Content area
Full Text
The imbrication of the personal and the social is one of the enduring projects of feminism (Spivak, 1988). It is also the theme of the revolutionary verses (at right), which I recall as being among the best loved and often quoted in my native language Urdu. In these words poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz traces how his coming to social consciousness and the awareness of the ugliness of oppression inescapably altered the expression of his passion. Describing the history of oppression and the suffering of his people he ends by saying:
No longer can I avert my gaze from these (the injustices), Nor, despite the allure of your beauty, deny the knowledge, That there is other pain in life than the yearnings of love And desires other than the desire for the beloved. So do not seek from me the purity of past passion (my translation).
By conceiving of the line between postcolonial public and private discourse as diffused rather than sharply defined,(f.1) we can begin to theorize our individual gendered experiences as narratives of the multiple intersections between the personal and the social-political as well as between the postcolonial present/future and our colonial pasts.
In this paper I want to look at the idiom of migrancy-conceptualized by Sara Suleri as a condition of movement between regions, locales and cultural spaces (Suleri, 1992)--and the consequent blurring of the public and private which marks the act of migration from the cultural, social and political spheres of the so-called Third World into that of the First. My use of the term postcolonial is intended not so much to imply a periodization of colonial experience but as to indicate the condition of consciousness that is restless and investigative; it is in the sense that Bhabha (1994) explains the present day use of terms such as postmodern, postcolonial, postfeminism "that insistently gesture to the beyond (and) only embody its restless and revisionary energy if they transform the present into an expanded and excentric site of experience and empowerment," (Bhabha, 1994, p. 4). In this respect, this article(f.2) itself demands to be read as a series of transition points in an ongoing attempt to map the developing of a discontinuous consciousness from seemingly sequential narratives.
This exercise, as has been documented...