Australian Women's Book Review Volume 14.1 - School of English ...

erudite and learned through this mish-mash of canonical references. It is mainly to the characters of
Goja, Goldie and Charity, however, that the narrator talks, as we all do to the voices inside our head,
accusing them of sorrow, hurt and unfairness. In one insightful moment the narrator is asked: '”Who
are you shouting at?” At myself? At the pain? At the whole of India?'
Namjoshi's analysis of sexism, class privilege and homophobia in the East and racism in the West is
lucid, but drawn out and at times self-torturing. Post-colonial politics are engaged when the English
language is referred to as a coloniser of the mind but also as the key to another life of poetry and
writing. One of the most provocative aspects of this book is its experiments in form, which include a
chapter on language as a forest, a fable about the black piglet and the queen of spades (mirroring a
thread from Namjoshi's Building Babel), self-reflexive narration, poetry, fairytale, straight
autobiography, and an almost continuous dialogue with various interrogators of conscience. While
these variations could arguably be said to reflect the search for an appropriate form in which to write
such an autobiographical myth, it is the 'straight' storytelling which is the most readable and engaging.
If I were giving a lecture on this, I'd say that this is what I've been trained to read; that the confusion of
hybrid textual forms proves just how fixed we've become in anticipating storylines. On another level,
however, the tortured textual position of being Indian, aristocratic, and lesbian becomes repetitively
self-flagellating (I've never understood Catholic culture) and comparable to that of the seventies
Toronto academics in the book who 'complain' that it's not their fault they are white, male, or
heterosexual. Perhaps the confusion of the title is telling: this autobiographical myth is not about Goja.
Goja is one of many characters whose voice is important, dominant and female in the narrator's
imagination. Goja is a fantasy of a servant speaking, a personal reconciliation, an elegy.
Alison Bartlett teaches literature at the University of Southern Queensland. Her most recent
book was Postgraduate Research Supervision: Transforming (R)elations, edited with Gina Mercer.
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