Shauna Singh Baldwin: Arranged marriages, women and writing

Features - November 05, 2006

Trisha Sertori, Contributor, Ubud

There is something that feels very reliable and comforting in arranged marriages, according to Canadian writer Shauna Singh Baldwin, at least during the years of puberty. Given the usual reaction to the concept of arranged marriages, this is not the philosophy one expects from a feminist who writes on the oppression of women through biographical fiction.

Internationally acclaimed author and Giller prize finalist, Shauna, was at this year's Ubud Writers and Readers Festival discussing her 2004 book, The Tiger Claw, and her earlier major work, What the Body Remembers, a piece of biographical fiction that catapulted her onto booklists around the world. The Jakarta Post caught up with Shauna to chat about women, arranged marriages and writing during the festival.

This year's festival theme, Place, Time and Identity, appeared to have been specifically crafted for Shauna who, as a Canadian-born Indian Sikh, has a complex cultural identity; an author, who is a computer whiz with a master's degree in business, she was educated in India and is now living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The move to the United States was forced on her when Canadian universities failed to acknowledge her Indian degree.

"I am certainly a mix of nationalities. Even my languages are a mix. I remember when my family came back to Montreal from India, where I grew up, no one could understand my French, because I had learned Paris French in India, so my accent was different from Montr‚al French," said multilingual Shauna, who speaks English, Urdu, French and Punjabi, with English as her writing medium.

This mixed cultural background has given her a richly informed world view that she weaves into her books. However her Indian education played havoc with her sense of a writer's identity.

"Growing up I felt society was telling me that Asian people can be writers, but not authors. This was the precept given to us at school. We read Tess of the D'Urbervilles; all the classics of English literature."

Shauna added that for many years the sheer volume of English literature available across India, and by comparison the absence of Indian literature, led her to believe that Asian writers were born of a "lesser God". It was not until the penny dropped that it was simply a matter of publishing economics, rather than quality, that created the flood of 19th century English literature across sub-continental India.

"We were not reading our Indian literature. It took a long time to realize this was not because Indian or Asian literature was less, but simply due to publishing companies printing out-of-copyright books. These books were the English classics of the 19th century and earlier."

"We had English books everywhere in India and this gave us, as students, a very strange view of the west," quipped Shauna.

And while that "strange view of the west" gives Shauna a laugh or two these days, the imbalanced set of literary scales misrepresents the talent of Asian, Middle Eastern, African, South American and female writers the world over, placing them into labeled boxes. It almost suggests that anyone outside the hegemony of white, male English-speaking writers is "authorly-challenged", requiring a leg up to join the big boys of the written word.

Shauna, who is frequently placed in the Indian female writer box, deals with labeling well, mostly by ignoring it completely, except at festivals where it becomes the sport of the day.

"I am a human being so I write for human beings who happen to read in English. The labels placed on different writers is an organizational tool of writers' festivals everywhere. The writers then fight that (labeling) throughout the festival -- that's the sport of festivals -- the fun of going to festivals," Shauna said with energetic good humor.

A thirst for a deeper understanding of her Indian history, coupled with a long conversation with her grandmother on life during and after the India/Pakistan Partition in 1947, was Shauna's turning point as a writer, elevating her to author status, eloquently addressing the labels of writer versus author in the process.

A 60-page memoir written by Shauna's grandmother, along with dozens of grandmother/granddaughter conversations, became the basis of What the Body Remembers. The memoirs and Shauna's rich discussions at her grandmother's New Delhi home examined the oppression of women, particularly when they are seen as breeders rather than as wives.

"What the Body Remembers is about two women in a polygamous marriage. Roop is the younger wife, married into the family when the first wife is unable to have children. The story is set in colonial India and, to a degree, is my grandmother's story," said Shauna. Published in 2000, What the Body Remembers won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book for the Canadian/Caribbean Region.

Shauna points out that the notion of women as household goods essential for breeding and housekeeping as voiced in the book was at the time not specific to India or Asia for that matter.

"It was just 50 years ago in Canada that women became people under Canadian law. Prior to that women were not considered people, but chattels," she said.

In some ways it was this societal attitude that gave Shauna, until she was 18 years of age, the belief that arranged marriages were beneficial for women because their lives were planned out and under the control of others, which appeared to leave them free of the desire to find a life partner.

"At that time I was looking to an arranged marriage. I had been brought up in New Delhi and an arranged marriage was the norm. Until I turned 18, I believed having an arranged marriage gave me the freedom to do what I wanted. I didn't have the problems teenagers face at 13, or have to worry about weight or boys. I could spend my time reading," she said.

From that emancipation from the woes of puberty, the author says "women can gain confidence" in themselves as individuals. But there was an unexpected downside.

"Arranged marriages, as an idea, are very liberating -- until girls turn 18. At 18 you specify your requirements (in a husband) and your family says `don't be silly'. I had asked for a husband who did not want children.

"I don't think the human race is that worthy of being passed on. I had been brought up with so much rhetoric about the overpopulation of the world and did not understand that a woman was expected to procreate. Until then I thought I was a person. The whole experience of arranged marriages changed my understanding and I realized I was not considered a person," said Shauna without bitterness. She later married a Milwaukee restaurateur, who also doesn't want children.

The courage to stand up to her society and family when it came to arranged marriages is a hallmark of Shauna's personality and her determination to maintain her individuality, while paying others the same respect. She is fiercely protective of her characters when writing, insisting on a great respect and responsibility when telling their stories.

"Because I am writing about real people I feel a huge sense of responsibility in making sure I portray them accurately. As a fictional biographer I have the facts of their lives, but then I must imagine and write their inner thoughts and feelings. I need to be able to bring them to life," she argued.

She pointed to one of the greatest compliments she has ever received as a writer, from her grandmother, who is represented by the young wife, Roop, in What the Body Remembers.

"My grandmother said to me 'Roop is not me. Is she you? I answered that I didn't remember being that way, to which my grandmother said, then she must be herself."

"As a writer you live for moments like that, when the character takes on their own life. It was a great compliment," said Shauna, who goes to great lengths to ensure her characters and their environments are portrayed as honestly as possible.

Shauna's insistence on accuracy in time, place, social mores and linguistic factors for her characters requires minute attention to detail and a willingness to turn to the experts for feedback, an unusually open and brave act from an author.

Using her background in computers to gauge if her biographical fictions are accurate across cultures, Shauna applies the computer standard 'Beta' test, sending her completed manuscripts around the world for feedback, long before they hit her editor's desk.

"The manuscripts live with me for the first three or four years as they are being written. Then I send them out to people who are experts in the areas that I need confirmation on. In this way the voice is accurate. I write globally, not just in one country or one period, so I need to know that the language, society or place is right."

"I feel this is essential when writing across cultures as I do. For me this type of testing is a given, otherwise I can end up with egg on my face," said Shauna.

As a biographical fiction author, Shauna researches the real lives of her protagonists, such as Sufi Muslim, Noor Inayat Khan in The Tiger Claw, and from that research recreates a fictional inner world. It is for this reason that Shauna insists on ensuring that the cultural and linguistic aspects of her characters are accurate.

Set in World War II, The Tiger Claw was published in 2004 and nominated for the Giller Prize in the same year. The Giller Prize is an annual award that goes to the author of the best Canadian novel or short story fiction collection published in English.

"For example in The Tiger Claw there is a Sufi Muslim whose beloved is a Jewish man. I wanted someone Jewish to read the manuscript; and someone Muslim; and an expert on World War II. And they needed to be able to read with the eyes of the typical market for a book -- white, middle-class women over 40 years of age," said Shauna on the essential difficulty of getting it right.

She adds that locating people she can trust to read her manuscripts for that accuracy of voice is not difficult. As a member of the Indian Diaspora, Shauna has 'cousins and other family members all over the world."

Evidence of Shauna's attention to her character's true voices is seen in her refusal to have glossaries for foreign terms throughout her works. The absence of glossaries is 'contractual' with her publishers and is based on her belief that the writing itself should give the clues needed to understand unusual terminology.

"Also you don't find glossaries for unusual terms in books based in the West, so why should we need them for globally based works? I take the time and care to give clues to the meanings of foreign words so the reader will be able to gather the meaning from the context," said Shauna.

Like all writers, Shauna is utterly passionate about books and writing. For her, one of the finest moments in life is when works start to flow beautifully. "I think it must be like the high of opium or religious ecstasy -- that moment of Ah! The moment you live for as an artist. And it's so much fun," said Shauna, itching to get back to her hotel where she has found many perfect writing spaces during the UWRF in Bali. Click here to add text.