Aurat Durbar

Aurat Durbar contains 74 selections of both poetry and prose by 31 South Asian women only. These south Asian women live in Canada, United States, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and India... Heterosexual, bisexual or lesbian and born to high or low caste/class, they are first or second generation Canadians in various phases of their lives. They fall into categories of social realism, psychological studies and explorations of language.

Sunera Thobani writes of the violence against women; a war, she emphasizes, is declared, though often unacknowledged ... Each woman reveals the way she is rebelling or resisting and changing her part of the world.

In "Dare to Bare", Ramabai Espinet addresses her audience in Caribbean Creole English, telling us the reason women cannot go topless is not because breasts are indecent (after all, men can shed their shirts on a hot day without a second thought), but because "Man have a stake in breast-commerce, yuh hear. They done seize woman breast and then go and sell it to other man in strip joint, in advertising, "cheesecake" and ting...Man don't like woman to give away she body for free ...she must sell sheself under the tradegrounds them set up already."

In "Making of a Cultural Schizophrenic," the hopes and dreams of a new country are coloured by the racism Sherazad Jamal's family discovers when they immigrate to Canada.

In a volume of pain and passion, each woman tells of her hopes and disappointments, of her struggle to be seen as an individual with faults to overcome and talents to share and celebrate. Seyda Nuzhat Siddiqui reminds us in "To The Human race," we are still of the one human clan.

Aurat Durbar is a rich and provocative collection of writings by South Asian women authors living in Canada and United States. It draws readers into their complex worlds, as they struggle under the demands imposed by tradition, duty, diaspora, language and community. Aurat Durbar commands the reader to sit up and take notice. The western ideology, curious and eager to play fair, cannot make things right unless it tries to understand the eastern philosophy. Curse or blessing of brown skin is mentioned by several authors with frustration, sadness and despair but never with a vengeful hatred. Despite often stifling surroundings, these authors have candidly expressed their innermost feelings, ... their humour shines through.

"There is No Place Like Home" is a complex study on cultural ambivalence. What appears to be about a failed relationship between a young Indo-Canadian woman and her mother is more about the immigrant coming to terms with her past.

Mira, the narrator in Veena Gokhale's "Reveries of a Riot," longs for something different. The writer contrasts the boredom of the young middle-class Mira trapped within home and marriage with the excitement and brutality of a communal riot occurring on the streets of India.

In Damayanthi Fernando's "Roses for My Dead Friend"... a stark portrayal of repression and violence in Sri Lanka ... this story focuses on the murder of an innocent victim by the state forces. I recommend this book not just to those interested in post-colonial literature by women but for the enlightening narratives that transcend the boundaries of the South Asian diaspora.