Sunday, June 1, 2003		Books

Functional love
 Review by Kamaldeep Kaur

Love’s Perfumes
by Rita Rahman, Penguin, New Delhi. Pages 134. Rs 200.

Recent years have seen the advent of the postcolonial novel. The work under review is an addition to this type of fiction. Rita Rahman, the author, has previously published a collection of short stories and numerous articles on international relations. The influence of this earlier work is palpable in Love’s Perfume—a novel. This is a story that spans disparate cultures and continents.

Arno, a white Dutch civil servant, meets Myrna, a black, Caribbean environmentalist at the World Food Summit in the Netherlands. Arno is an insomniac and Myrna is privy to traditional sleep therapy, which she has learnt from her grandmother. During the course of this therapy Myrna takes him back into time by telling him stories about the Caribbean. She takes him not only through the chaotic and tumultuous history of the Caribbean, but also reveals her own journey from a revolutionary to an environmentalist, from childlike innocence to cynical adulthood. Gradually they develop a relationship based on their selfish desires.

It is later revealed that Myrna is on a voyage of reconquest and revenge, a search for her roots in the Hague, as one of her ancestors was the offspring of a Caribbean man and a Dutch woman. It is in the telling of these stories that Rahman excels as she traverses through the past and present effortlessly.

The work is ostensibly a love story that cuts across opposing cultures. I say "ostensibly" because the traditional concept of love as an ideal, pure human experience based on compassion and sympathy is negated here. Love here is based on the fulfilment of individual needs and one sees how history and politics vitiate this elevating emotion and influence decisively the choice of a partner. Both Myrna and Arno emerge as partners (not lovers), each pursuing private goals.

The stories that Myrna weaves show Rahman’s comfort in dealing with the short-story genre. But when these individual stories are strung together there are certain inconsistencies and the novel borders on inscrutability. The triumph of a novel is if each part dovetails easily into the next even while retaining its autonomy. Unity in a text must be achieved spontaneously; it must not appear contrived. Rahman has undoubtedly excelled in the parts but the whole seems laboured.

The novel also delineates the problems of colonisation and the even more critical problems of decolonisation. One key problem that recurs is that of racial discrimination and the stereotypical modes of behaviour attributed to a Negro—"the institutionalised xenophobia"—as a consequence of his complexion. In an outburst of anger Myrna gives vent to her frustrations: "Make us white through genetic manipulation or manipulate your brains so that you see only white! You don’t even see us. With black skin we always cast a shadow in front of us."

In episodes such as these Rahman’s position as a diplomat and minister are perceptible. Her concerns about racial hatred, corruption and the poverty of post-independence Caribbean islands feature extensively. Overall the text is thought provoking. But its postcolonial leanings will be all too familiar to the discerning reader: the proverbs that make it culture specific, the conflict between binaries, the stereotypical characters representing primitive and modern modes of thought, respectively, make it a classic postcolonial text. But I have my reservations about its ambitious sub-title, a novel. It has neither the length nor the scope of a novel. It appears to be an extended short story. At best it can be called a novella or a long short story.