[In the following essay, Uma investigates the genre of My Story.]

“My Story is my autobiography which I began writing during my first serious bout with heart disease” (Das 1991:v). The author herself has given us sanction to read it as an autobiography. So we proceed to do so, taking with us at first a lay person's understanding of what an autobiography is—factual recounting of one's life—and therefore we take whatever is written as sacrosanct truth. Then suddenly we realise that we are not “naive lay readers” but “sophisticated autobiography critics” who know the nuances of the genre. We start talking about memory, about autobiography being the creative retelling of one's life at a given point of time, about how there is no “the truth” but the truth of a given moment etc. And those of us who are concerned with issues of gender and of decolonisation read the text ever so closely to show we need different parameters to read and understand the text, that the tools for reading white male mainstream texts will not do.

Kamala Das serializes her life story at a time when she is seriously ill. She is therefore, we gather at our first level of reading, desirous of confessing all that has happened to her. We take all the details in—her birth, her lineage, her schooling, her discomfort in an “English” school, her friends, her various encounters with sexuality as a young girl, her relationship with her parents and her grandmother etc., her marriage and the rough sexual handling of her by her husband, her children, her various liaisons, her creativity etc., etc. Some sympathise with her, some condemn her brazen behaviour, some wonder whether all this could have happened to her.

We realise that My Story was serialized. Therefore, every instalment had to be complete in itself while yet anticipating the next one. If we consider autobiography as a text which deals with the evolution of the self, how then do we deal with self-contained entities? Try reading a chapter at random. With its title and its internal coherence, the episode is complete in itself. Yet each adds to the final understanding of the text. I say text and not self, for chapters like the one on Valiamma and Narayana Menon (32-35) do not directly relate to the evolution of the self, but deal with questions of gender, creativity etc., which pervade the text, which ultimately go to the making unmaking of the self.

When Kamala Das weaves together the private and the public as in chapter 4 where she gives us the history of Kunji as also the battle for power between the English and the Dutch, she is not only emphasizing the importance of the private, but is also showing us how the woman is the possession of a male, no doubt an adoring one, just as India and Indians are assumed to need the protection of the British. Here is an instance to show how the autobiography strikes at the very root of patriarchy and colonialism:

The house was gifted to my ancestress, the 15-year-old Kunji by her new … doting husband after she had come to his village, fleeing from burning city of Cochin, where she had gone with her uncles to attend a relative's wedding. An aristocrat was to be shown to her at Cochin who was to marry her if she liked his face and if her uncles approved of his deportment.

So when we read about the various love affairs Kamala Das has in an attempt to counter the emptiness of her life, or when she emphasises the importance of the body, we understand her need to refute stereotypes and to assert her gendered desiring self. Her autobiography becomes a creative outpouring of these very desires.

Yet Kamala Das herself seems to be making distinctions between her “creative output” like poetry, two lines of which she quotes at the end of chapter 25: “Wipe out the paints, unmould the clay. Let nothing remian of that yesterday …” (Das 1991:104) or the reference to the “sad poems” (Das 1991:157) she used to write in her diary, with the act of writing an autobiography or a diary. While there are very detailed entries like that in a diary, there are also many evocative passages in the autobiography. Consider how she can write about sensual images of the woods in one para and give diary like entries in another:

… I picked this hour to walk to the woods where, besides the flowers I knew and recognised, the wild cyclamen, the pickerels, the mountain laurels, the narcissus and the exotic rayed lycoris, grew large unfamiliars, savage ones that smelt of slaughter houses and of blood, which I picked in bunches to tie upside down in a dark cupboard for drying (when we packed up to leave after a month, the flowers were dry and held their bright colours intact). From every tree, the squirrels and the humming birds made soft utterances and the woodcock stirred in the undergrowth while I walked through the fallen leaves.

… When Saturday came, I put them to sleep after lunch and arranged under the tree, paper plates full of pastry and almonds. At four, I woke up the boys and dressed them in their red cardigans and took them for the party.

(Das 1991:131)

She is aware of the imaginative creativity that goes into any writing, including autobiography. When an interviewer asks her: “Are any parts of My Story creation of your imagination?” (Kaur 1992:144), she responds quite openly:

Any book will contain passages which are the creation of the writer's imagination. My Story is no exception. Whether something happened to me or to another woman is immaterial. What really matters is the experience, the incident. It may have happened to another woman who is probably too timid to write about it. I wanted to chronicle the times we lived in and I had to write about the experience.

(Kaur 1992:144)

The question and answer only reiterate what we observe how poetry is woven into the fabric of her text. Chapters 27 to 49 each begin with a poem that has already been published, a poem her readers are perhaps familiar with. The poem is a micro-representation of the rest of the chapter that is to follow or it epigraphically announces the idea that is worked out in the chapter. Take for instance chapter 39 which deals with the birth of her son Jaisurya, the agony and pain of life, of childbirth giving way to the pleasure and beauty of the child itself. The poem says it all, even if briefly and the rest of the chapter describes it in detail (see Das 1991:163-167). There are even instances of parts of poems which have been rendered into prose as follows:

There is a hunger in each of us to feed other hungers, the basic one, to crumble and dissolve and to retain in other things the potent fragments of oneself. But ultimately we shall discover that we are immortal and that the only mortal things are systems and arrangements.

Even our pains shall continue in those who have devoured us. The oft-repeated moves of every scattered cell shall give no power to escape from cages of involvement. We are trapped in immortality and our only freedom is the freedom to discompose …

(Das 1991:215)

Compare this with the following lines from her poem “Composition”:

Ultimately
I will feed only the hunger
to feed other hungers,
that basic one.
To crumble,
To dissolve
and to retain in other things
the potent fragments
of oneself.
The ultimate discovery will be
that we are immortal,
the only things mortal being
systems and arrangements,
even our pains continuing
in the devourers who constitute
the world. Even
oft-repeated moves
of every scattered cell
will give no power
to escape
from cages of involvement.
I must linger on,
trapped in immortality,
my only freedom being
the freedom to
discompose.

(Das 1986:9-10)

But for a few minor changes and the way in which the words are placed on the page there is no significant difference between the two versions. Again consider the following lines in the autobiography:

… While I was being driven home, I saw near the mountain passes, the aged cattle being taken to the slaughter yard. I saw their thin haunches and the vermillion brand on their shoulders.

I wanted to, just for one brief moment, get down from the car and join them. Human beings are never branded with a hot iron. They are only sent home with their electrocardiographs and sedatives.

(Das 1991:203)

This appears as the poem “Old Cattle” in the 1980s with only a few words altered. These examples show how the distinctions between prose and poetry can get blurred.

All this brings us to the main questions I am concerned with. (Kamala Das's My Story allows me to raise these questions in a fundamental way.) A lot of work on autobiography has been done and we are now happy that it is an “acceptable” genre. But within it once again have developed various classifications. We then tend to valorize certain of them saying they have “literary” merit. In our desire to authenticate diaries, letters etc., we call them personal narratives and create parameters to test them. We indulge in similar acts of legitimization in studying gendered writing or postcolonial writing or any other which has suffered near extinction under the whip of mainstream writing. In this process of asserting a rightful place for each of these modes, aren't we at some level accepting a hierarchy of genres even as we try to break it? Are the notions of “respectability” then inevitable in this exercise? If our aim is to question the very basis of construction of genres which are detrimental to the existence of others, how do we justify our new creations? Can we not envisage a time when the very notion of “respectability” of genres gives way to a fluidity of forms (should I say writing or language)? The mixing of genres, as we have seen, in Kamala Das's My Story (whether she intends it for this purpose or not) is likely to provide one possibility in this direction.

So, what's after all in a “genre”?