Contemporary women literature is so vast and eclectic that it would be difficult to put it all down in one article. There has been, and the tribe is ever-increasing, a plethora of women from the Indian subcontinent writing today. Strangely, many of them are settled outside India, and yet, they can speak of the Indian experience as if they had never gone. It may be a case of outsiders looking in, or it may be a case of insiders looking deeper in, but the contemporary Indian woman writer speaks her heart out.
In her novel Women of Algiers in their Apartment, Assia Djebar takes the first steps towards reconciling the effects of the postcolonial world with the history of women’s participation in the struggle for Algerian independence. As Clarisse Zimra notes in the afterword of the most recent translation of the novel, “(Djebar’s) entire corpus grapples with issues attending the passage from colonial to postcolonial culture: the definition of a national literature, the debate over cultural authenticity, the problematic question of language, and the textual inscription of a female subject within the patriarchal background.
One of the most challenging literary events of the last decade which took place in Athens was undoubtedly the lecture of Nadine Gordimer. It was a memorable experience to hear this tiny, silver haired lady speak with a soft but steady voice of some of her country’s unsolved problems: analphabetism and semi-alphabetism, poverty, racism, the transition from the racist regime to the democratic state
Contemporary women literature is so vast and eclectic that it would be difficult to put it all down in one article. There has been, and the tribe is ever-increasing, a plethora of women from the Indian subcontinent writing today. Strangely, many of them are settled outside India, and yet, they can speak of the Indian experience as if they had never gone.