarly educated,
we haven't come near to figuring out what but never before published in
sider and deal with the unwant-
prove their equals. Through
English, this book casts a
we want or expect from men in this arena this dialogue, Fonte provideseda advances of men, negligent
woman rather than a man as
(and of course we disagree). And for those and abusive husbands and suit-
picture of the private and pub-
the main disputant on the
ors, the dangers of childbear-
of us who are moms, our motherhood has ethics of love. lic lives of Renaissance women.
ing, and the disappointments of
This book is a testament to the
to be a beginning, not an end in itself: a Paper $12.95 child rearing.
enduring issues that women face,
reason to care about other women's chil- Paper $15.00
inciuding the attempt to recon-
dren, not just our own. cile femininity with ambition.
Hey, feminism and motherhood: I'm Paper $17.95
enjoying the conversation. But I hear Ben
calling-we're going to do a puzzle, or
fro m
maybe draw a picture... Thanks for the
THE OTHER VOICE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE SERIES
books.s
Avyailable at bookstores

of feminism that sees all doctors as capital- i Ann Snitow,

ist male exploiters, all women who use
these technologies as dupes: "The rules of
the Demon Texts," Ms., May/June 1991.
THE UNIVERSITY OF "Motherh
CHICAGO PRESS
http://www.press.uchicago.edu

The Women's Review of Books / Vol. XIV, No. 7 / April 1997 7

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 with their fingers, scooping up curry onto

Meera Syal.
McDouglas Biscuits assembly line,
my father sweeping away crushed gari-
baldi crumbs from the communal pil-
low before sliding gratefully into obliv-
ious sleep, my mother awake at his
side, counting the kicks from the
daughter inside her who would con-
demn her, marry her to England for-
ever. (p9)
This, Meena says-and her house with its
outside toilet-is the history she trots out
"to impress middle-class white boys who
come sniffing round, excited by the
thought of wearing a colonial maiden as a
trinket on their arm."
As for herself, she knew she belonged
in England-though this insight turns out
to be subject to a more complex reinterpre-
tation as she grows older-the first time
she understood the punchline of a joke on
the telly. It was a double entendre, and
through it she learned that, as a permanent
alien of a sort, she would live "in the gap
between what is said and what is thought,
what is stated and what is implied," and,
however comfortable she might become in
some situations, would live there forever.
ME EENA, WHOM WE FIRST MEET at the
age of nine, is, not surprisingly,
desperate to belong. Not only
does she envy the native British girls their
unself-conscious status, she also-what
child does not?-lusts to be older, more
sophisticated than she is. She is a feisty Tollington shifts. Just as the rebellious-
child, which seems to be a given in fictionbut-essentially-responsive girlchild is a fa- to "treat" the intersexual physiological
about young girls. Surely every nation has miliar in literature, so, by necessity, is the variations that naturally occur among
its own high-spirited heroine, its Jo. I don't pain of dawning consciousness as that
know who the Hindu role models are, but
undoubtedly Meena has ancestors when it
comes to good-natured disobedience and
smart-girl rebellion. Her high spirits make
it difficult for her to conform; she tells lies She encounters the sometimes thoughtless
of convenience and dislikes any kind of
coercion, though when she flouts conven- neighbors and, worst, of her friends. "Inci-Blues, will recognize in Transgender War-
tion it tends to be accidental. She is the dents" take place. She is taunted, harassed riors her urgent vision and vivid style.
kind of girl who, when her father takes herand called names, and she discovers both
to a Christmas party at his office, bites
another girl who, curious, dares to touch
her brown skin. Needless to say, she does
not apologize.
And when it comes to making friends,
seeking out the local equivalent for her her personally, "I am the others.. ..You did experienced in post-war, anti-Semitic Buf-
outsider status, she follows those indepen- mean me." If that's not clear by the last
dent instincts into the most dangerous alli- few pages of the book, Syal has spent a lot girl, she writes: "My parents worried that Iand the thought patterns that form it are
ance she can manage. Meena finds her one
friend altogether too attractive to resist: an
older giri named Anita Rutter whose
mother is more interested in men than in
her own two children. Anita is cheeky and
irreverent, boisterous, angry and casually
dishonest.
She is also the first white person ever to
eat Indian food with Meena. In a very
funny scene, Meena tries to describe the
feast that awaits her friend and innocently
collides with Anita's own provincial igno-
rance. Bad enough that mattar-paneer
combines cheese and peas; Anita is aston-
ished to confront chicken with tomatoes
and asks suspiciously "What' s garlic?"
When she sees Meena's parents eating
Delusions of gender
their chapattis, she "stopped in mid-chew,
looking from her knife and fork to mama
and papa's fingers with faint disgust, ap-
parently unaware that all of us had a great
view of a lump of half masticated fishfin- by Dianne Dugaw
ger sitting on her tongue." Foreign to each
other but needy in their different ways, the Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to RuPaul, by Leslie
girls manage a kind of inequitable friend- Feinberg. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996, 212 pp., $27.50 hardcover.
ship that serves their needs for a few years. Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender, by Bernice L.
Hausman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995, 245 pp., $49.95 hardcover, $17.95
S YAL NEGOTIATES THE PARADOXES of paper.
class deftly. Meena's parents were
sufficiently comfortable "back W E IN THE WEST may be living our
home" that, in spite of the modesty of their way out of one of the most con-
lives in Tollington, they are irredeemably strained and unimaginative
middle-class; they do middle-class things epochs in the history of human sexual ex-
like buy a car and give parties. "Mama and pression. (One can only hope.) Among
papa charmed people...they did not ask for recent developments in the rethinking of
approval or acceptance but it came to them sexuality/ies is the transgender move-
nevertheless." Though this elides the eth- ment: people who live, understand and
nic prejudice Meena will later discover- present themselves in ways that resist a
for whom are they giving those parties?-
"natural" binary system of either female
it does take note of an interesting distinc- or male, and people who apparently cross
tion: Anita's mother, Deirdre, "with her from "one side" of such a two-gender sys-
scarlet gash of a mouth and her back- tem to "the other" as medically treated and
handed conversation.. .was frightened of managed transsexuals.
us..." Leslie Feinberg's Transgender War-
More likely, she is bewildered. As riors is an urgent manifesto for "trans"
Meena says, "We were not one of those people, "a very oppressed segment of the
faceless hordes depicted in the television population." Surveying figures in history
news, arriving at airports with baggage andwho resist categorization as simply male or
children, lost and already defeated, beg- female, from ancient Egyptian and Assyr-
ging for sanctuary." Working-class Deir- ian queen/kings to the jazz saxophonist
dre, considered sexually wanton all around Billie Tipton who, "born female," lived as 17th-century cross-dresser Catalina de
town, "had been seeking approval all her a man for most of her/his life, Feinberg Erauso From Transgender Warriors
life in this village, her village, and I sup- proposes a "fresh look at sex and gender in Organized as chapters in Feinberg's
pose she wanted to know why life was so history." She celebrates in her subjects own journey from lonely self-loathing to
bloody unfair." Mama the newcomer, the "those who led battles and rebellions recognition of likeness in others and ac-
supposed outcast, is gracious to her; she is throughout history, and those who today ceptance of herself, Transgender Warriors
a "bounty giver." She can afford to be. muster the courage to battle for their iden- fairly bursts with interesting figures whom
There are many such ironies in their situa- tities and for their very lives." Feinberg identifies as transgendered:
tion, and because the first three quarters of Bernice Hausman's Changing Sex takes "Elagabalus, emperor of Rome in 218
Meena's adventures are slightly antic, Syal
up the interrelationship between physio- C.E., who often appeared in women's
manages them with an admirable lightness logical sex difference and social, ideologi- clothing and makeup, and publicly de-
of touch. cal and psychological distinctions between clared one of his male lovers to be his
But then, after some lively complica- the "feminine" and the "masculine." Haus- husband"; Two-Spirit people like the fa-
tions-many stories of the neighbors who man focuses on transsexuals who cross mous nineteenth-century Zuni weaver and
people her world, a visit from Meena's physical gender categories by "medical in- potter, We'Wha, and the eloquent contem-
Punjabi grandmother Nanima and the ar- tervention," arguing that the very notion of porary Menominee poet, Chrystos; celeb-
rival of a baby brother-Meena's view of gender identity emerged with the develop- rated transsexual of the 1950s Christine
ment of hormonal and surgical procedures Jorgensen.
Feinberg weaves through the results of
her transcultural and transhistorical re-
human beings. Hausman's history of gen- search cogent questions that expose the
child approaches adolescence. der identity as a concept supplies a reveal- arbitrary premises of binary gender cate-
Meena finally discovers the inevitabil-
ing context for Feinberg's manifesto. gories routinely taken to be "natural" and
ity of betrayal: her "difference" begins to unquestionable. "1 don't see why I should
separate her from her sense of security. T HOSE WHO HAVE HEARD Leslie have to legally align my sex with my gen-
Feinberg speak or have read her der expression, especially when this policy
and sometimes vicious racism of her powerful first book, Stone Butch needs to be fought," she declares. "Why
am I forced to check off an F or an M on
these documents in the first place? For
Here, a transgender world history begins identification? Both a driver's license and
who she is and who she is not. I would with her own experience in 1950s work- a passport include photographs!... Why is
rather have been spared Syal's (rare) ing-class Buffalo, feeling that "those of usthe categorization of sex a legal question at
heavy hand; in one episode, she has Meena who didn't fit stuck out like sore thumbs."all?" Early on, she quotes Chrystos, who
instruct one of the casually cruel friends Feinberg writes with verve and directness. observes: "The concept of Two-Spirited-
who has cursed her and hers but exempts Describing the anxiety her Jewish parents
ness is a rather rough translation into En-
glish of [the idea of more than two gen-
falo because of her "boyishness" as a little ders]. I think the English language is rigid,
of words to no effect. was a lightning rod that would attract a rigid, so that gender also becomes rigid."
But of course we understand, and the dangerous storm." Recording her "Path to Chrystos' comment captures concisely the
words have had their effect. Though Consciousness," she queries the obvious lesson I take from the diverse people and
Meena temporarily complicates her ascent but often unquestioned absurdities of intol- stories that fill this book.
into the high-achieving class her parents erance: As it proceeds, however, Transgender
have picked out for her by playing out the Warriors teeters over the edge of persua-
Why was I subject to legal harassment
final scene of her shattered friendship with siveness into over-simplified explanations
and arrest at all? Why was I being pun-
Anita and her sister Tracey, she never re- for complex phenomena. Feinberg projects
ished for the way 1 walked or dressed,
ally rejects their ambitions for her. The an ill-fitting contemporary North Ameri-
or who I loved? Who wrote the laws
pleasurable poignancy of Anita and Me can worldview onto people from times and
used to harass us, and why?... Who de-
lies in the pain we know she will swallow cultures with profoundly different values
cided what was normal in the first
(and they must surely drink down with her) and sensibilities. It is reductionist, at best,
place?... Have we always existed?
as she marches on past childhood naughti- to disregard the differences between Joan
Have we always been so hated? Have
ness into a future as an upwardly mobile of Arc's tumultuous late Gothic world and
we always fought back? (pp.8-9)
outsider/insider in a country that may our own and, ignoring the saint's own
chew her up and even swallow her, but willTransgender Warriors chronicles her frame of reference, to declare her state-
never willingly digest her. search for answers. ment that "For nothing in the world will I

8 The Women's Review of Books / Vol. XIV, No. 7 / April 1997

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