The Fabulous Feminist

by Suniti Namjoshi

It was on a sabbatical in England in the late 1970s that Suniti Namjoshi discovered feminism – or rather, she discovered that other feminists existed, and many among them shared her thoughts and doubts, her questions and visions.

Since then she has been writing–fables, poetry, prose, autobiography, children’s stories– about power, about inequality, about oppression, effectively using the power of language and the literary tradition to expose what she finds absurd and unacceptable.

This new collection brings together in one volume a huge range of Namjoshi’s writings, starting with her classic collection, 'Feminist Fables', and coming right up to her latest work.

Genres: Feminism, Poetry, India, Queer, Nonfiction, Lesbian, LGBT

253 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2012

About the author

Suniti Namjoshi is a poet, children's author, and teacher. She ran a collaborative fiction site in the late nineties called The Reader's Text of Building Babel. She lives in England with her partner Gillian Hanscombe.

Reviews

[diana garcía · Rating 4 out of 5]

loved it

[Sudarshana Mukhopadhyay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Suniti Namjoshi is a poet, novelist, fabulist, lesbian, and feminist who is on a constant quest for utopia but doesn't shy away from subverting the idea of utopia itself. We get a taste of her exploration in "The fabulous feminist," published by Zubaan in 2012. It is a tapestry of poems, fables, stories, and novel excerpts - written over a span of 40 years - woven together by pithy introductions by Suniti that help readers understand her state of mind behind each of the writings. She writes about injustice, prejudices, class, racism, sexism, gender inequality, love, loss, and much more. In her meticulously slender prose, she rewrites the familiar fables we've grown up reading, only to turn them upside down and question the morals they teach! Yet, she is never preachy. Instead, Suniti is witty, intelligent, sarcastic, who never tells you what to think, but makes you think! She brings about the richness of clever sarcasm rooted in Indian story-telling but never caves into a mockery.
I must admit that a handful of poems in this volume didn't speak to me. But I can vouch for the rest of them and each prose in this book. For example, in one poem, Suniti writes about riding a dinosaur in the heart of a city and yearning for validation as she sees the world from above. Then you burst out laughing after knowing that Suniti wrote that poem after failing her driving test many times! You can't help but wonder if she eats metaphor for breakfast?
Through the stories of a prophetic blue donkey, the princess who's too sensitive to pain, the hare and the turtle, the mouse of the lion, the one-eyed monkey who's friends with crocodiles, and the politically charged cows, and so on, Suniti makes you question your preconditions. And if you're lucky, she lets you borrow her feminist lens.

P.S.: Suniti lives and writes in England. She left India and her cozy IAS job in the late 1970s to do a Ph.D. on Ezra Pound. Since then, she's been writing and teaching and fighting for LGBTQ+ rights.

Links:
https://zubaanbooks.com/bookauthor/su...

[Battameez · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.25 stars

Full of whimsy, wonder, and wicked satire. Years ago, I read a chapbook of poems by Suniti Namjoshi at a queer feminist litfest and somehow, couldn't find any other work by her. Trust a publisher like Zubaan to collect all her work and make this wonderful book.

This book is a part memoir and part Namjoshi's treatment of well known fables and fairytales--ranging from stuff in the Panchatantra to Hans Anderson's tales. Since it is such sharp satire, there is no set-up, we get sections upon sections of her feminist fables. Her short story on the lesbian cows had me in splits, her fables always gave me a chill down my spin as soon as I reached the clincher of the tale. Some of her poems were a hit-and-miss for me. Maybe I shouldn't have read this book in such large chunks, who knows. Will definitely reread this book and see if my opinion on her verses changes.

It was fascinating to see her explain the context or the time in her life and where she was--home/abroad, out/still-coming-to-terms-with-her-sexuality and then have that explanation immediately followed by her short stories, fables or poems. It gives the book such a well-rounded atmosphere, it made for a wonderful experience in all.

[Karla Baldeon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review on Spanish.

No es que la narración sencilla quite profundidad al significado de los relatos y poemas, sino que los temas, en sí, y las ideas abundantes, críticas, opiniones y retratos son tan complejos en sí que reflejan en la mente del lector un millar de ideas similares y crean por sí mismas esta complejidad.
Hay momentos bastante fuertes de visión feminista que agarran desprevenida a la más novicia, pero usualmente es un diálogo constante entre la autora y sus recuerdos y vivencias.
Es un excelente libro que te hace reflexionar y te da un poco de aliento para desarrollar tu propia ideología sin termor a demonizarla por miedo a la crítica de otros.

[Bill Brydon · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Against whom are my sister? III LADY SHY i) In the mirror my sister does not smile at me. She looks anxious and needy. “Sister!” I call out, “Let’s be friends!” She wants to be friends, but her eyes are like holes, her voice comes through the glass darkly."

"The Beast considered these arguments circular, but she discovered also that she was unhappy. Boys didn’t interest her. She fell in love with a girl. The girl disapproved, and she found that she was now the object of ridicule. She became more and more solitary and turned to books. But the books made it clear that men loved women, and women loved men, and men rode off and had all sorts of adventures and women stayed at home. ‘I know what it is,’ she said one day, ‘I know what is wrong: I am not human. The only story that fits me at all is the one about the Beast. But the Beast doesn’t change from a Beast to a human because of its love. It’s just the reverse. And the Beast isn’t fierce. It’s extremely gentle. It loves Beauty, but it lives alone and dies alone.’ And that’s what she did."

[Ariadna Medrano · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sin duda alguna un buen libro, la lírica y la narración me parecieron impresionantes, desde un inicio me atrapó, sin embargo, hubo relatos con los que no pude conectar, pero con esto no quiero decir que sea un mal libro...tal vez no era el momento adecuado para leerlo.

[Ayush · Rating 3 out of 5]

Likes for the fables, not so much for the poems.