Search results
principle achieved, the daughter figure within the framework of the postcolonial narrative that inscribes the new nation is, if not subordinate, peripheral and quiet, then virtually invisible. The pre-eminent status of national sons, and the overshadowed position of their sisters, is exemplified in postcolonial fiction from the 1950s and into the 1990s by writers as diverse as George Lamming, Sam Selvon, V. S. Naipaul, Alex La Guma, Salman Rushdie, Shashi Tharoor and Romesh Gunesekera. A nuclear family fronted by a male heir is emblematically carved onto Gikonyo’s stool, a
, describing what, to borrow and mangle George Lamming’s phrase, one might call the pressures of exile, are not merely about the experience of double-edged cultural translation, but also about how one narrates such experiences. In view of the structure and degree of sophistication outlined here, Mistry’s chosen epigram from one of Henry David Thoreau’s letters, ‘Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short’, seems particularly apt. Writing of one favoured mode of arrangement for short story cycles, J. Gerald Kennedy notes that, ‘Small