Eunice de Souza (1940 – 2017) was born into a Goan Catholic family settled in Pune. After her initial schooling, de Souza attended Sophia College in Mumbai and subsequently earned a Master’s degree in English literature from Marquette University, Wisconsin, and her PhD from the University of Mumbai. She started teaching at St. Xavier’s College (Mumbai) in 1969, where she headed the Department of English for several years. In a career spanning four decades, de Souza published five collections of poetry and a couple of novels, compiled anthologies of Indian women’s writing, edited volumes of folk tales and poems for children, and contributed review articles on art, literature and culture for a weekly column to the Mumbai Mirror. She was also actively involved in organizing stage plays for the annual theatre festival “Ithaka” hosted by St. Xavier’s College.
Though she lost her father at the early age of three – a trauma that left her feeling “damaged” for many years to come – it was his interest in literature and art to which de Souza traces her own literary inclination (Nerlekar 249). Her exposure to the American civil rights movement in the 1960s may also have had a formative influence on her response to gender inequality in Indian society. Her poetry is imbued with a sense of the personal, distilled from the lived experience of being a Catholic woman in a patriarchal set-up, and is simultaneously also political in its trenchant critique of the oppressive forces of the family and the Church that constitute her cultural milieu. De Souza’s first collection of poems, Fix (1979), established her as a poet with a distinct voice, irreverent, unsentimental and steeped in savage irony. Her poetry is marked by a keen observation of the characters she grew up around and knew best – members of the Catholic community whose voices, both in terms of their use of language and their attitudes towards “others”, she captures with unerring precision. In doing so, de Souza adopts a remarkably sparse style of writing, bereft of verbose ornamentation and elaborate explication. It is the seemingly innocuous, unremarkable, everyday social lives of her characters, with all the nuances of their speech and behaviour captured dispassionately and without authorial comment, that is most often the subject of her poems. De Souza’s mode of representing the world around her is consistently satirical, demonstrating an unsparing criticism of normalized forms of oppression in society that the reader is called upon to confront, not through overt moral cues offered by the poet (she does not offer any) but by means of sharing with her a common knowledge of how that world functions.
Her non-conformity to the traditional expectations of Indian women poets – what she dismissively refers to as “this whole “poetess” thing, derived from Sarojini Naidu” (Nerlekar 251) – distinguishes her work as original and unorthodox. Although reluctant to be ghettoized as a “woman” poet, de Souza never shied away from using her poetry as a medium of social critique when it came to the theme of women’s subjugation within institutional structures of family and marriage. Thus, in the title poem of her second collection, Women in Dutch Painting (1988), she conveys a sense of the repressed inner lives of her characters beneath the pretty surface of European art as much as the efficiently managed Indian household. Her women are “calm, not stupid/ pregnant, not bovine” (11), they do not answer back their husbands nor aim to publish their poetry, and in being such perfect models of submissive compliance they epitomize the lack of agency that female “subjects” endure in patriarchal societies.
This capacity to unmask the inherent biases of hegemonic masculinity, as enabled and sustained by the institutional structures of religion and family, is best exemplified in one of de Souza’s most commonly anthologized poems, “Catholic Mother”. De Souza uses the form of the dramatic monologue here by introducing Father X. D’Souza indirectly through a photograph. The “Father of the year”, as he is identified by the speaker, boasts without a trace of irony: “By the Grace of God / we’ve had seven children / (in seven years).” The easy appropriation of credit by the “Father” – the identical nomenclature in the domains of religion and family suggesting the collusion of patriarchal power in both – for divine blessing as well as natural fertility marks his unquestioned authority as the head of “One Big Happy Family”. The glorified edifice of the patriarchal family, sanctioned by the Catholic Church but under threat from the Indian government during the sterilization campaign of the Emergency, becomes the contested site of cultural identity:
God Always Provides
India will suffer for
her Wicked Ways
(these Hindu buggers got no ethics)
(Fix 9)
The binary opposition between Father D’Souza’s moral indignation as a Catholic priest and the Hindu/Indian authoritarian rule of law effects a delightfully ironic reversal of the process of the ‘othering’ of religious minorities in the specific cultural context of Goa, whose history of Portuguese colonialization and conversion followed by its annexation by the Indian nation-state, renders the idea of affiliation moot. Quite significantly, in this complex negotiation for power between the colonial inheritance of Catholic faith and the forces of the modern nation-state, the human agent (the titular mother), whose feminine biological labour is implicit in the (re)production of the family, remains silent throughout. The position of privilege from which the patriarch speaks, using the first-person plural “we” with absolute self-assurance, admits only a parenthetical reference to the seven years over which the physical and emotional stress of pregnancy and childbirth must be assumed to have been borne. While social approbation for Father D’Souza is deliberately emphasized in the form of epithets such as “Pillar of the Church”, the “pillar’s wife”, the speaker wryly observes, “says nothing”. Yet, much like the women in Dutch paintings, the very presence of the voiceless mother within the visual frame of the photograph (which functions also as the emblem of the family, the community and the nation) reorients the reader’s attention towards the marginalized subject of patriarchal discourse and offers a counterpoint to the Father’s confident declarations. In thus capturing the silence of the titular character, present only nominally in relation to the “Father”, de Souza offers a stringent critique of patriarchal institutions of religion and marriage.
De Souza’s persistent engagement with matrimony as the site of social hierarchies and prejudices is reflected in another of her best-known poems “Marriages are Made”, where the prospective bride becomes the object of intense scrutiny:
The formalities
have been completed:
her family history examined
for T.B. and madness
her father declared solvent
her eyes examined for squints
her teeth for cavities
her stools for the possible
non-Brahmin worm.
(Fix 10)
The reduction of the prospective bride to a catalogue of body parts, each of which is subject to the groom’s evaluation, signifies her commodification as a genetic asset within the transactional economy of marriage. The structural injustice and violence that enable and perpetuate such “arranged” marriages are laid bare, in a manner similar to “Catholic Mother”, by the matter-of-fact tone of male privilege. The entrenched biases of gender, class and caste, crucial determinants in the Indian matrimonial market, are succinctly captured in this list of pre-conditions that must be ruled out for the bride to be considered suitable. The fact that the bride’s complexion, which is deemed to be “just about / the right shade / of rightness” to compensate for her other physical deficiencies – she is not quite “tall enough” or “full enough” – becomes the clinching factor that “makes” the match suggests the inherent hypocrisy of an enterprise predicated on female subjugation to male entitlement. As Veronica Brady observes, the poet’s concern here is with “the disparity between value and being, with the way in which social propriety arrogates to itself divine sanction, reducing people to objects so that measurement and calculation substitute for love” (112-13). De Souza’s deliberate use of the passive voice throughout the poem is an effective linguistic strategy of conveying the mechanical, iniquitous and perhaps even repetitive aspect of such evaluation. The clipping of the romantic cliché of the poem’s title is thus de Souza’s satirical indictment of the traditional social divisions and biases on which the Indian marriage market is founded.
De Souza’s poetic strategy constitutes “a pungent ethnic auto-critique”, wherein she “turns the merciless eye of an insider-turned-outsider on the group that she has quit, at least mentally” (Hoskote 56). Her ability to unmask the hypocrisy underlying the sense of self-righteousness enjoyed by those in positions of social power within a community is perhaps nowhere more evident than in her poem “Feeding the Poor at Christmas”. Here she examines the performance of Christian charity as a symptom of class privilege, in that it functions as both the condition and the consequence of maintaining social distinctions:
Every Christmas we feed the poor.
We arrive an hour late: Poor dears,
Like children waiting for a treat.
Bring your plates. Don’t move.
Don’t try turning up for more.
No. Even if you don’t drink
you can’t take your share
for your husband. Say thank you
and a rosary for us every evening.
No. Not a towel and a shirt,
even if they’re old.
What’s that you said?
You’re a good man, Robert, yes,
beggars can’t be, exactly.
(A Necklace of Skulls 5)
The note of condescension that marks the speaker’s attitude towards the recipients of her alms (“Poor dears”) reveals her charity as being a self-serving, conditional, superficial exercise. The speaker and her ilk are unapologetic about arriving late every Christmas, and smug in their infantilization of the poor – telling them what they can and cannot have. What is noteworthy here is not just the detailing of the material components of such occasional largesse – second hand clothes, rationed portions of food and drink in exchange for a daily prayer and a mandatory “thank you”. While these are sufficiently indicative of the parsimonious nature of the ‘charitable’ speaker, it is the blithely unselfconscious tone of her voice in the poem that enables the reader to participate in de Souza’s unobtrusive but devastating indictment of such a position of assumed superiority. Thus, the speaker’s reassertion of class distinctions in the last line of the poem ironically echoes the muttered discontent of one of the “beggars” and renders her supercilious attitude both ridiculous and offensive to the reader. That de Souza achieves this degree of critical engagement with the endemic hierarchies of social class, simply through description and without any direct commentary, bears testimony to her artistic acumen for using and presenting language as a tool that often undermines its user’s authority.
De Souza’s trademark economy of expression does not only serve as a tool of satire directed towards social hierarchies of class, caste and gender; she also employs it deftly to give her more obviously “personal” pieces a calibrated tone of restraint, which results in a form of brevity that makes her poems read like notes exchanged between people who already know one another well, characterised with what A.K. Mehrotra aptly describes as “the urgency of telegrams” (114). Here is an instance of how she uses language as the medium as well as the subject of self-reflexive commentary on her own art:
It’s time to find a place
to be silent with each other.
I have prattled endlessly
in staff-rooms, corridors, restaurants.
When you’re not around
I carry on conversations in my head.
Even this poem
has forty-eight words too many.
(Selected and New Poems 56)
In thus offering the reader a sense of intimate familiarity with the speaker’s conscious “self”, while simultaneously also subjecting that self to ironic scrutiny, de Souza presents the poem itself as both the process and the product of the “conversations in [her] head” to which we, the readers, bear witness.
This unsparing, incisive look at the characters that inhabit her poetic universe prevents de Souza’s writing from becoming too indulgently autobiographical, while at the same time it also serves as the aesthetic and moral frame for representing the world to which she belongs. Thus, when she imagines the “fat chuckle” of her Brahmin ancestor who converted to Christianity and “got the best of both worlds”, she not only confronts the endemic hypocrisy of socio-religious institutions but also demonstrates awareness of her own implication in that legacy of power. It is also a legacy that precludes easy identification with any single cultural tradition: thus, the speaker declares that with a Greek name, a Portuguese surname and an alien language, she “belong[s] with the lame ducks” (Fix 32). Her “confession” in the last stanza of the poem – that she “hid the bloodstains/ on [her] clothes” and “let [her] breasts sag” to qualify as the boy her parents really wanted – is at once candid and mocking, recalling, as R. Raj Rao points out, Kamala Das’s “An Introduction” (246). It is this awareness of her peripheral position within an ambivalent legacy that is demonstrated with subtle humour in another condensed masterpiece “Conversation Piece”:
My Portuguese-bred aunt
picked up a clay shivalingam
one day and said:
Is this an ashtray?
No, said the salesman,
This is our god.
(Fix 20)
The transaction between the two characters here epitomizes the cultural gap that is the default condition of the hybridized postcolonial context of Indian society, and the poet’s ability to hint at the absurdity of faith at both ends – Western/Christian and native/Hindu – without taking sides is symptomatic of her own conflicted allegiance as a citizen who is familiar with both and submits to neither. The “sardonic amusement and self-directed irony” that the poet Arundhati Subramaniam, one of de Souza’s former students, identified as characterizing her poetry (63), mark her as an artist who refuses to belong to any one bracket of identity. Her advice to women to keep cats “to learn to cope with / the otherness of lovers” (Women in Dutch Painting 22) might well be read as a declaration of her own poetic credo. To the end, de Souza remained resolutely independent in her art and life, her wry wit undiminished and her self-knowledge unabashed:
Tell me Mr. Death
Date, Time, Place.
I have to look for my
Life-of-sin panties
Make an appointment
For a pedicure.
(Learn from the Almond Leaf 23)
De Souza also published two works of fiction – Dangerlok (2001) and Dev & Simran (2003). The former is a semi-autobiographical novella in which de Souza adopts her characteristic satirical style to present vignettes from the life of Rina Ferreira, a middle-aged college teacher of English. The minor battles of everyday life and work in metropolitan Mumbai constitute the backdrop in which eccentric neighbours, uninspired colleagues, non-committal lovers, fiercely loyal friends and oddly amusing pets appear recurrently as characters. It is not plot that is of interest here; rather, it is the tone of mild exasperation and honest confession with which the narrator reveals the ordinary joys and frustrations of being a non-conformist that arrests the reader’s attention. De Souza privileges relations of affiliation over those dictated by convention: hence, Rina’s easy camaraderie with her bai (maid servant) or her instinctive but unsentimental fondness for stray animals offer her greater emotional sustenance than institutional structures of family, religion and education.
Though primarily known for her poetic output, de Souza also made significant contributions to the enterprise of anthology making. Especially noteworthy is her edited volume Nine Indian Women Poets (2001) in which she includes post-Independence writers on the basis of the range of their thematic and stylistic engagement with the idiom of poetry and seeks to rectify the often tokenistic representation of women poets in anthologies of Indian English poetry. It is the same inclusivity that informs de Souza’s selection of pieces in Purdah: An Anthology (2004), which accommodates a variety of critical and creative writing on the system of social seclusion of Indian women: colonial accounts of the various forms of “purdah”, anti-colonial and reformist native critiques of such practices, and literary manifestations of the experience of living within such systems. De Souza highlights the class and caste connotations of the practice, avoiding the general tendency to identify it as a “Muslim” problem, and alerts the reader to the “damage [caused by] the disparagement or the idealization” of ‘Indian’ culture (xiii). In thus engaging with the larger question of “Indianness”, de Souza attempts to “remedy the simplistic post-colonial reaction to these accounts, which treat them as if they all spoke with one voice” (xix). Her astute observation of the continuities between older systems of purdah and contemporary social realities such as the segregation of space for women in modes of public transport or the stigma attached to women’s bodily functions enables us to grasp the relevance of such writings in our own times.
De Souza’s impatience for easy, essentialist categorization is evident in another of her anthologies, Early Indian Poetry in English (2005), where she defends the right of a poet to write in a language of his or her own choice and rejects the “literary caste system of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, the rooted and the alienated” (xxiii) that underlies the patronizing attitude towards the work of 19th and early 20th century Indian writers of English. De Souza aims to revise the general critical opinion on early Indian English poetry by demonstrating that this body of literature goes beyond “the more acceptable face of Indianness: safe improving legends and limp spiritual poetry” (xviii). The project is thus fundamentally concerned with the question of artistic freedom versus narrow identity politics, a debate in which prominent writers like Salman Rushdie and Vikram Chandra have participated. De Souza asserts her position on the subject with characteristic brevity and clarity: “The crux of the matter really is language – the way one uses it, not the language in which one writes, whether native or adopted” (xxvi).
Of her contemporaries, de Souza’s work has thematic and formal resonances with Kamala Das’s, since both poets employ the confessional mode to voice discontent with the limited and limiting roles that society enforces upon women. The foregrounding of the personal and the intimate as a means of questioning gender politics and asserting the individual, artistic “self” against patriarchal norms marks the work of both and paves the way for feminist English poetry in the Indian subcontinent. Moving away from what she describes in her “Introduction” to Nine Indian Women Poets as “the confidently mindless versifying” of Sarojini Naidu and the “sentimental pastiche” of Toru Dutt (1), de Souza achieves in her writing a sharpness of observation and idiom reminiscent of Jane Austen. After all, as she asserts, “Our poetic predecessors are not necessarily those who come just before us in time” (1). De Souza’s own work, in its capacity for unsparing social critique and unreserved self-expression, has certainly influenced younger poets like Imtiaz Dharker and Arundhati Subramaniam to not only speak about the gendered nature of our everyday experiences of life but also to capture the potential for strength and humour in those experiences.
References
Brady, Veronica. “‘One Long Cry in the Dark’?: The Poetry of Eunice De Souza”, Literature and Theology 5.1 (1991): 101-23.
Hoskote, Ranjit. “On Eunice de Souza”, Indian Literature 61.6 (2017): 52-59.
Mehrotra, A. K. ed. The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1992.
Nerlekar, Anjali. “‘Indian’ doesn’t exclude me”: An interview with Eunice de Souza”, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 53.1-2 (2017): 247-54.
Rao, R. Raj. “Interpretive Testimony: Kamala Das and Eunice de Souza”, in A History of Indian Poetry in English, ed. Rosinka Chaudhuri. New York: Cambridge UP, 2016. 235-50.
Subramaniam, Arundhati. “Eunice de Souza”, Indian Literature 61.6 (2017): 60-64.
Publications by the Author
Poetry
Fix (Newground, 1979)
Women in Dutch Painting (Praxis, 1988)
Ways of Belonging (Polygon, 1990)
Selected and New Poems (St. Xavier’s College, 1994)
A Necklace of Skulls (Penguin, 2009)
Learn from the Almond Leaf (Poetrywala, 2016)
Novels
Dangerlok (Penguin, 2001)
Dev & Simran: A Novel (Penguin, 2003)
Anthologies & Edited Volumes
Statements: An Anthology of Indian Prose in English (Orient Longman, 1976) – co-edited with Adil Jussawala
Talking Poems: Conversations with Poets (Oxford UP, 1999)
Nine Indian Women Poets: An Anthology (Oxford UP, 2001)
Women’s Voices: Selections from Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Indian Writing in English (Oxford UP, 2004) – co-edited with Lindsay Pereira
Purdah: An Anthology (Oxford UP, 2004)
101 Folktales from India (Penguin, 2004)
The Puffin Book of Poetry for Children (Penguin, 2005)
Early Indian Poets in English: An Anthology (Oxford UP, 2005)
The Satthianandhan Family Album (Sahitya Akademi, 2005)
Both Sides of the Sky: Post-Independence Poetry in English (National Book Trust, 2008)
These My Words: The Penguin Book of Indian Poetry (Penguin, 2012) – co-edited with Melanie Silgardo