Sapphos daughters: Postcoloniality and the polysemous semantics of gender

Abstract

Can the tired mantra of the personal as the political be rejuvenated via a polysemous semantic theory that calls for what might be termed, after Sappho, a hermaphrodite awareness? By adopting as my metaphor for this paper the twenty-one stringed harp that Sappho is said to have invented as the appropriate instrument for her lyric voice, I seek to draw attention to the many-faceted, multi-vocal sensibility that contemporary women poets on the Indian subcontinent now enthusiastically embrace. Rather predictably, this attitudinal stance, born out of the specific anxieties of postcolonial women writers, rejects outright the traditional binary divisions of male/female, western/eastern, colonial/postcolonial, and so forth. As a consequence, I argue that those who write in the English language, and women writers in particular, have developed in recent years a painfully convoluted but clearly identifiable literary style that is forced to self-reflexively interrogate itself -often in more than one language- at every stage. Relatedly, I suggest that a natural alliance can be forged between the goals of a polysemous literary semantics and a pluralist postcolonial feminist theory.