Nervy Girl!

by Gina Bacon
Stretching minds, borders, and boundaries is Ginu Kamani's calling as a writer. She is the author of Junglee Girl, a collection of 11 short stories published in 1995 by Aunt Lute Press, a multicultural feminist publisher. She also writes for the San Francisco Examiner and taught at Mills College from 1997-1999 as a Distinguished Visiting Writer in Fiction.

Born in Bombay, India, in 1962, Kamani moved to the U.S. with her family at age 14. She graduated from the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 1987 with a Master's degree in creative writing. After living in Bombay from 1987-1991 to work on film projects, Kamani returned to the U.S. to write full time. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Nervy Girl! recently had the opportunity to interview her. Through her raw, honest, and unconventional insights into the core of humanity, Kamani invites us to explore with her. From the sexual awakenings of her female protagonists in Junglee Girl to unraveling the delicious and bizarre mysteries of Mexico's mezcal liquor in a piece for the San Francisco Examiner, Kamani takes us with her; not as tourists, but as travelers.

NG: You left India on the brink of womanhood. Did entering a new culture at this time in your life impact the way that you view sexuality?

GK: Entering a new culture impacts everything, including the way you walk and talk and breathe, use language, your senses, logic, space. The sensory re-adjustment alone is monumental. A person receives so much continuous ambient information at a sensory level that a body developed in one culture is quite particularly habituated to, and then suddenly one is being bombarded with a whole new set of stimuli, and the sorting process is wild, and weird, and scary, like being badly fitted inside one's skin.

I had no affinity for suburban America, for example, having grown up in Bombay, a cosmopolitan concrete jungle in the tropics. The deserted streets of suburbia, everyone moving around in cars, shops all segregated in malls or on Main Street, neat and tidy lawns, one family to a house. None of it computed; all of it felt alien.

But as far as the most concrete effect on my sexuality from moving to the U.S. at 14, I had attended all-girls' schools in India, and though I was excited by the prospect of entering co-ed high school in the U.S., I was mystified, and quite revolted, actually, by the fixation of my female peers on adolescent boys, who didn't even seem like fully formed creatures to me, let alone worth going into heat over.

Everything about bonding with girls my age seemed to revolve around pandering to insecure, posturing, lemming-like boys, and at least I had the good sense and high self-esteem to steer clear of the whole lot of them. But I paid in alienation, something I was not accustomed to. In India, having been a class-topper all my life, I was always the recipient of affection and praise and awe from my peers. Over here, the minute it became clear I was a straight-A student, everyone kept their distance. And same-sex affection is not proscribed in India, not imprisoned in the narrow cage of sexual behavior the way it is here. I was accustomed to walking hand over shoulder, or hand in hand with my girlfriends, and certainly the sensuality of touch just disappeared in high school in this country.

This perception of all affectionate touch as sexual touch was another extremely difficult, and to me oppressive, cultural practice. At 14, though, I couldn't have articulated any of this for the life of me. Instead, my first real friendship at 16, full of all the same passions, secrets, hours lost in reverie, that I associated with girlfriends, happened with a boy. When the relationship eventually turned to tentative sexual exploration, it all felt quite natural.

NG: Do you ever imagine who you would be now if you had not left India?

GK: As a writer, and a person who moves regularly between India and the U.S., I certainly have entertained that thought many times. I come from wealth, it's possible that I would have married into wealth. Being a good student, I was steered towards the sciences, which have greater prestige amongst educated Indians, so I could have become a scientist or a doctor... I may have had a big apartment in Bombay with servants, possibly even have had children by now... entering a different culture, or leaving one behind, really alters the flow of life, and invokes parts of the psyche that don't necessarily air in any other circumstances.

People who are familiar with my strong interest in writing and filmmaking, in sexual topics and human relations, speculate that I would have found a way onto that path one way or another. Certainly, there is no lack of writers, filmmakers, bohemians or boundary-breakers in India.

And my Indian self is as rooted and expressive as my American self. I returned to live there between 1987-1991, and I would love nothing more than to be able to return again for another long period.

NG: There is a great debate amongst writers as to whether we should tackle subjects outside of our own experiences, our own cultures. What is your opinion about this?

GK: I think the debate is very important, because on the one hand, there has been this myopic tendency in the West to label Western culture, behavior, norms, as universal, when they are not in the least. They're not even usually broad enough to encompass the different domestic classes in any Western culture, let alone any foreign ones. Additionally, there has been this total confusion generated by such high-handed terms as objectivity, which, as I see it, basically grants permission to dissect an "other" without having to expose oneself.

One quote that I would urge everyone to keep in their front pocket, is: "Perception is at the root of all knowledge." There is no knowledge that stands alone as truth. And cultures shape perceptions, and I don't just mean in a metaphorical way, but in a very real, physiological, neurological way. Language alone shapes our perceptions to an incredible degree. We take for granted with American English that we can throw around the first person singular pronoun "I" without limits. In many other cultures, this American habit of using "I" is perceived as offensive, selfish, threatening, bad manners, shallow, and so on. Same with asking for things directly, as opposed to indirectly. Or assuming that persons are individuals; being an individual is considered negative (and considered) selfish, arrogant, disrespectful of the group and so on.

Usually, the last thing we can articulate well is where our own perceptions come from, what the mythologies and insecurities are that under-gird the ideological "givens" of our culture, and how, and when, and where, we imbibed and internally fossilized the above.

If the emphasis shifted to approaching another culture to learn about oneself and one's unconscious conditioning instead of attempting an authoritative decoding of what the other culture is about, then things would get a lot more honest, and equal. But that approach invokes vulnerability, and uncertainty, and often messes with those hallowed cultural "givens," and gets broadcast as loss of control.

In my view, vulnerability is not valued in this culture, as it isn't in many middle-class cultures around the world. I feel that vulnerability provides the more valuable position in perception, in judgment, in communication, in any area of human relations, really, but it requires dispensing with the illusion of control. My own encouragement to writers is that any subject, if approached with self-exposure - no matter what your limits as far as an understanding of the "other" may be - makes for a valuable experience, because then one is oriented to the process of experiencing one's humanity, rather than the goal of achieving authority.

To give some examples, with foreign writers' approaches to India: Ram Ram India by Nick Rossiter and Alex Thompson is a brilliant book about two Brit bicyclists who traverse the country from north to south to raise money for Oxfam. They are extremely aware that they make a very strange sight in India, where bicycles are associated with the lowly, not with sports or politics, and describe each cross-cultural hurdle with great humor and loving attention, even though they're the butt of every joke, so to speak. The book becomes a pretty thorough investigation of being upper-class, educated Britons, and bringing those expectations to India. They are awed at being there, even as the country taxes them to the limit, and they manage to convey a wonderful, self-revealing portrait of the experience. In comparison, and I'm talking the other extreme, there's Gunter Grass's Show Your Tongue, which goes on ad nauseum about what a hell-hole Calcutta is. The obvious fact that his German cultural conditioning makes this city unpalatable is never dwelt on. The fact that the city has an internal logic and is home to millions, despite the filth and poverty, never makes it past his sensory threshold. He just condemns the place wholesale. His wrath strikes me as quite comical. In contrast, it's fascinating for me to see how Allen Ginsberg dealt with the same disagreeable issues posed by Calcutta in his book India Journals. Ginsberg positions himself as an authority only on his own reactions to what he sees, and in fact revels in the relentless sensory assault, riffing on the experience in his poetry.

NG: What are you currently working on?

GK: I've put aside my novel and have begun work on a manuscript of inter-linked stories. I'm also writing feature articles for the San Francisco Examiner and am involved in scripting some film projects. Additionally, I have two video documentaries in process, for which I need to raise completion funds, both are being shot in India.