[In the following essay, Flockemann compares the treatment of ethnic and cultural identity in Senior's “Arrival of the Snake-Woman” and Agnes Sam's “Jesus is Indian.”]

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.”

—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,¹ 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 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 Zoë Wicomb's You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (1990), 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 deal in a more familiar and direct way with the politics of identity and 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 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 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, 11)

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 Arrival 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 modern 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 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 “mongrelisation” 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 modern 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 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-claiming 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's mother, become involved in a fight over the possession of a “large lifelike doll with 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 irresistibly 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” (111). 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” (111). 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, 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 way South African Indians have been “excluded from South African history,”⁵ 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 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 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 given women writers a particular space—that of autobiography and domestic life (1995, 244). However, drawing on the debate concerning identity 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 stern surveillance of Sister Bonaventura in her Catholic school. This is interspersed with dialogue as 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, her question, “Who invented school?” challenges one of the very authorities that she is forced to obey, as well as indicating her awareness of the 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 language 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 Hama saying:

“What that sister know? 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)

Although Hama effectively turns the tables on Sister Bonaventura by appropriating Christianity, but on Indian terms, 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 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)

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 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 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 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).

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, modern 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 of the new age” (44); her rupture from her country 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 chewstick, 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 configurations” of the future for Angelina and the “new age” of a modern 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: “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-lin 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 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 monological 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 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-modern society, migration need no longer emphasise the migrant 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 al., 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 of the Indian community” (Arcadia: Manx Publishers, 1996).

3. Quoted by kind permission of the 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 of hybridity and syncretism in favour of repetition and re-memory” (Dayal 1996).

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.”

Works Cited

Chapman, Michael. 1995. Southern African Literatures. London and New York: Longman.

Crehan, Stewart. 1997. “1994 and All That: Re-writing South African Literary History.” Pretexts 6.1: 101-112.

Dayal, Samir. 1996. “Diaspora and Double Consciousness.” The Journal of Midwest Modern Language Association 29.1: 46-62.

Daymond, Margaret. 1996. “Gender and ‘History’: 1980s South African Women's Stories in English.” Ariel 27.1: 191-215.

De Mel, Neloufer. 1995. “Women as Gendered Subject and other Discourses in Contemporary Sri Lankan Fiction in English.” Into the Nineties, Post-Colonial Women's Writing. Ed. Anna Rutherford, Lars Jensen, Shirley Chew. Aarhus: Dangaroo.

De Kock, Leon. 1997. “An Impossible History.” English in Africa 24.1 (1997): 103-117.

Fakier, Yazeed. 1996. “A Debate Coloured by Race.” Cape Times 4 Dec.: 8.

Flockemann, Miki. 1998. “‘If I were her’: Fictions of Development from Cape Town, Canada and the Caribbean.” Journal of Literary Studies (Autumn 1998) [forthcoming].

Geok-lin Lim, Shirley. 1993. “Asians in Anglo-American Feminism: Reciprocity and Resistance.” Changing Subjects, The Making of Feminist Literary Criticism. Ed. Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn. London and New York: Routledge.

Govinden, Davarashanam. 1997. “The Indentured Experience—Indian Women in Colonial Natal.” Unpublished conference paper. Gender and Colonialism Conference. University of the Western Cape, Jan. 13-15.

James, Wilmot. 1997. “Apartheid's Death Machines.” Cape Times 11 Nov.: 1.

Jeppie, Shamil. 1996. “Commemorations and Identities: The 1994 Tercentenary of Islam in South Africa.” Islam and the Question of Minorities. Ed. Tamara Sonn. Atlanta, GA: Scholar's Press.

Marais, Sue. 1995. “Getting Lost in Cape Town: Spatial and Temporal Dislocation in the South African Short Fiction Cycle.” English in Africa 22.2: 29-44.

Murray, Sally-Ann. 1991. “Telling Stories.” Current Writing 3.1: 184-192

Myburg, Marietjie. 1991. “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Writer.” Daily Dispatch: In Focus. 19 Feb.: 4.

Ngcobo, Lauretta. 1988. “Apartheid South Africa: Through Women's Eyes.” Third World Quarterly 10.1: 299-306.

Patteson, Richard. 1993. “The Fiction of Olive Senior, Traditional Society and the Wider World.” Ariel 24.1: 13-35.

Reddy, Jayapraga. 1987. “Friends.” On the Fringe of Dreamtime and Other Stories. Johannesburg: Skotaville.

Rooney, Caroline. 1990. “Living Histories.” Southern African Review of Books Feb/May: 6.

Sam, Agnes. 1988. “South Africa: Guest of Honour Amongst the Uninvited Newcomers to England's Great Tradition.” Let it be Told: Essays by Black Women in Britain. Ed. Lauretta Ngcobo. London: Virago.

———. 1994 (1989). Jesus is Indian and Other Stories. London: Heinemann Educational.

Saunders, Christopher, ed. 1992. The Illustrated History of South Africa: The Real Story. Cape Town: Readers Digest.

Senior, Olive. 1989. Arrival of the Snake-Woman. Trinidad and Jamaica: Longman.

Smit, Johannes A., Johan van Wyk, and Jean-Philippe Wade. 1996. Rethinking South African Literary History. Durban: Y Press.

Van Niekerk, Annemarie. 1992. “Aspects of Race, Class and Gender in Jayapraga Reddy's On the Fringe of Dreamtime and Other Stories. Unisa English Studies 30.2: 35-40.

Wicomb, Zoë. 1993. Between the Lines: Interviews with Nadine Gordimer, Menan du Plessis, Zoë Wicomb and Lauretta Ngcobo. Ed. Eva Hunter and Craig MacKenzie. Grahamstown: NELM. 79-98.