Ecofeministic Perspectives in Atwood’s Surfacing

S.Sasikala

Asst. Prof, of English

Chidambarampillai College for Women

Joyce Nelson says, “Ecofeminism bridges the gap between ecology and feminism : strands of analysis which have existed side by side over past decades without necessarily interwining.  By making explicit the connections between a misogynist society and a society which has exploited ‘mother earth‘         to the point of environmental crisis Ecofeminism has helped to highlight the deep splits in patriarchal paradigm”. (20)

This paper attempts to take an in-depth study of Atwood’s Surfacing (1972) from an eco-feministic perspective. Atwood forecasts the upcoming feminist wave and ecological movements in this novel. Atwood’s themes are replete with victimization and survival of women in male-dominated society.  In her novels, she expresses the idea that men and women are equal at every level of existence.  Her protagonists’ remodify the term ‘Survival’ and emerge as a new woman.  In this context, this novel’s protagonist brings out the bondage between Women and Nature.

The protagonist of the novel is unnamed she is commercial artist she left her isolated rural background and family nine years earlier, returns back to it in finding her missing father.  She is accompanied by three friends Anna, Joe and David.  Her quest embanks on two levels-the search for her real self and the other is alienation from the real world. She explores her psychological journey by diving deep to the roots that leads her into the natural world.

            Her quest for her father makes her to discover herself which flashbacks her dead marriage , the abortion, the break from her parents and the confused value of her childhood. 

In the end of the novel, she realises she is no longer a victim of the society and gains power to face the world.

            When the protagonist encounters nature she finds her real self is being lost.  She could also identify even the nature has been victimized by Americans. The opening of novel states this.  The narrator is shocked to find her native place’s beauty devasted by men.  It is strange for her to see the new roads and new routes. She expresses her deep concern for natural surrounding as she thinks it as her own tragic reflection.  She sees how her life has been received and destroyed similar to that nature she pities the white birches  death as nostalgia hits her when she finds the old bridge replaced by a huge concrete structure.

I can’t believe I’m on the same road again, twisting along past the lake where the white birches are dying, the disease is spreading up from the south, and I notice they now have sea-planes for hive(Surfacing,3)

            The narrator is completely against the environmental degradation by the technological expansions.  When she reaches her native, she feels that she is far away her place.  She sensed that everything has changed.  People’s American accent made her to think of intrusion of the foreigners in her native land.  She finds that the native is being contaminated and spoiled by invasions.  She opines that Americans kill the nature just for fun, for recreation and for establishing their power.  She shows her protest:

It wasn’t the men I hated, it was the Americans, the human beings, men and women both, They’d had their chances but they turned against the gods(15). 

Like a true ecologist ,the narrator feels hers of hurt whatever harms,she sees done to the environment, Trees, Frogs, fish, birds triggers her good old memories when her brother catches the frogs, she lets it out.  Similarly when she sees the dead bird, she is depressed and disgusted by the society  in killing birds.  In another circumstance, when Joe and David films the fish’s innards.  She pleads  them not  kill the fish .

            Anna is another victim of the submissive women in the novel.  She is supposed to be the protagonist’s best friend although she has known her for just about two months.  The relationship between Anna and David exemplifies the male-dominated world.  As Simon de Beauvoir says, “the male world is harsh, sharp edged, its voices are too resounding, the lights too crowds, the contracts rough”(55) David has his own rules and treats Anna as a slave.  He is unconcerned of her health and dream.  He humiliates her by taking her nude photographs.  As Petra kelly rightly observes, “women are sex toys for men; women who assent their independence and power are in some way defective” (118).Like nature even the female body is seen as a resource to be colonized and commercialized. David forces Anna to fulfill his desires He asks her to skip off her clothes for the movie Random samples.  This makes Anna a helpless, powerless and expressionless figure.  When the narrator sees this incident she thinks of her fake husband who shattered her by showing the photographs of his wife and children.  She calls  Anna as one of the victims  in the masculine world.  She recalls hers “It was worse for a girl to ask questions than for a boy” (112).  In another circumstance, the boys tie her to the tree and forgets to release her.

            The novel surfacing is enriched with ecofeminism. It’s impact is laid entirely in the character of the narrator.  The natural surroundings has strengthened her to refin and recast her.  Before the narrator’s journey to the natural world she was suppressed by the external world.  She was weak enough to face the reality.  Her ex-lover used his skill to seduce her.  When she is pregnant he uses all tricks to abort the child.  She passively accepted it.  She couldn’t defend herself of the Anti-natural act. The abortion itself illustrates the ecofeminist thought, devaluation of life-giving and the celebration of life-taking are profound for ecology and women.  For here ex-lover, “it is simple like getting wart removed”.(185)

            Atwood emphasis the fact that men exploit the bodies of women for their needs.  They have controlled the process of child birth which nature has assigned only to women.  Her abortion created a compassion for flora and fauna of the Quebec island.  She believes nature can give solace and solution for her degradation.”Human beings are not radically separate from nature, that the fulfillment of our humanity is profoundly liked with learning to appreciate the nature within us and without. (113)

            The narrator accepts her pasts, ready to confront and explore the present.  When her aborted child is surfacing within her, she can’t forgive herself for it she confronts her own guilt over the abortion and she feels that becoming pregnant again is an act of redemption for her.

            This time I will do in myself… the baby will ship out easily as an egg, a kitten and I’ll lick it ff and bite the word, the blood returning to the ground where it belong; the moon will be full, pulling.  In the morning I will be able to see it, it will be covered with shining fur, as god, I will never torch it any words. (209)

            The narrator feels a great change in her.  Her thoughts of image of division and death is replaced by the image of  wholeness and life.  She felt safe in the environment surrounds her.  She feels:

            Through the trees the sun glances; the swamp around me smoulders, energy decay turning to growth, green fire.  I remember the heron by ago it will be insects, frogs, fish and other herons.  My body also changes, the creature in me, plant-animal sends out filament in me, I ferry it secure between death and life, I multiply.(217)

            She behaves as a natural woman. In the beginning of the novel,  she ate the tin food where as towards the end she prefers the uncooked food.  She relies on mother earth to strengthen her physically and mentally.  As she discovers herself her journey comes to an end.  She decides to stay back in Quebe and give birth to the ‘gold fish’ glowing in her womb.  She is not worried about the sex of the child but asserts her mind to nuture the child.  She says.

I can’t know yet; it’s too early.  But I assume it: If I die it dies, If I starve it starves with me.  It might be first one, the first true woman; it must be born allowed.(250)

She refuses to be a victim.  She is determined to face the reality and truth.  The narrator acts like an ecologist by finding total harmony  with nature.  She is against technologies and invasions into the physique of mother earth.  She gains absolute freedom is the earth like the people of olden times.  With the deep contentment she says, “The lake is quiet, the tree surround me, asking and giving nothing.(251)

            The novel deals with issues related to the environment and feminism. The entire novel severs as a good example of ecological feminism.  The narrator experiences transcedence in nature form the conscious to the unconscious part of her mind.  It is like a female bildsungsroman, the immaturity to maturity or death to life.  The novel unites the two dualities of feminine world with nature and masculine world with separation from nature.  The narrator non-violently protests the male-dominated society and wishes to maintain a cordial relationship between man and woman.

WORKS CITED

Atwood, Margaret.  Surfacing. London: ViragoPress,2009.

Beauvoir, Simonde.  The Second Sex. Tr. Edited by H.M. Parshley. Penguin Books, 1949.

Kelly, Petra, “Women and Power” Ecofeminsm: Women, Culture, Nature. Ed Karen  J.Warren Bloomington and indianpolis : Indiana University press, 1984.

Joyce , Nelson “Speaking the unspeakable”, Canadian Forum, March 1990.

Wimsatt, Margaret, “ Surfacing’ Commonwealth, 7 Sept, 1973.

        

The More You Confine Me, the More I Spill Over – A View from the Selected Contemporary Tamil Women Writers

The More You Confine Me, the More I Spill Over – A View from the Selected Contemporary Tamil Women Writers

Women are portrayed as God, an embodiment of sacrifice, backbone of the family, et al., these appreciation of words keep them under the control of menfolk and wants women dependent, and servant to them. Though we are in the modernworld, treating women in the name of culture, and custom is really a pathetic one. Most probably, women are expected to be a modest girl, never go-out-of girl, complete obedience to menfolk, especially to spouse, trained good cook, accommodate to family members. But these qualities are never expected from men. Treatment given to women physically, mentally and sexually are unbearable.

            Some contemporary Tamil women poets boldly question on the taboo subject, and stereotype living. The women poets of, particularly, MalathiMaithri, Salma, KuttiRevathi and Sukirtharani have guts enough to raise the voice for voiceless women. Their writings peeled off the ideology that confinement life is contentment life. Their approach on handling sex, modest and body is unique from others.

            People who considered themselves as guardian of Tamil culture opposed their writings. They charged women with obscenity and immodesty. These women poets came into limelight by their collections of poetry between 2000 and 2002. The themes of politics of sexuality and a woman’s relationship to her body are all common to be discussed, but in the name of culture and as they are a woman they were condemned and nullified.

            Andal, Avvaiyar, Thiruvalluvar and other eminent writers in Tamil spilled their artistic sexual themes in their works. In the first century A.D Sangam’sAvvaiyar smoldered a man horizontally between her breasts, deciding to leave for harsher paths. Andal, in the eighth century, was determined to remove and throw her futile breasts on the Lord who remains apathetic towards her. These four women poets were not doing anything that was not done by Andal or Avvaiyar.

After several centuries, a bunch of women poets crops up to restitute the feminine rights which lost in the appropriation of Tamil literary space. Their voices instill the confidence among women to act on their own. Men writers protest against their writings and labeled them as bad girls who wrote body poetry and good girls who wrote normal poetry.

These four women poets showcase their artistic beauty and originality and above all it shows their own individuality. The Tamil women who are with the traditional values of accham (fearfulness), madam (propriety) and naanam (modesty) are adorned as good girl. On contrary, these poets have chosen the fearlessness, unconventional behavior and constant questioning of stereotyped rules. They claimed their foremother Avvai, Velliviidhi and Sappho, Anna Akhmatova, Sylvia Plath and Kamala Das as their role models.

It is cinema which sows the seeds of art of writing to Kutti Revathi. She herself says that she came to understand the modern art forms and the world politics through cinema. Her first collection of poetry came out in 2001 and was entitled Punnaiyaipol Alaiyum Veliccham (Light Prowls Like Cat). This was followed in 2002 by Mullaigal (Breasts). Her second work created shock waves in writing community. She has been speaking out for the rights of the downtrodden. Agnostic in her beliefs, she trusts human values and poetic virtues. Her poem explicitly state that a woman need not always welcome a man’s advances; and that he is often harsh, indifferent and selfish. Her poems express a woman’s loneliness and anger. Her poem Mulaigal (Breasts) states:

Breasts

are bubbles, rising from marshlands.

As they gently swelled and blossomed

at due season, at Time’s edge,

I watched over them in amazement.

                                                            (Breasts, 58)

Breasts are central to a woman’s body. They are her obsession too. It attracts menfolk towards her. Every woman is in one way or the other involved with her body. It is her personal domain. But men have set of ‘rights’ over women’s body by snatching away even a woman’s right to speak, share thoughts about her body or parts of it with herself or with others. In the above lines, ‘bubbles’ symbolize the size of the breasts and temporary of its attractive. The words of ‘bubbles’, ‘swelled’ and ‘blossomed’ spelled her admiration towards her body. She is surprised by her bodily development from child to adolescent. She supports every woman’s right to her own body, to speak about it or to do anything with it as she pleases. Her body is hers and hers only.

            The ways in which she has imagined and depicted the body is constantly intriguing and refreshing. Hers another poem Mazhaiyinnathi (Rain-river) is complete erotic. She uses beautiful images associated with her body. The poem also demonstrates how closely she identifies with the natural landscape, making it her own. Her love for Tamil Poetry especially the Sangam Period is reflected in the poem.

                                                I am the rain’s fall;

                                                you are the pull of the river.

                                                The force of our love’s union

                                                is like red earth and pouring rain-

                                                the leaping of fish into the body-

                                                the entwining of water-weeds.

                                                                                                            (Rain-river,60)

The trope of red earth and pouring rain is an intertextual reference to a poem from Kurunthogai (2^nd century AD), ‘Yaayum yaaum yaaraagiyaro’, best known to non-Tamil readers in A.K. Ramanujan’s translation. The image of red earth and pouring rain is used in KuttiRevathi’s poem with the same intense passion as in the Sangam poem.

            She is also taken into account of some love poems. In recent times, there is a political and feminist oriented theme she focused on. In Tharkolai Viiraangkanai (Suicide-soldier), Gandhari and Kaldevadaigal (Stone goddess), She exemplifies her personal experience and her body is either manipulated or distorted in some way by social, cultural and political. Her brutally frankness of tone and whose overexposure of sex has earned for her the labels, a bad girl and a sexy poet.  A puzzling, intriguing personality, full of contradictions, she has been differently described as “a poet of the body”. Both her life and work are too controversial and unconventional as to receive comment and criticism from readers and discerning critics.

            MalathiMaithri is brought up in poor family conditions. She belongs to fishing community. Having seen the scenes of fishing in sea, and river, she knows very well the hardships of fishermen and working women there. These ideas are reflected in her poem titled Ottaganga, kudiraigal, Orumiinkuudai (Camels, horses and a fish basket).

Her poems says,

                                                At earliest dawn

                                                when even the morning star

                                                hesitated to appear,

                                                she swept the courtyard

                                                scoured the dishes

                                                cleaned her teeth

                                                …………

                                                Then she filled her stomach

                                                from a small pitcher of rice-water

                                                and set off eastwards

                                                with her fish basket

                                                                                                (CHF, 25-26)

The above lines portray the real picture of fisherwomen life. Her life from morning marks with domestic chores and drinking rice-water indicates her penury conditions. She walks miles to save bus fares from one village to other to sell fish. While returning home, she buys rice, tamarind, chillies, snacks for the children.

            In her another poem entitled My Home, she expresses the reality of society treating the Dalit people. Liberty to speak, living with society make human beings different from animals. Alienating people in the name of caste and gender could not meet any progress in the society. Her poetry is filled with the gender discrimination and requirement of space to express one’s ideas. She strongly believes that poetry has the power to create that space for women. For instance, in another poem entitled Demon Language she says,

                                   

                                                Poetry’s features are all

                                                saint

                                                become woman

                                                become poet

                                                become demon

                                   

                                                Demon language

                                                is liberty

                                   

                                                outside Earth

                                                she stands:

                                                niili, wicked woman.

                                                                                                (DL, 27)

This poem alludes to the Karaikkal Ammai, one of the sixty-three canonized Saiva saints, who lived in the 6^th century CE Punithavathy who gave up her youth and beauty when her spouse hesitated to live with her by seeing her godly qualities. Then, she became a poet-saint devoted only to God Siva. She tries to break the shackles of male chauvinism associated with Tamil culture. She seeks a new language to express her grief in new world. It is well-nigh chiseled with trope in this poem. MalathiMaithri is a poet of portraying real events. She transmutes her personal emotion into artistic emotion. Thus her distinction to discover poetry in ordinary reality as observed, known, felt and experienced than as the intellect thinks it should be, is in evidence, in her works like My Home, Bhumadevi, Incessant War and Camels, horses and a fish basket.

An another famous Tamil women poet is Sukirtharani, who hails from Dalit community. Her past life taught her the discrimination prevailing in the society. Gender and caste play major role in the society. She realized the caste distinctions when she started school. Other caste students would avoid her. She got inspiration from teacher to love Tamil literature. It kindles her interest to learn more about poetry. She began to think about societal structure for caste and gender. She begins to write poetry but her parents did not approve her writing on feminism. She defied the parents words and published her first collection Kaippatri En KanavuKel (Hold Me and Hear My Dreams) in 2002. Her name was branded as Obscene writer, which abhors her parents and stayed away from her completely.

She never give up her writing at any cost, nothing can stop her further. She read writings of Kamala Das and Taslima Nasreen. She writes, ‘I realized then, a woman’s body had become the property of man. I realized that it was my first duty to redeem it. So my poetry began to put forward a politics of the body’.

The perspective of Dalits and Feminst get differs in her writing from the world view. She writes boldly in her poem ‘I speak up bluntly’,

                                   

                                                But now

                                                If anyone asks me

                                                I speak up bluntly:

                                                I am a Paraichi.

                                                                                                (I speak up bluntly,79)

            She picturises her personal experience and treatment meted out to Dalits. They are always ignored by their profession and caste. She never expresses her feelings. She afraid of being reveals her father profession to school mates. She states in the same poem,

                                                When I saw my father in the street

                                                the leather drum slung from his neck,

                                                I turned my face away                                               

and passed   him by.

Because I wouldn’t reveal

my father’s job, his income,

The teacher hit me.

Friendless, I sat alone

on the back bench, weeping,

though no one knew.

                                                                                                (I speak up bluntly, 79)

            Her poetry depicts the humiliation and shame that she experiences as Dalit and woman. The oppression and suppression of her never lose her spirit from writing against society evils. She continually raises her voice for voiceless. She cannot be bend over by the social criticism.

Her boldness and courage is explicitly expressed in the poem entitled Nature’s Fountainhead.

                                                I myself will become

                                                earth                           

                                                fire

                                                sky

                                                wind

                                                water.

                                                The more you confine me ,the more I will spill over,

                                                Nature’s fountainhead.

                                                                                                (Nature’s Fountainhead, 85)

Her writings consist of myriad themes. She not only focused on Dalit’s oppression and discrimination but also the body, sexual thirst and landscape of her land.

            Salma, another famous poet of Tamil, belongs to Muslim community, leads a confinement life. She was banned to go to school as they were reported as watching the pornographic film in Theatre with her friends. With her parents’ permission, she learns herself by interest. She expressed her career as writer. But her parents turned down her proposal. She was forced to get married.  She could not stop writing and she wrote under the pseudonym Salma. Her first collection of poetry Oru Maalaiyum Innoru Maalaiyum (One Evening, Another Evening) came out in 2000, Pacchai Devadai (Green Angel) in 2002, followed by Irandaam Jaamangalin Kadai, (The Hour Past Midnight) in 2004.

            Her poems reflect the loneliness, treating women by women, yearning for true love. She burst out in her poem The Contract the deep anguish she felt at home. The criticism from her parents for her sexual act irritates her. She states,

                                                Always

                                                my sister will repeat in anger

                                                what Amma says more subtly:

                                                that I am to blame

                                                for all that goes wrong

                                                in the bedroom.

                                                                                                (The Contract, 35)

            She finds monotonous of living through a loveless marriage. She could not get any chance to share her feelings with her husband.  Salma perfectly uses the imagery which portraits the real picture of her bitter and confinement life. In the poem An Evening, another evening, Salma writes that her.

The present is as tangled

                                                As the world of a cat

                                                That lurks in the kitchen.

                                                                                                (An Evening, another evening, 40)

            Her poetry is marked by a search for loneliness. Her poignant feelings expressed through the images of a tiger in her bedside and painted houses through which she monologues her desires and expectations. All the four poets in the anthology speak frankly about female desire and the body. Most of the poetical ideas are stemmed from their personal past and familial past.

Before applying the crusted moral yardsticks to judge the character and personality of these poets, one has to study the influence of societal treatment meted out to them in their personal life. Hence this paper.

Works Cited:

Holmstrom, Lakshmi. Wild Words.HarperCollins Publishers, 2012.

Breaking the Silence: That Long Silence

Breaking the Silence: That Long Silence

S.Amala,

Ph.D., (Full Time) Research Scholar,

PG Dept. and Research Centre in English,

Alagappa Govt. Arts College,

Karaikudi.

            “If I were a man and cared to know the world I lived in, I almost think it would make me a shade uneasy-the weight of that long silence of one-half of the world.” This statement by Elizabeth Robins form the epigraph to Shashi Deshpande’s novel, That Long Silence, announcing, as it were, the intention of this talented contemporary Indian writer to break the long silence that has surrounded women, their experience and their world. For a long time, woman has existed as a gap, as an absence in literature, whether Western or Indian. This is not only true of the fiction created by men, but also by women, who have mostly confined themselves to writing love stories or dealing with the experience of women in a superficial manner, creating the same kind of  stereotypes of women which they find so reprehensible in the writings of men. Women writers have also often fallen a prey to that prescriptive feminist ideology of creating strong women characters. This doctrine becomes as repressive as the one created by male hegemony and represses the truth about the majority of their sisters and their lives.

            Against this backdrop, Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence promises to be a refreshing departure from most of the fiction written by women. Of course, one cannot claim that she is doing anything extraordinary. We readily recognize the middle class ethos and people that we come across in the novel. The novelist’s contribution lies in the heightened sensitivity and the fresh insights that she brings to bear on the well-known types and situations. The action of the novel is triggered off by a crisis in a middle-class family. Mohan, the narrator’s husband, in his pursuit of prestige and security, had indulged in certain malpractices, as a result of which he now faces an inquiry and may perhaps lose his job. Mohan is advised by Agarwal, his partner in the crime, to stay away from the office and his Churchgate flat till the storm blows over. Luckily for Mohan, the children are away on a tour with their family friends, and it all ends well, they need not even know about this disgrace. Mohan, therefore, decides that he and his wife Jaya would go and stay at the flat in Dadar. This flat had belonged to Jaya’s maternal uncle. Jaya and Mohan had stayed there before shifting to a bigger flat in Church gate. Jaya acquiesces to her husband’s decision and accompanies him, albeit in silent resentment, to their present exile at the Dadar flat. It is here, in the intolerable period of waiting and rising hysteria, that the process of self-examination and self-criticism begins for Jaya. She is flooded by the memories of the past-her earlier life, her marriage with Mohan, the  frustrations and disappointments in her seventeen-year-old married existence, her personal failures, all these begin to haunt and torment her. By her journey into the past, Jaya gets the guidance for her future. By the end of the novel, the crisis-a mere storm in the teacup-has been averted and everything outwardly appears to be as it had been. Except for what has happened to Jaya. Jaya can no longer be a passive, silent partner to Mohan. The novel ends with her resolve to speak, to break her long silence.

            That Long Silence, then, traces Jaya’s passage through a plethora of self-doubts, fears, guilt, smothered anger and silence towards articulation and affirmation. Suman Ahuja, while reviewing the novel in The Times of India, observes that Jaya “caught in an emotional eddy, endeavors to come to terms with her protean roles, while trying, albeit in vain, to re-discover her true self, which is but an ephemera … an unfulfilled wife, a disappointed mother and a failed writer”. Jaya, in fact, rejects the patriarchal notion of a unitary self or identity when she observes, “But what was that ‘myself? Trying to find oneself’ – what a cliché that has become. As if such a thing is possible. As if there is such a thing as oneself, intact and whole,  waiting to be discovered. On the contrary, there are so many, each self, attached like a Siamese twin to a self of another person, neither able to exist without the other.” (69) That is why the novel offers interesting comes of so many other people, men and women, as they have become a part of Jaya’s personality and her unconscious. Even her mother and her two grandmothers-though Jaya may not like to think of it-have imparted something of their own selves to Jaya.

            Even a casual reading of the novel makes one conscious that Shashi Deshpande is not only writing about her female protagonist, Jaya, who is trying to erase a long silence and grapple with the problems of self-revelation and self-assessment, but , through Jaya, also about other women, those unhappy victims who never broke their silence. The author, in the first place, points out how our culture has often kept silent on the subject of women. For instance, at one point in the novel, Jaya discovers that she does not figure in the family tree that her uncle, Ramukaka, had prepared with great pains and of which he was so proud. When Jaya asks her uncle why her name is not included in the family tree, she is given to understand that she now belongs to her husband’s family and not to her father’s. But this is only half of the truth. Neither her mother nor her kakis, i.e her uncle’s wives, not even her grandmother, ajji, that indomitable woman, “who single handedly kept the family together” (143) find a place in the family tree. Jaya, to her dismay, finds that her name and existence, along with those of other women in the family, are completely blotted out of the family history. The novel, as it were, is Jaya’s protest against the kind of treatment that is given to women in our culture and her attempt to give another version of history from women’s point of view.

            That long Silence is also a scathing critique of our social institutions like marriage or family, the way they stifle the growth and free expression of the individual. These institutions put the individuals into the slots like wife, husband, brother, sister, daughter, son, etc. and obstruct the free communication between human beings. This is what happens in Jaya’s relationship with Kamat. Kamat was Jaya’s upstairs neighbour at Dadar. He was a widower and his only son had settled abroad. He was a lonely man and had shown a lot of understanding and sympathy for Jaya. In fact, Jaya was more free and uninhibited with him than she was with her husband. But in our society, this kind of friendship between a married woman and another man is always looked upon with suspicion and disapproval. That is why, perhaps, when Jaya had found Kamat lying dead on the floor of his flat on one of her visits to him, she had panicked and left the place in silence. This incident underlines how marriage often drives people into impossible and awkward situations. Jaya cannot even stay and pay homage to her best friend in his death for the fear of ruining her marriage. She perhaps does her role of wife to a perfections, but fails as a human being.

            Shashi Deshpande employs the first-person narrative and makes her central character Jaya tell her own story. Jaya warns the reader at the very outset that she is not the heroine of her story, nor is she talking about her isolated self.

One may say that her preoccupations are man-woman relationship, marriage and family life. But the novel avoids the facile solution of putting the blame on man only. Both men and women are products of their culture and victims of the institution of marriage. It is as difficult for women to outgrow the images and roles allotted to them by their society as it is for men. For example, during her first pregnancy, when Jaya suggests to Mohan that he should do the cooking, Mohan is highly amused by the suggestion, because he thinks cooking is not a man’s job. Later on, we discover that Jaya also shares her husband’s viewpoint when she confesses to Kamat that the sight of him doing the cooking made her uneasy as she thought it was unmanly. Like Mohan, she too puts her children into the slots and feels disappointed when they refuse to remain there and contribute their share in creating the myth of a happy and harmonious family. It is only at the end, after her ordeal, that Jaya realizes her mistake and releases herself as well as her children from the slots into which she had put them.

            In her anxiety to fulfill her roles of a wife and a mother, Jaya had not done proper justice to her own talents. Years back Jaya had made a good beginning as a writer by producing a story which had won the first prize and was published in a magazine. But Mohan’s response to the story was most disheartening. He assumed that the story was about their personal life. He was apprehensive and hurt at the thought that the people of his acquaintance would think he was the kind of person as was the man portrayed in the story. No doubt, this incident had left a deep impression on Jaya’s psyche and affected her career as a writer. She, therefore, can easily make her husband a scapegoat for her failure, but in her self-critical mood at the Dadar flat she refuses to have this easy way out. She reminds herself that even after her confrontation with Mohan she had continued to write-write under an assumed name (as women writers have often done under patriarchy)-but her stories had been rejected. Something had been missing from them, something had been censored out of them. According to Kamat, it was Jaya’s anger, her strong passions. Jaya had tried to remind him-what actually she had learned from her husband in her first memorable argument with him-that a woman cannot be angry, that anger makes a woman unwomanly. She had also given the familiar excuse that women give, when they fail at anything, that they have no time for serious work because of their household duties. Kamat had reproved of this tendency in her. “I’m warming you-beware of this ‘women are the victims’ theory of yours. It’ll drag you down into a soft, squishy bog of self-pity. Take yourself seriously, woman. Don’t skulk behind a false name. And work-work if you want others to take you seriously.” (148) Kamat was a  hard critic and he would leave no escape route for Jaya. The real reason for her failure, he pointed out, was her fear. She was afraid of writing, of failing.

            Jaya was in no mood to take such hard criticism. She had crawled back into her hold. She had resumed her career as a wife, as a mother. In the meantime, Mohan had suggested that she should write light, humorous pieces in the newspapers, what they called “middles”. Jaya had then started her weekly column “Seeta” which had won the approval of the readers, the editor, and above all of her husband. “And for me” “Jaya observes, “she had been the means through which I had shut the door, firmly, on all those other women who had invaded my being, screaming for attention, women I had known I could not write about, because they might – it was just possible-resemble Mohan’s Mother or aunt, or my mother or aunt” (149) Thus the novelist makes it clear that not only patriarchy has kept silent on the subject of women, but under patriarchy, women have also recoiled from telling the truth about their sex.

            When Jaya finally comes out of her emotional upheaval, she has sorted out a few problems with herself. For the two nights that she has to herself, she puts down on paper all that she had suppressed in her seventeen year’s silence. What she has written in evidently the novel that we are reading. The novel is mostly concerned with women like Kusum, Mohan’s mother and many other victims like them-Victims of patriarchy and also of their own silence. That Long Silence puts into nutshell the history and evolution of women through four generations that Jaya has known and promise a better future for women.

            What has Jaya ultimately achieved by her writing, by her getting all the ghosts that bothered her out of her systems on to the paper? In Jaya’s own words, “I’am not afraid any more. The panic has gone. I’m Mohan’s wife, I had thought, and cut off the bits of me that had refused to be Mohan’s wife. Now I know that kind of a fragmentation is not possible. The child, hands in pockets, has been with me through the years. She is with me still.” (191) Bald statements like these plainly show that That Long Silence is a feminist critique written in the form of a novel. As Toril Moi remarks, “The principal objective of feminist criticism has always been political. It seeks to expose, not to perpetuate, patriarchal practices.” And this is what Shashi Deshpande also does through her text. At the same time, That Long Silence is also a self –critique. The important insight that Shashi Deshpande imparts to us through Jaya is that women should accept their own responsibility for what they are, see how much they have contributed to their own responsibility for what they are, see how much they have contributed to their own victimization, instead of putting the blame on everybody except themselves. It is only through self-analysis and self-understanding, through vigilance and courage, they can begin to change their lives. They will have to fight their own battles, nobody is going to do it for them.

References

        Deshpande Shashi, That Long Silence.India: Penguin, 1989.Print.

        Ahuja  Suman, “Review in The Times of India” (8 October 1989), P.2

        Moi Toril, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist  Literary Theory. London:             Methuen,1985. Print.

“I belong here—just as you!”: A Human Rights Claim over a Sense of Belonging in Diaspora as Portrayed in Cyril Dabydeen’s “The Puja-Man”

                                                                       

                                                                                          

“I belong here—just as you!”: A Human Rights Claim over a Sense of Belonging in Diaspora as Portrayed in Cyril Dabydeen’s “The Puja-Man”

                                                                                                R. Viswanathan

                                                                                                Assistant Professor of English

                                                                                                NMSSVN College of Education

     Today, Literature and Human Rights can be considered as a transnational interdisciplinary branch of Comparative Literature. In fact, Humanities and Human Rights are mutually illuminating: “Humanities can meaningfully bring our modes of analysis and interpretation to bear on human rights discourse and in turn our teaching and research can become richer, more nuanced and more relevant by engaging with the ethical and philosophical imperatives of human rights” (Stanton qtd. in McClennen n.p.). While literature reflects human rights certain human rights in turn help in shaping literature also. Especially in Diasporic literature writers try to be realistic by focusing on the human rights issue of the diasporans (in many cases writers themselves are diasporans). Indo-Caribbean Canadian diaspora is also not an exception, for “literary theorists have spoken of the transforming power of the imagination” (Dabydeen 1989, 250).

     Cyril Dabydeen is an Indo-Caribbean Canadian who vehemently writes about the challenges and difficulties faced by his family in Diaspora. Dabydeen is popularly known as a fiction writer whose best works include the short-story collection Jogging in Havana (1992). One of the stories entitled “The Puja-Man” narrates the predicament of the narrator’s brother Duleep who migrates from Guyana to Canada wishing to settle there.

     Having entered Canada on a visitor’s visa along with his wife Beti, Duleep overstays, for “Canada somehow seemed to have brought about a change in him” (34) and the authorities try to evacuate him. Duleep’s attempts to do away with a Caribbean sense of placelessness indirectly compel him to search for a permanent identity in his own self. It is apt to quote Rosemary Sullivan’s explication on identity here: “…a re-definition of the conventional understanding of nationhood: from one viewed solely in terms of physical place to that which is based on a concept of the landscape of the mind wherein place and psyche become intertwined” (1988, 26). Dabydeen also thinks of Canada in the same line: “my view of Canada as an intrinsic place to fashion dreams, all conceived despite the overwhelming, over forbidding, sense of the Great White North, far different from the tropical milieu I grew up in; and increasingly, Canada became the place of possibilities, unlike the U.K. or the U.S. in my formative years” (1999, 231). Duleep constantly tries to be a Canadian by redefining the understanding of nationhood.

     The narrator describes that Duleep succeeds in whatever he sets his mind to do. He also figures that “the authorities would have difficulty with him, hardened as he was” (33). Duleep too thinks of slipping across the border to New York. However, he prefers living in Canada “…something about being here, the people being civil; once or twice he’d commented on this” (34). Their mother at Guyana also wants him to live in Canada and she goes to the extent of consulting a Hindu-holy man (the puja-man) and worries about Beti’s relatives who have the mischievousness of informing the authorities. One of the reasons why Duleep chooses to live in Canada is understood when he quotes Graham Greene’s views of the world: “Third World societies being inevitably corrupt. Haiti was the best example” (35). Also, “Deportation also meant that everyone would laugh at them” (35). At the same time, they cannot avoid deportation. The sour-grapism creeps in as he says, “It’s not the best place in the world here. You na see how it cold!...the tropics in our part of the world always seemed like paradise” (37).

     Amidst such pressures Duleep is confused: he tries to run away to Vancouver leaving his wife; he thinks of getting a lawyer. However, at the end of the two weeks of grace time Duleep resorts to his “new-found ‘Canadian ways’: he was almost benign, passive; even obedient, willing to conform” (38). On the other hand, Beti is unhappy about leaving Canada, for, back at Guyana Duleep might resort to his earlier habits of visiting whorehouses and hence she refers to Canadian way of modest living (as shown in the Canadian TV shows) and insists him to follow the same back at homeland. During occasions of supporting each other Duleep and Beti become unusually intimate. In spite of Beti’s taunting him he is “plagued by his torturous feelings” and he hates himself “because of his incapacity to do much…a sense of powerlessness: what Canada had done to him, I figured; now he was just a shell of himself” (41). He watches the immigrants in crowds coming and going: “Hundreds seemed to be coming in, smiling, happy….He looked at them—and it was as if only he was being sent back home, deported!” (43). Being an immigrant he does not want to be disappointed and defeated in his diasporic existence.

     Duleep rehearses his deportation: when he is ushered into the Air Canada jet, he gets wild on hearing the official’s words “Get the hell out of Canada” (43). He shouts back with insolence: “I will, see. I have relatives, family here! In Canada…I belong here—just as you!” (43). He feels like an assimilated diasporan participating in the politics of the nation saying “See, my brother is here—he could, well, become Prime Minister one day?” (43); this is more than a diasporic anxiety, a claim over human rights to belong everywhere. At this juncture, the narrator has to console his younger brother by “shaking his hand, embracing him as never before; telling him with earnestness, that he was welcome, he belonged here—the Prime Minister that I now was in Ottawa” (44).

     Finally, to everyone’s applauding Duleep complies with the Immigration laws “reassuring everyone of his new ways, new self almost” (44). However, the narrator visualizes his brother’s running away with his wife at Miami airport where “all his former instincts, the old self, would return!” (44). This is his defiance against unwillingness to go back to “the inescapable Third World” (37) and his strong exercising of his right to live anywhere he chooses. It is again Cyril Dabydeen’s reinstatement that the idea of placelessness can be transformed to be belongingness and nationhood is not to do with physical place but with landscape of the mind. It is evident that Dabydeen’s real-time humanist struggles have enlightened his art of writing and his writing in turn will enlighten many of the human rights activists.

Works Cited

Dabydeen, Cyril. “The Indo-Caribbean Imagination in Canada.” Indentures and Exile: The Indo-  Caribbean Experience. Ed. Frank Birbalsingh. Toronto:TSAR, 1989: 250-258. Print.

…, “The Puja-Man.” Jogging in Havana (Short Stories). Oakville: Mosaic Press,

      1992: 33-45. Print.

…,

“Places we come from: Voices of Caribbean Canadian Writers (in English) and Multicultural    Contexts.” World Literature Today 73.2 (Spring 1999): 231-237. Print.

McClennen, Sophia A. and Alexandra S. Moore, eds. The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights. N.P.: Routledge, 2015. Web.

Sulllivan, Rosemary. “The Multicultural Divide.” This Magazine 22.1 (1988): 26. Print.

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Human Rights in Literature

                                                Human Rights in Literature

                                                                                                                                    P.Asha,

Asst. Prof. of English,

Umayal Ramanathan College for Women.

                                                                                               

                                                                                                                                                           

            “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” In its efforts to defend these “rights that exist on paper,” Amnesty developed literary methods for mobilizing public opinion (the personal story) and focusing it on repressive regimes (the mass letter-writing campaign) that they depended heavily on paper. Both of those methods exercise precisely the rights of freedom of opinion and expression that are being denied the Prisoner of Conscience; in other words, the techniques entailed in defending freedom of expression are of the same kind as the modes of expression for which the political prisoner is being punished. In a sense then, at least some of the original Amnesty campaigns were defenses not just of individual writers but of the literary universe and its conditions of possibility more generally.

Literature and human rights may have intersected only recently as common or overlapping areas of scholarly inquiry, but the two have been bound Copyrighted Material-Taylor & Francis Foreword xiii up with one another in the field (so to speak) for a very long time. As a number of the chapters in this volume, and studies elsewhere, demonstrate, literary works and literary modes of thinking have played important parts in the emergence of modern human rights ideals and sentiments, as well as in the elaboration of national and international human rights laws. Such relationships are rarely quantify able, which I think is probably a good thing for both literature and human rights—not only because it leaves the dynamic terms of their entanglements undetermined in mutually productive ways but also because it reminds us that we must resist the easy temptation to instrumentalism one in the service of the other, to bend one to the exigencies of the other.

In other words, the terms of cooperation, coordination, and contradiction between literature (or cultural production more generally) and human rights remain open questions. That the influence of literature on human rights may be both immense and immeasurable is not just a reflection of the indefinable epistemic effects of what Gayatri  Chakravorty  Spivak has described as “the Humanities . . . without guarantees” it is the condition and wager of human rights work itself.

 In the early years of its existence, for example, Amnesty International properly refused to credit directly its letter-writing campaigns with the release of political prisoners. In the presentation speech awarding the Nobel Prize to Amnesty International, Aase  Lionæs  flirted with some inexact statistics on the percentage of prisoners freed to “provide some indication of the scope of the [organization’s] work”; she concluded, following Amnesty’s own lead, that such figures were impossible to calculate, arguing instead that it is “more important to consider Amnesty International’s worldwide activities as an integral part in the incessant pressure exerted by all good forces on governments and on the United Nations organizations.

literature, letter writing too is an activity without guarantees; and like letter writing, literature (in its best moments) participates in mounting “incessant pressure” through its own “worldwide activities.” By any account, the Appeal for Amnesty, 1961 campaign’s emphasis on personal stories predates the so-called narrative turn in the social sciences and the ethical turn in literary studies when narrative and ethics apparently turned into one another. Personal stories are the contemporary currency of human rights projects, and it seems difficult now despite Benenson’s insistence to imagine the genre as new in 1961 or to imagine a time before personal stories and human rights campaigns. Indeed, from our perspective, it seems almost as difficult as imagining the introduction of a third character onto the stage of classical Greek drama as a revolutionary literary technological innovation in a sense, Amnesty’s efforts were similar: to introduce a third character (world opinion) into the two-person drama of political imprisonment, to interpose public opinion between the state and the individual.

Nonetheless, looking back, it is possible to see that the rise of personal story politics and memoir culture in the 1970s and 1980s coincided with mass movements for decolonization, civil rights, Copyrighted Material-Taylor & Francis xiv Foreword women’s rights, and sexual freedoms many of whose participants would themselves become subjects of Amnesty’s letter-writing campaigns. In fact, one of the primary tools of all those campaigns was the personal story although, in contrast to Amnesty’s offi cial opinion, the personal was also (or always already) political. The intellectual (and not just the emotional or political) attraction of Amnesty International’s project for academics in particular might suggest that we should look more closely at the relationship between the development and popularity of human rights campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s and the turns taken by literary studies and the social sciences at the same time. What we call the World Republic of Letters in the second half of the twentieth century was at least in part shaped by the human rights campaigns defending the lives and rights of individual writers, but the campaign methods themselves seem likely to have had an influence on the generic shape of late-twentieth-century literature, and vice versa.

We might discover, for instance, that human rights campaigns and methods like those popularized by Amnesty International and other organizations had more to do with steering the narrative and ethical turns than we suspect that the dramatic turn to personal stories in the context of human rights struggles (broadly understood) helped to create and consolidate many of the literary tastes and methods as well as the memoir culture that remain with us today. I have considered here only one very narrow but highly and historically influential way of thinking about the links between literature and human rights the admirable chapters in this collection strike out in other important directions. Indeed, as a group, these chapters explore what we might call the necessary and incessant pressure of culture and the worldwide activities of literature on human rights thinking and practice.

Generalizing from the scene of torture to preventable human suffering of both acute and chronic kinds, we must understand the role to be played by human rights, with its instrumentalization in international law and politics, in ending suffering and striving for human dignity and justice—even as we recognize its imperialist origins and complicities with global power and corruption. Our questions about the theoretical implications of interdisciplinary work in human rights and literature are posed within this aura of contestation, critique, and deep desire for social justice. While the imbrications of the humanities and human rights is evident on the most basic etymological level, overt attention to interdisciplinary work in these two fields is relatively recent. Human rights academics and activists have for some time considered the significance of cultural texts in the Copyrighted Material-Taylor & Francis  Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore struggle against human rights violations, and scholars in literary studies have always devoted critical energy to interpreting representations of suffering, yet their pairing as an interdisciplinary is emergent. It is clearly rooted in questions and approaches developed over several decades in trauma, postcolonial, holocaust and genocide, and feminist studies, questions and approaches which also fueled and were fueled by the rise of the “personal story” in responding to social suffering, as Joseph Slaughter’s Foreword to this volume explains, as well as the foothold human rights discourse and ideals gained in political and activist rhetoric in the late 1970s.

In his important new history of how human rights achieved its current ideological dominance, Samuel Moyn underscores the importance of 1977 as its “breakthrough year”: the year Amnesty International was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, U.S. President Jimmy Carter made human rights a centerpiece of his governing moral framework in his Inaugural Address, and Charter 77 was published in Czechoslovakia. As an interdisciplinary scholarly field in the U.S., human rights and literature gained formal momentum after September 11, 2001. The shift in political, social, cultural, and intellectual landscapes at that point seemed suddenly both to obviate and to render imperative the connection in relation to changing understandings and practices of war, imprisonment, torture, and immigration. As human rights continues as the dominant war, imprisonment, torture, and immigration. As human rights continues as the dominant discourse for addressing issues of social justice more broadly, scholars working at the intersection of human rights and literature, each galvanized perhaps by his or her own political moment and geographic location, are developing new and more effective tools for understanding the ethical, literary, and political implications of their shared intellectual foundations.

Interdisciplinary scholarship in human rights and literature, finally, undertakes two mutually invested intellectual projects: reading literary texts for the ways in which they represent and render intelligible the philosophies, laws, and practices of human rights from multiple, shifting cultural perspectives and considering how stories, testimonies, cultural texts, and literary theories contribute to the evolution of such philosophies, laws, and practices. Significantly, both intellectual projects are profoundly implicated in—and have profound implications for—the realm of the political as located within the flows and jumps of global capitalism. As Domna C. Stanton notes in her “Foreword” to the special issue of the PMLA, “The Humanities in Human Rights: Critique, Language, Politics,” human rights and the humanities have a long, shared history. The proliferation of literary and cultural texts telling the stories of past and current human rights violations clearly necessitates an understanding of human rights philosophies and frameworks; less obvious, perhaps, is the extent to which the critical insights gained through literary readings in the past fifty years might be brought to bear in human rights contexts in the field and in legal, activist, and scholarly sites to open the foundations of shared rights norms to new interpretations. The essays in this collection Copyrighted Material  Taylor & Francis Introduction 3 explore this intersection from both perspectives.

They examine ways in which human rights norms and concerns change the way we read familiar literature even as they shape new directions in the “world republic of letters”; and they bring the interpretative methodologies of literary criticism to bear on human rights to uncover the stories that normative rights discourses implicitly include and exclude. If, as Thomas Keenan suggests, “[e]thics and politics as well as literatureare evaded when we fall back on the conceptual priority of the subject, agency, or identity as the grounds of our action,” theoretical approaches to reading literarily can help return us to the necessary work of negotiating shared foundations of rights, suffering, and representation. One of the difficulties indefi ning the interdisciplinary field of human rights and literature is the nature of the “field” of human rights: it comprises law, politics, philosophy/ethics, sociology, anthropology, history, cultural and media studies, and journalism, yet is bound by structural and institutional components of the human rights regime. And of course, approaches to literature have been informed by multiple disciplines and cross-disciplinary approaches including, most relevantly in the late twentieth and early twenty-fi rst centuries, history, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, economics (especially Marxist theory), political science, film and media studies, feminism, critical race studies, and queer theory. Requiring rigorous scholarship, nuanced interdisciplinary work contributes to efforts to move beyond the structuring of disciplines and departments which has produced both the rise of specialization as well as the compartmentalization of knowledge. Such compartmentalization of knowledge (and the teaching and learning practices that accompany it) must especially be disrupted if we are to tackle the complexly interwoven problems accelerating in our new millennium.

 The contributors to this volume share attention to the ways in which literary readings of human rights discourses (fi ctional, poetic, testimonial, legal, political, economic, journalistic, cinematic) may illuminate both the limitations of those discourses and the imaginative possibilities of alternative frameworks. We conceptualize such possibilities as substantive, in terms of the alternative potentialities occasioned by progressive work in human rights and in literary production, and as a kind of meta-narrative refl ection on the forms that such interdisciplinary work has taken or may yet take. With this dual focus upon form and content in mind, then, we posit a human rights oriented literary criticism that engages in several unique activities.

Historian Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights (2007) makes the case that modern human rights were articulated in the particular historical moment of the American and French Revolutions partly because of the enabling function of empathic responses fostered by the novel form which produced readers able to care for others outside of the limits of their social class, gender, race, and other situated particularities. Martha Nussbaum makes a similar claim for literature’s humanizing effects on the reader: that literature enables us to “see Copyrighted Material-Taylor & Francis Introduction 5 the lives of the different with [ . . . ] involvement and sympathetic understanding,” to “cultivat[e] our humanity,” and to learn the habits necessary for “world citizenship.”10 Even as they formulate the powerful shared foundations of human rights and literary discourses, Hunt’s and Nussbaum’s works focus our attention upon the critical problem of the west-centric history of contemporary human rights, begging the question of whether human rights can materialize in states without democratic systems of governance, in societies in which “the individual” is not the major category of social organization, or in translation in local contexts that remain illegible to the human rights regime. As Hannah Arendt famously described in

The Origins of Totalitarianism, one of the central paradoxes of human rights as outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) is that they are available foremost to citizens, such that statelessness or marginalization within state formations challenges individual and collective claims to rights precisely at the moment that persons and groups are most vulnerable to the kinds of harms that such rights mitigate against. Similarly, expanding Arendt’s question about the role of the nation-state in maintaining the human rights regime to include the role of global capitalism, Talal Asad asks whether normative human rights discourse is in fact “part of a great work of conversion” which promises that when “redemption is complete, rights and capital will be equally universalized.” But,he notes, “whether universal capital or universal human rights will bring with it practical equality and an end to all suffering is quite another question.”

Considering Asad’s focus upon the affi liations between global capital(ism) and human rights, we might consider one of the UDHR’s framers, René Cassin’s, elegant diagram of the structure of the Declaration as a classical temple in “Cassin’s Portico” as emblematic of these limitations identifi ed in the modern human rights regime, inasmuch as his image resonates culturally with notions of rights as a secular morality based upon individualism and democracy. Cassin imagined rights resting on the cornerstones of dignity, liberty, equality, and brotherhood and grouped into four stately columns relating to the individual; to individuals in relation to one another and social groups; to public and to public and political rights; and to economic, social, and cultural rights.

Nevertheless, Human rights literature is not propaganda, it does not anticipate that the author actually will call for a specific action, rather it sees the authors role end as soon as writer complete the process of literary action. The question whether their creation will inspire for social changes or motivate readers to take action will be answered by the readers. Human rights literature gives the readers direct opportunities for real action. However it will never obligate then to be committed to it. Commitment is in fact an unwritten contract that is signed between the readers to the creation in the process of reading and holds the reader’s freedom to act.

What we should be doing is taking the responsibility ourselves to play our part in protecting human rights of others. Michael Murpurgo states that:

I long for the day when Amnesty is needed no more, mat be sometimes, but not enough. If we did, if  all people of goodwill did this, then the tsunami of protest  would roll on into the corridors of power and sooner rather than later the bastions of tyranny, the walls of division and oppression and prejudice would come tumbling down.  

 According to Murpurgo .                                           

Not simply literacy, that we learn to understand and empathis. As reader we learn about the lives of others.  other places cultures.  Other ways of seeing world.  We find about the past , understand better how it made our today and how our tomorrow. We are not alone our feelings, that joy and pain universal, that humanity is to be celebrated for its diversity but is ultimately  one humanity. Through literature, we can find our place in the world, feel we belong and discover our sense of responsibility.      

  

 Human rights are vital role in our society. Everyone have our own rights and responsibility.  We must respect our own rights and also we must follow that. Through literary thoughts authors presented in literary way. My paper presented through it about Human Rights in Literature .

Work cited

Sartre, Jean Paul. What is Literature.Gallimard.1948.

Morpurgo, michaelPrivate peaceful.2003.

http://www.human rights.com

http://en.michaelmorpuro.com