Differing Resistances: Mediating the Naga Struggle in Easterine Iralu’s a terrible matriarchy and Temsula Ao’s These Hills Called Home
By ASHLEY TELLIS

Why should literature have anything to do with conflict? Isn’t literature a safe haven outside of conflict, a space where we experience aesthetic pleasure and to which we take recourse precisely not to have to deal with the conflicts of our day-to-day lives? These are the sort of questions that face the literary critic (and indeed the literary writer) when she wishes to negotiate political conflict in her writing. The questions are, of course, premised upon a certain conception of the literary and a certain theory of the aesthetic. Those are not the premises of this investigation. It is my firm belief that the literary often helps in understanding the question of conflict – its impasses and its possibilities – much better than most other modes of articulation.

In being singular and unverifiable1 in the way in which sociological or historical data is not, it takes a leap of faith to enter the world of the literary, one has to surrender oneself to the written word and one emerges with a sense of what causes conflict and how conflict is experienced and resolved or not resolved with a perspective that political and historical analysis rarely offers. Literature offers us access to the psyche often simply denied in the straitjacketed world of social and political analysis. As Jacqueline Rose puts it in the Preface to her extraordinary collection of literary essays The Last Resistance:

The other is literature whose power to subvert the status quo receives new urgency when the dominant clichés and deceptions of statehood, whether here and in the US or in Israel, have reached new and mind-numbing heights.2 

Rose’s “here” is the UK, but it could well apply to India whose deceptions of statehood are nowhere more obvious than in the “Northeast.”3 Further, her first (of which literature is the other) term is psychoanalysis with “its ability to uncover truths that would remain hidden, and to unsettle the most rigid forms of identity as they play themselves out across the stage of political life.”4 Through looking at two fictional texts by Naga writers Temsula Ao and Easterine Iralu, I want to see the roles that literature plays in mediating the conflict in Nagaland, keeping in mind the de-romanticisation of literature that Rose effects through psychoanalysis.

Literature may be resistant, but it is not normatively so. It could well be resistant in the psychoanalytic sense, which Rose describes as: “For Freud [...] resistance was a psychic reality that blocked the passage of the psyche into freedom. One of the mind’s best defences, it cuts subjects off from the pain and mess of the inner life.”5 Not all literature is subversive, then, and Easterine Iralu’s a terrible matriarchy6 is an example of that. Even though its ostensible object across three hundred and fourteen pages is the inner world of its central protagonist, Dielieno, it is an inner world that shows an unrelenting resistance to the “pain and mess” of the political realities in which it inheres. This is effected through a curious gendering of the text. The text is saturated in a women’s world, where the protagonist is trapped; the Naga political world is almost completely denied entry through the dense gendering of its world. All the violence of the context is displaced onto the violence of a dominating matriarchal figure in the form of the grandmother, with whom young Dielieno is sent to live, and this is the only violence that the adult Dielieno also reads. The temptation to read this resistance to the political violence of the outside as an act of subversion of the male world of politics on the part of a female author is untenable given the loving and complex detail in which each male character is etched and the few moments when the Naga political world is allowed to seep into the narrative. By contrast, the few moments when the women characters are given complexity are devoid of any compassion.  Thus the resistance is not just a blocking of the pain of the public violence of the Naga context; it is also a resistance to an exploration of the private pain wreaked upon the protagonist in the context of the family. In both spaces, men are let off the hook and women are held responsible. Iralu not only resists engaging with the Naga political text, she also resists an engagement with Naga patriarchy.

The private, familial world in a terrible matriarchy is full of soothing men and menacing or menaced women (the few menacing men are aberrations who need to be domesticated); the political world is full of brutalised men and uncomprehending women, traumatised by their incomprehension and incapable of any political analysis of it, let alone a sense that their trauma is being caused by the brutalised men displacing anger at the Indian state or at Naga hierarchy upon them; unable also to see how they inflict violence upon each other based on age and access to power, let alone be capable of forging any sense of solidarity with each other. Resistance in Iralu’s text, far from being subversive, shores up the Indian state and buttresses patriarchy.

The novel is built by a slow process of accruing detail. We follow the vision of a young girl left at her grandmother’s by her parents who documents in painstaking detail the oppressive regime of this brutal woman and the minutiae of day-to-day life at home, school and home again. The tediousness of this life is matched only by the excruciatingly descriptive prose which is remarkably literalist and invariant, and, consequently, serves no purpose apart from ethnographically fleshing out a certain exotic context for the reader.7 The political world outside enters a terrible matriarchy only as late as page 173 and leaves just as suddenly. Reference is made to recruits to the Naga army and their arrest and torture at the hands of the Indian army. The fear on the part of the father and the elder, more responsible brother, Leto, is that Vini, Dielieno’s tempestuous and alcoholic brother, has been one of the boys involved. Dielieno, the narrative protagonist claims that she:

knew what they were talking about. It was the new recruits in the Naga Army who had been captured. The boys in our class would talk about it endlessly, saying they would join up when they were old enough. There were boys as young as seventeen in the Naga Army. (atm, 173)

Reference is then made to Vechoi, a Chokri Naga from Phek town, whose father had been killed by the Indian army, whose village had been attacked by the Indian army, the men killed, the women raped to teach the Nagas a lesson. Dieleno adds: “Bulie and I made a pact to join the Naga army when we grew up and vowed to avenge Vechoi’s father.”(atm, 174-75). Bulie is Dielieno’s other brother who is portrayed as mentally somewhat slow, firmly located in his body, strong of body and good with his hands. Nowhere is he endowed with any politics except in this adolescent moment. This is exactly the case with Dielieno as well. She has not talked about politics at all in the preceding 172 pages and will not do so again. Further, Leto is contrasted with Vini, as the responsible brother, seeking government employment, avoid alcohol and bad company (read militant company) and leads a stable domestic life, unlike Vini, who dies brutally of his alcoholism, repentant and remorseful. Also, the stress on the youth of the Naga Army recruits (Army moves from being capitalised to having a small a) suggests that it is a foolish, headstrong enterprise, that these are misguided, testosterone-ridden, rebellious youth.

The only other moment when the Naga political context enters the scene is the bitter moment of confrontation between the good and bad brother before the bad brother dies. Vini explodes in a sudden burst of politically articulate rage:

Do you know how frustrating it is to be a Naga and live with the fear of being shot all the time? Do you know what it does to your insides when you hear about the people being tortured and killed by the army and you can’t do anything about it? And then, along comes this smart alec who thinks it is alright to stop fighting for freedom, to stop being men and be sitting at an office desk, having sold your identity away for a bundle of money. You didn’t know that Rocky’s father was killed by the Indian army, did you? (atm, 247)

Though Vini is ostensibly speaking about Naga politicians who have sold out this indictment could just as easily be of his brother who has a desk job and has become a stooge of the Indian government. Masculinity is invoked and again the implication is that Leto is impotent and has forgotten what it is to be a Naga man. Vini goes on to explain that he drinks because of this bottled political rage in him:

I didn’t start out drinking because of that reason but now that I have been drinking for some years, I feel the futility of stopping because things are going from bad to worse. Leto, haven’t you heard that they killed Lato’s mother? Put a gun into her mouth and shot her dead after they had raped her. Do you know that when Lato went to avenge his mother they beat him until he was half-dead and then they released him? And no one could do anything to help him, certainly not the government. Tell me, Leto, what is the use of trying to live life well? (atm, 247).

Leto has no answer but to invoke God and peace and Vini’s privatised world of wife and child as antidote to this political impasse and as reason to live a reasonable life. Vini soon dies of his alcoholism, Christian and repentant, so the implicit argument is that the political rebel in Nagaland is the mindless alcoholic, whose thwarted masculinity leads to violence on women and children, even though the alcoholism is precisely because he can do nothing to the violences visited upon women and children by the Indian army that he as a Naga man cannot tolerate. He is opposed to men (like Leto) who have been domesticated and schooled into Indian citizenship and nationality, into proper Christian manhood which is not violent but paternalist and protective to women and passive and hopeful in prayer in their relationship to the Indian state, which is not a relation of confrontation.

These are the only two moments8 that rupture the seamless narrative of female oppression at the hands of the grandmother, which continues even after her death in the form of hauntings, the gossipy women on whom the novel ends, who are shunned in favour of the good women who marry, reproduce, stand by their husbands, no matter what, and never gossip. Bad femininity is gossipy (the village gossips, the prostitutes) and oppressive (the grandmother) and good femininity is passive, silently suffering and bearing oppression with Christian stoicism and even compassion (the mother, Bano, Dielieno, Nisano, Vimenuo).

Iralu’s infantilising of the Naga political struggle and her subsumption of Naga political anger into a larger domesticating discourse of Christianity, family values and government job security is paralleled by her upholding of male values and female subservience. At no point does she allow her female protagonist to seriously question Naga patriarchy, try to understand why and how the grandmother’s oppression can be seen as her attempt to have some power in patriarchy, to wonder why the mother is so invested in her sons and is almost entirely uncaring about her daughter, to reflect upon the biases in the treatment of the prostitutes and the village gossips or indeed to have any political opinion, or ambition of any kind, outside of relational positions in the family or community bound by kinship and religion.

By contrast, Ao locates all her stories in These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone very clearly in the early part of the Naga movement and reads roughly the same period quite differently. However, this does not mean that her mode is politically obvious in any way. Despite the combative subtitle to the book, she states in her Introduction, entitled “Lest We Forget,” that she does not see the stories as being about “historical facts” or justice or justification but opts instead for a universalising “We all suffer in conflict” and “There are no winners” mode.9 She appears to posit the Naga as traditional, placid and rural and the conflict with the Indian state involving the Nagas having disabled themselves and damaged their psyches.

Nevertheless, the stories themselves can be read as militating against this framework and offering a stringent political critique not just of the Indian state, and specifically the Indian army, but also of Naga patriarchy. Sanjay Barbora, in an otherwise laudatory review of the book, points to a problem he perceives at the heart of Ao’s fiction when he writes that the timelessness and the lack of particularity in the stories gives them a universality that is: “both liberating and (somewhat unfortunately) subject to self-censorship. The vague references to political positions and positioning of people as victims of circumstances beyond their comprehension are somewhat misleading.” As a result, Barbora adds “one is left with a nagging doubt that one half of the story is missing.”10 

Yet it is my contention that not all Ao’s characters are victims, if any of them are victims at all. Indeed, many of them are subversive in remarkable ways – fooling the Indian state by disguising militants, singing even as she is brutally raped by the army, living courageously with babies out of wedlock – and almost all of them resist the Indian state.

Further, Ao’s own characterisation of her fiction and the opaque and departicularised surface of her writing notwithstanding, it is possible, I contend, to read the opacity as containing a reservoir of sublimated anger that is, precisely through its particular fictionality, very politically productive and her departicularisation in terms of ethnic and political as a poetics that not only resists the ethnicising impulses of the Indian state vis-à-vis Nagaland and the “Northeast” as a whole but also allows for the articulation of a collective politics that offers a way out of the impasses and internecine battles of the current Naga political situation.

A detailed study of the modes of her writing – her creation of narrative suspense in each story, her articulation of internal difference through a subtle critique the logic of gender relations and of community, her use of figures and figurations of marginality, e.g. the mentally challenged, the illegitimate, the physically challenged – offer us a nuanced understanding of the processes by which politics is transmuted in art. Given space constraints, I will be able to look closely at only one story, though each of her stories offer multiple possibilities of resistance and critique in the subversive way that Rose signalled literature having the potential of earlier. All of Ao’s stories are written from within psyches engaging with political violence of various kinds and while they also are in a literalist prose, they do11 not shy from exploring the constitutive contradictions of the human psyche. They disarmingly, almost imperceptibly, enter the layered nature of violence across the sites of family, community, state and nation and do not dwell on external description. They do not allow the reader the luxury of surveying a scene or painting a picture. Instead the bare prose draws the reader immediately into the vortex of what is usually a turbulent scene masked by the serenity of the prose. Both male and female characters are portrayed with a psychic depth through techniques that mask their own capacities and modes of reach. While in some stories, Ao gives in to the explicatory aside or the bald political statement or explanation, the stories work best when she simply tells the story and the subtlest, smallest detail takes on a metaphorical significance and resonance that overtakes the story or throws it into sharp relief.

In “An Old Man Remembers,” the protagonist Imtisashi, like many of the male protagonists in these stories, is scarred by physical and psychic wounds that will not go away. He was part of the Naga Underground Army in the fifties along with his best mate Imlikokba, with whose death the story opens. He has a bad leg, suffers traumatic dreams from which he wakes screaming and he is cold and tired. A question from his grandson who has come over – “Grandfather, is it true that you and grandfather Imli killed many people when you were in the jungle?” (THCH, 92) triggers a long account of his time in the underground army because he comes to realise that he has to give this young boy a sense of his history and that “the bad things” do not go away when one does not talk about them.

Two moments stand out in the story of Imli and Sashi for the way in which they infect the reading of the story and make it work at levels that are unimaginably more complex than political commentary. Both are moments from childhood. One is when he describes to his grandson how once, hiding, as children, they saw a naked woman, her breasts bouncing, the dark of her pubic region, in awestruck wonder, as she passed with a bunch of other women. The other is when they used the birdcalls to send messages to each other as children in the adult context of revealing themselves to the villagers and not being taken for the enemy and killed. They try and there is no sound returned to them. Then:

“I’ll give it a last try,” Imli said and taking a deep breath let out another whoop. The strength and tone of that sound was so deep that I thought his lungs had burst because he collapsed even as the last note left his body. I slipped to his side to see if he was all right and tried to raise him from the ground where he lay in a heap. Seconds after I reached him, there was an answering whoop followed by a long twittering echo.

These two moments, the first one returns at the end of the story, say more than the grisly accounts of ambushes in the jungle. The old man cannot recall the incident of the naked woman as man-talk with his grandson; it is displaced, or so the narrator says, by another “area of darkness” that he had always wished away. The shock of the sexual, the mystery and the wonder-ment of it actually resonates with the shock, mystery and wonderment of the jungle experience. The exchange of birdcalls in childhood eases into an adult political strategy that saves their lives. Narrating this history releases the monstrous protagonist from a sense of his own monstrosity into the placid relationship with the early morning landscape on which the story ends. The old man does not give his grandson any message or moral. This is what he tells his grandson:

I do not know if what I have just told you answers your question or makes you understand your reason for asking it. But there is nothing more I can add. You have to make what you can from what I have tried to tell you.

It is not an exorcising of the political so much as a coming to terms with it. Ao’s protagonists have to live with their histories. Her violators are haunted by what they perpetrate; her victims become part of the legacy of the landscape. But whether violator or victim, no one is allowed to escape history. People are either compromised by it or refuse to compromise with it. It is clear where Ao’s politics lies but it is not easy to describe her politics. Her own broadly humanist account of it fails in the face of the stories. What her stories enunciate, the quality of resistance they offer in the telling of the stories of a people who built their history out of suffering almost beyond endurance, is a resistance with no easy lessons to offer, no quick redemptions; hers is a literature with as many dark areas as there are areas of illumination, which is the stuff of our political engagement with the world.