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Interview with Suniti Namjoshi
Suniti Namjoshi describes her recent book, Goja an Autobiographical Myth, as the book that she has wanted to write all her life. Her story is set between the rich and the poor in India and moves across to the West, where she now lives. The grand daughter of the Ranisaheb of Maharashtra, Namjoshi was aware from an early age of her privileged status in a society, where "indecent" disparities exist between human beings. She was raised and loved by two women from opposite ends of the social scale: her grandmother Goldie, the matriarch of the family, and her servant woman Goja. The reader is afforded a unique position - to see the East from the perspective of the West; and the West through the eyes of Goldie and Goja, who have only experienced the East.
Despite what Namjoshi sees as the essence of her story - the quest for love, any autobiography is hard to read and separate from what is known of the actual life. Namjoshi is a successful academic and writer who has spent most of her adulthood in the West teaching English literature. Her book confronts sensitive issues of race, gender and ethnicity and is beautifully woven together with poetry, fairytale, myth, and imagined conversations between the dead and living.
The interview took place soon after the launch of Goja an Autobiographical Myth at the Sydney writer's festival in June, 2000.
Interview
Why did you choose to call your book an autobiographical myth?
It's autobiographical, in that my experience is all I have, I've written 15 or 16 books, I am nearly sixty and towards the end of my life, what does it all mean, what sense can I make of it. What was valuable and mattered most? It's fictional since any version manipulates facts, rye used my life as raw material for asking questions that matter to everybody. It's myth, because I make specific patterns out of it, I do not want to claim this is how it was definitively for me, or anyone I came into contact with.
So it's like a disclaimer?
Yes it is. It is not the facts of my life that are important, but what kind of meaning anyone's life might...