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… imaginative writers who, by choice or by life circumstances, experience cultural
dislocation, live transnational experiences, cultivate bilingual/plurilingual proficiency,
physically immerse themselves in multiple cultures/geographies/territories, expose
themselves to diversity and nurture plural, flexible identities. 6
Now, speaking from the position of literary practice, I recognise myself in this description and
cannot object to my work being considered in this way.
What I’ve been talking about is how, whether a woman is writing of her own life or of the lives of
other women, and no matter to what extent those written lives are intended to be or are considered
“fictional”, the writings take place in a context of discourses about identity. Writing women’s lives,
whether such writing is primarily memoir or fiction, is to write in peril. The perils are in the positions
assumed, positions assigned.
The value of transculturalism for women writing women’s lives, their own or others, in fiction,
non‐fiction and hybrid forms is this: to set aside the given barriers of cultural, national, ethnic, and
other assigned identities, is to enter a territory of women’s experience. I do not for a moment make
this claim for all women; class is probably the greatest marker and source of one’s experience of the
world and one’s relation to it. However women writers and women subjects whose life experience
and literary experience is transcultural have more likelihood of understanding each other and are
more likely to enter a territory of shared assumptions about how the world works, how to live one’s
lives, how to understand others.
Keywords: Lifewriting, Transcultural, Memoir, Novel, Reception
Inez Baranay
Çanakkale Onsekizmart University
inezbaranay@gmail.com,
www.inezbaranay.com
Notes
1
Baranay, Inez. Neem Dreams (Delhi: Rupa&Co, 2003), 56.
2
Ibid., 124
3
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, “Axiomatic”. (In Simon During (ed.) The Cultural Studies Reader London
and New York: Routledge, 1993), 243‐268.
4
Saghal, Nayantara, Prison and Chocolate Cake. (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1954), n.p.
5
McDonell, Jennifer. “Transgression, diplomacy and the art of Writing Fiction: an interview with
Frank Moorhouse”. Meanjin 57, 4, 1998), 712‐727
6 Dagnino, Arianna. “Transcultural Writers and Transcultural Literature in the Age of Global
Modernity” Transnational Literature Volume 4, no. 2 May 2012
Bibliography
Baranay, Inez. The Edge of Bali. Sydney: HarperCollins, 1992. Rascal Rain. Sydney: HarperCollins,
1994
Neem Dreams. Delhi: Rupa&Co, 2003 “Multiculturalism, Globalisation and Worldliness: Origin
and Destination of the Text”.
Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, (2004) Volume 3: 117‐132
sun square moon: writings on yoga and writing. Kolkota: Writers Workshop Kolkata, 2007.
With The Tiger. Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2008.
Bartlett, A. “Critics, Crucibles, and A Literary Career: Inez Baranay and Her Indian Novel,
Neem Dreams”. In Australian Made: A Multicultural Reader. Sydney: Sydney University Press,
2010 Dagnino, Arianna. “Transcultural Writers and Transcultural Literature in the Age of
Global Modernity” Transnational Literature Volume 4,
no. 2 May 2012 http://dspace.flinders.edu.au/jspui/
bitstream/2328/25881/3/Transcultural_Writers.pdf