Suniti Namjoshi

Namjoshi says she got politicized during her sabbatical from the University of Toronto which she spent in England in 1978 – 79. “A major influence,” she writes in an email exchange, “was my friend, Hilary Clare (alias Christine Donald). She had more brains than me, she could out-argue me and she had a literary mind. What’s more I could see that she was fighting my battles for me, while I stood aside and did nothing; and that shamed me. She was active in both Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation. Up till then I thought that politics was something unpleasant that vaguely unpleasant people indulged in. I hadn’t realized that it had something to do with ethics. I had also assumed that literature had nothing to do with power. It was books like Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and the work of writers like Virginia Woolf and Adrienne Rich that made me understand the extent to which sheer brutal power in the form of wealth and social ascendancy intersected with the literary enterprise and determined not just who could write what, but who could write at all and what constituted the literary canon. It wasn’t just particular friends and important writers that mattered though. There was the sense that a strong feminist movement existed, and for a writer this meant that there was an audience — a readership — to whom I might make sense. That was enormously exhilarating and it allowed me to think and to explore and to write.”

The poems that accompany this edition are from various books and reveal the textured and multivalent satire that characterises Namjoshi’s political poetry. In a recent article on her new book, Sycorax, I wrote of how Namjoshi’s work demolishes several stereotypes in one swift stroke: “She is a fabulist who is never preachy. A feminist who is never humourless. A poet who is never arcane. An intellectual who is never pedantic . . . Her work points to a deeply internalized radicalism, one that has as much depth as it has edge. Quirky, funny, intellectually agile, capable of making connections between the mundane and the metaphysical, adept at sniffing out the archetypal in the culturally particular, they point to a mind that is as engaged as it is engaging.”