{"id":5096,"date":"2015-10-11T00:14:38","date_gmt":"2015-10-10T23:14:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=5096"},"modified":"2016-01-23T14:39:31","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T13:39:31","slug":"sheena-kalayil-the-beloved-country-grosvenor-house-8-99","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=5096","title":{"rendered":"Sheena Kalayil, The Beloved Country<\/em> (Grosvenor House) \u00a38.99"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alan Paton\u2019s Cry the Beloved Country <\/i>begins, famously, with a prose paean to the South African countryside.\u00a0 Paton\u2019s description of the \u2018holiness\u2019 of this ground establishes it as the place to which the character, Kumalo, must return even though the land \u2018cannot be again\u2019.\u00a0 Sheena Kalayil\u2019s fine debut novel begins with a sentence which also suggests a place that \u2018cannot be again\u2019, \u2018Before we even knew each other, we shared an ocean.\u2019\u00a0 Kalayil\u2019s potent opening sentence evokes a relationship whose sharing depends on something both unknowable and also ever-changing.\u00a0 And as the opening paragraph goes on to suggest, the unnamed narrator of the book, and the lover, Jafar, spend less and less time beside that ocean, and more and more apart;\u00a0 they start off beside the ocean, it later divides them even when they do return to it.<\/p>\n

Although Kalayil\u2019s book is, essentially, about a doomed love affair, it is, like the Paton novel to which it nods, much, much more about how time and place are increasingly temporary.\u00a0 So, the novel asks the big questions about the post-colonial world, \u2018Is it possible to have an identity from a specified locality, or is identity a kind of global habit?\u2019 By framing these questions around a love affair, Kalayil makes those questions more poignant, resonant and personal, by asking if identity is also the negotiated product of \u2018loving the one you\u2019re with.\u2019<\/p>\n

The narrator of the novel moves out of a rather damaged childhood in Kerala, India, via an education in England, to a stay with her Francisuncle, a university lecturer in Harare.\u00a0 The narrator gets a job teaching in a college in Harare, and it is there she meets Jafar, who is first a student of hers and then becomes her lover.\u00a0 Jafar is Mozambican; and both he and the narrator have \u2018histories\u2019, hers rather less serious than his.\u00a0 When we meet Jafar he is in the process of breaking up with Marie, a French doctor.\u00a0 Kalayil\u2019s great skill here is to show how ethnicity both does and does not affect relationships. And she does this not to evoke the spectre of racism, but to evoke with considerable delicacy how those inside such relationships negotiate these things, and other aspects that these matters evolve.\u00a0 When she and Jafar move in together, it is to share a flat in Maputo with Jafar\u2019s brother, Naman.\u00a0 Kalayil writes, \u2018What was clear was the understanding that Jafar needed a bedmate, and I was his choice for now\u2026: men and women were a recipe for consolation, a throw-back to urgent, war-filled times when people seized the opportunity for comfort before it could disappear.\u2019\u00a0 Kalayil shows how a patriarchal view becomes the norm in a country which \u2018simmered with its fascination for heterosexuality\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 Naman introduces the narrator as \u2018Jafar\u2019s woman, a mulher de Jafar\u2026<\/i>there was an assumption that the woman you were with was your wife, but that it could be a temporary position.\u2019 Thus, with great tact, Kalayil brings in the social context of the relationship, and without any sense of labouring them, evokes the pressures that exist in this post-colonial world.<\/p>\n

What Kalayil is also wonderful at doing is the sheer evocation of place;\u00a0 there\u2019s a heady sensual feel to the places she ranges through and describes.\u00a0 And she is very good on language, and the use of those little phrases and words in another language which create atmosphere but which never patronise or alienate.<\/p>\n

Part Two of the novel describes the narrator\u2019s engagement in and engagement with her arranged marriage to Sebe part of the Malayalee community living around Chicago. And if this half of the novel does not have the heady, perfumed exoticism of the first half, that is because Kalayil\u2019s narrator is, again, having to situate herself in a contemporary America with, perhaps, a slightly more \u2018flattened\u2019 set of expectations than those of either the Kerala in which she has grown up or Maputo beside the Indian Ocean.\u00a0 Kalayil moves from the society of Mozambique, to the the Keralan community in America.\u00a0 Here, Kalayil\u2019s novel resembles the novels of Jhumpa Lahiri, which are often set amongst the upwardly mobile Asian-American community, but Kalayil\u2019s world does without Lahiri\u2019s slightly smug airlessness.\u00a0 If the narrator has to find her place amongst these contemporary Americans, it is with more sense of acceptance in a world which is a blend in the first place.<\/p>\n

This is a finely wrought and intelligent first novel, whose moves back and forth in time are occasionally a little dizzying, but which is always beautifully written and very atmospheric.
\n 
\nIan Pople<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alan Paton\u2019s Cry the Beloved Country begins, famously, with a prose paean to the South African countryside.\u00a0 Paton\u2019s description of the \u2018holiness\u2019 of this ground establishes it as the place to which the character, Kumalo, must return even though the land \u2018cannot be again\u2019.\u00a0 Sheena Kalayil\u2019s fine debut novel begins with a sentence which also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nSheena Kalayil, The Beloved Country (Grosvenor House) \u00a38.99 - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=5096\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sheena Kalayil, The Beloved Country (Grosvenor House) \u00a38.99 - 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