In a recent interview, Nigerian novelist Chimananda Ngozi Adichie, made an interesting observation on how American writers, black or white, skirt around the issue of race.
Adichie feels like fiction writers here either avoid addressing the subject matter of race or they use predictable "tropes" to speak of it.
One of the predictable tropes is lyricism; a character in Adichie's new novel, Americanah, says that when black American authors write about race, they have to “make sure it’s so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn’t read between the lines won’t even know it’s about race."
Perhaps, this avoidance of representing matters of race and racism is part of a larger reluctance to make readers uncomfortable: "In American fiction there is a tendency to celebrate work that fundamentally keeps people comfortable."
Having read Adichie's observation, I realized that every culture has a topic or a subject matter that it would rather not have a frank conversation about. The elliptical references to race isn't just confined to American fiction; it seeps from American culture at large into American fiction. It's a cultural problem.
Just as in America, so in contemporary India. There is a fundamental tendency to avoid speaking of certain subject matters in Indian culture as well. Homosexuality is prime among these. People would either not speak of homosexuality at all, or if needs be, speak of it "lyrically," i.e. in a way that transcends the discussion from a concrete level of physical and sexual reality, to one of poeticism and sentimentality.
Take for instance the discussion of prominent Indian filmmaker Rituporno Ghosh. His death marked the occasion of what Bengalis call a chorcha (discourse) of his art. He was hailed as a "genius" and a fantastic director in the tradition of the trio of Bengali greats, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak.
The language in which self-proclaimed film ustaads (experts) in India write of the art of movie-making is shoddy, imprecise. Yet within the limitations, a vast majority of the writing on Ghosh kept mum about his homosexuality. It is as if, in the spirit of the American separation of Church and State, it is unconstitutional to mention an artist's sexuality in the same breath as his work.
I had a personal taste of this in a brief conversation about Rituporno Ghosh on Facebook. An India-based female cousin of mine paid a tribute to Ghosh and said that he was a genius (or something along those lines). I added that he was also "gay." A gentleman promptly butted in with "He was a great director; gay or lesbian is useless." He didn't use the semi-colon, for language isn't the metier of Bengali middle-class, balding gentlemen, who have been married and ergo convinced that they are normal, heterosexual males. Neither did he mean gays and lesbians to be "useless" people. In all probability, he meant to say that what does Ghosh's sexuality have to do with the quality of his art?
Next day, my female cousin gave a supportive rejoinder to this comment and wrote that she agreed with what this balding gentleman said; indeed it's "irrelevant" (note: an improvement on "useless") to take into consideration an artist's sexuality when judging her art. Didn't Charles Chaplin have many "characteristics" that would have made us dislike him as a person, but did we consider those "characteristics" when we judged his films as superior?"
Two things emerge from these comments: (1) Homosexuality is a mere "characteristic" in the eyes of my Facebook interlocutors, like womanizing is (Chaplin was a womanizer). What the female cousin meant was that Chaplin's "looseness" of character did not deter us from loving his films. So why should Ghosh's homosexuality?
(2) A consideration of Ghosh's gay identity would somehow tarnish his standing as a filmmaker, which convinces me that homosexuality is an uncomfortable truth, in the minds of even the relatively more enlightened bunch amongst Indians--the Bengalis.
I felt like I had to talk back at this point. Sexual identity, isn't just a "characteristic," or a virtue or a vice (an index of character), it's an intrinsic part of one's self and ergo that self's expressivity, especially if that self happens to be an acutely sensitive artistic self like Rituporno Ghosh. A mention of him as gay just might enrich our understanding of his art. An artists' perspective matters; there is a theory that had the world's majority of filmmakers been women then the image of women in cinema would have been vastly different from the image of women we are used to seeing on celluloid. Women in film have inevitably been the creation of male directors. If one's gender can impact one's perspective, so could one's sexual orientation.
Perspective matters, and Ghosh's gay perspective must have mattered in the making of the male and female characters in his films. He is said to have portrayed especially strong female characters and is said to have "understood" women better than most Indian (male) film directors. I don't mean to suggest that because a man understands women well means he is gay; I mean to say that Ghosh must have had a significantly different outlook on males and females, on the world at large, because he may have had the perspective of an outsider in the most fundamental of ways. An openly gay male on the Indian cultural scene is a like a lone horse in a cowshed full of cows. It's imminent that the horse will have an unique take on the normative features of the cow-world.
Ghosh's homosexuality must have given him a privileged perspective, or as William Du Bois, the noted African American intellectual and activist said, a "double consciousness" that permits minorities, sexual or ethnic, to have a distinctive view of things we take for granted.
The discussion on Facebook came to an abrupt halt. I had broached the "gay" topic and shutters were pulled down. Neither Bengali babu nor bibi wanted to take the exchange to the next level.
I felt like a stranger in a wild-wild Western town, stranded alone, all dressed for a fine intellectual conversation with my hands on my bullet-studded analytical guns, but nowhere to shoot my guns at.
I scoured the Internet for discussions of Ghosh's homsexuality and its impact on his art, but found nothing noteworthy on this topic. There was just one mention of how he "changed forever, the discourse on homosexuality" in the Indian media, but no follow up explanation of how that was accomplished.
The sexual part had been expectedly lyricized to the hilt.
It seemed like Ghosh had been canonized with a wilful avoidance of the dirty topic of sexuality; suddenly Indians, who are utterly unable to separate the artist from her art in a discussion of the latter, were eager to judge Ghosh's art on its objective aesthetic merit.
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