Writers Can Create Emotional Maturity: Collen

A born story-teller, an instinctive rebel (her next book is abut rebellion), a life-long political activist (as she sometimes likes to describe herself), a rescuer of endangered languages, Lindsey Collen thrives on her inexhaustible hunger for freedom and creativity.

Born in South Africa and living and writing in Mauritius for over two decades, the intrepid writer has been arrested several times for picking a quarrel with society’s vanities and hypocrisies. Her novel “The Rape of Sita” was banned in Mauritius within hours of its publication as religious fundamentalists found the book’s title blasphemous.

Literature, however, triumphed over twisted religious politics when the novel won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Africa Region) in 1994.

I have learnt a lot from the Indian way of thinking – the ability to hold a paradox or dialectic or contradiction in suspension.

Other critically acclaimed novels by Collen includes “There is a Tide,” “Getting Rid of It,” “Mutiny” and “Boy,” which again won her Commonwealth Writers Prize Best Book (Africa Region) last year. She is also a co-compiler of the first major dictionary of Mauritian Kreol, and has translated Kreol folk stories and children’s’ stories into English.

Collen speaks to Manish Chand about the power of the African oral tradition on her writings, the idea of India in Africa and the role of writers in spawning “emotional maturity” and forging “common understanding” among diverse peoples and places.

Q) What are dominant themes in your writings?

A) Unsung heroes. This is something that keeps coming again and again in my writings. But when I am writing a novel, my driving force is not so much themes, but the desire to tell a story.

Q) Your novel “The Rape of Sita” has aroused extreme emotions – you have even been physically threatened for writing it. What were you trying to convey in this novel?

A) A contemporary Sita or a contemporary woman is not protected by a divine prophecy. This is what try to say in this novel. It’s about going into the mind of the rapist, into the mind of the woman in the course of her rape and going into the mind of the mother of the rapist and show the parallel between this physical rape with the colonization of a country which is equivalent to raping it.

Q) What new insights did you glean into this despicable and deranging act called rape?

A) Rape is a form of abuse of power on the one hand and on the other hand it’s a form of weakness in man that forces to the surface the hidden male fear of impotence. In the ongoing sexual war between the male and the female of the species, there is something irreducible about rape. The difficulties of understanding continue to be enormous.

Q) What are your major influences?

A) For sometime I have been reading a lot of non-English, non-American writers. I am influenced mostly by British and American writers like William Faulkner, Kurt Vonnegut and Anthony Burgess. I like Toni Morrison for her lyrical intensity.

Q) Any African writer you admire?

A) Quite a few of them. The book I love most is “God’s Bits of Wood” by Senegalese writer Sembene Ousmae (originally written and published in French). It’s about a worker’s strike in East Africa that transforms into a movement for justice and liberation.

Q) Africa has a powerful oral tradition. How much has this oral tradition influenced you as a writer?

A) The oral tradition has influenced me a lot. When I was growing up in Umtata in Transkei (South Africa), the women who looked after me told me all the history of South Africa, some of which I would later on read in textbooks. The stories they told me were simply astonishing. My love of the oral tradition is linked with the fact that it is very reliable.

Q) There is a substantial Indian diaspora in Mauritius and in Africa. What is the attitude among Africans toward the Indian disapora?

A) The Indian diaspora in Africa is very varied in time and place. I know this diaspora well as I am married to a person of Indian origin whose ancestors lived in Bihar.

Mauritius is predominantly a diaspora society. Generally, there is a great sense of unity and cohesion among the Mauritian people.

But there is occasionally a kind of trade-off between politics and community. And then there are these ethnic and religious divisions – Tamil diaspora and Bengali diaspora have their own sense of themselves as unique.

Q: What do you think is unique to the Indian culture vis-à-vis the West?

A: I have learnt a lot from the Indian way of thinking – the ability to hold a paradox or dialectic or contradiction in suspension. I also like this let-it-be attitude, the reluctance to make a big issue out of something that is not very important. I find this Indian attitude of acceptance very admirable.

Q: What image of India do people in Africa have?

How do you see the relationship between India and Africa evolving?

A: India is a mixture in popular mind – it’s intense, potentially disorganized, something that transcends history. India, in popular imagination, is like a slow moving river.

As far as India-Africa relations go, it’s a mixture of shared struggle. In the 1940s, India and Africa came together with a common vision in Bandung.

There is, however, a sense of incomprehension of India from Africa. There is a common history, but the way Indian society has been organized India could defend itself against more vicious forms of colonization. In Africa there is this feeling that in comparison to India, they had to negotiate much more with colonization.

Q: How do you see the role of writers in African society?

A: Writers have a role in creating an emotional maturity among their readers. A writer through an act of imagination create the possibilities of common understanding. You can’s change things without developing common understanding.

Q: What’s your next book about?

A: It’s about the causes of rebellion and how rebellion takes place. It’s an anatomy of rebellion.