The Mothers of Maya Diip

by Suniti Namjoshi

[Back Cover]
An original publication from The Women's Press.

'0f all the princely states of India there was one in which a matriarchy bloomed unashamedly.

'... when the Blue Donkey received a formal invitation from the Ranisaheb to visit the principality, she felt highly gratified and then dubious...'

So begins an adventure which leads Jyanvi and the Blue Donkey to the Matriarchy of Maya, to the Fortress of Hope and to the gallants of Paradise.

In this, the funniest and most wide-ranging of Suniti Namjoshi's works to date, fable, poetry and satire combine in a heady feminist mix that entertains, subverts and scandalises.

'... a born story-teller, a fabulist spinning yarns with a far-seeing vision with the ease of a natural' The Times of India

About The Blue Donkey Fables

'Stories deftly pointing out the absurd ways in which human beings insist on categorising anything strange as Other and Worse' New Statesman

Cover painting and line drawings by Beth Higgins

Genres: Fiction

146 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Suniti Namjoshi is a poet, children's author, and teacher. She ran a collaborative fiction site in the late nineties called The Reader's Text of Building Babel. She lives in England with her partner Gillian Hanscombe.

Reviews

[Zephyr · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid 4.5 read with layers and layers of meanings.

[Andrés · Rating 2 out of 5]

A donkey, the colour blue but female, is surprised at being privileged to receive from its matriarch a request to be guests of India's only true matriarchy. She brings as her guest a poet friend who is a sort of militant anti-patriarchy lesbian because the matriarchy is famous for being poetical. Oh frabjous day, callooh callay! It is with great excitement and a feeling of honour that they go and, after a cordial welcome, are befriended by another matriarchal 'foreigner' who had fled the evil of the patriarchies some years earlier. To be in a place where not only women are honoured, but poetry is too! And, above all, where males do not exist meaningfully in the community meant, obviously, that this is going to be utopia.

Or is it? The two protagonists discover the brutal truth. The males, called 'pretty boys' are kept in horrific conditions until their semen can be milked from them as stud animals when they reach puberty. The honour and reward the pretty boys receive for giving the gift of life is their being returned to the earth goddess before their obnoxious puberty could be allowed to create social disorder, decay, depravity and dystopia.

And so the satire starts. And it started well! But in the end Suniti Namjoshi's novel The Mothers of Maya Diip ended far too late in this short book to keep it from moving from an interesting satire into a clunking, plodding, heavy-handed parody that collapses like an undercooked angel food cake.

After an initial optimism that this would be both funny and a real social commentary/criticism, I found I became disenchanted at the flatness of the characters. They all sounded pretty much the same and the narrator's observation felt like a drone. 'Good try,' I thought, 'but not quite.' And up until the final two thirds of the text I thought Mothers was still a positive read.

Alas! In a modern example of a hurried deus ex machina, Namjoshi fell into complete creative collapse and bad writing. Perhaps even very bad writing. The collapse begins with the unbelievable rescue of the foreign matriarchal heretic from prison by self aware male robot soldiers who call their helicopter 'mother' and badly embody every machismo stereotype Namjoshi could cram in. Am I asking too much of a satire that it not be too heavy-handed? Perhaps, but now consider: the helicopter conveniently crashes into the ocean close enough to land to allow the protagonists to escape but have the robots 'drown.' The rationale? The robot's' mother proved to be bad at maintaining herself, despite having had the wherewithal and ability to create the self-aware robots in the first place.

The penultimate section, that of the gallants, suffered from what I can only describe as a circumscribed creativity. That the 'pretty boys' who managed to somehow not die and somehow managed to get to an island where they were allowed by another renegade matriarch to grow up without responsibilities and who would choose suicide before taking them on was just too much for my limited brain to accept. Not even in what I had hoped would be a satire. Perhaps if the writing had felt less like this was a slap dash tack-on, a hurried-up my book's deadline is due jumble, I would have accepted it. I have accepted very bizarre things, but the writing was just way too weak to sustain my credibility to accept the satirical nature of this part of plot.

And the final wrap up, which was to see the 'proper' matriarchy restored after its early overthrow by the matriarch's daughter, displayed to me that Namjoshi was in this effort an empty critic: she poked fun at matriarchy, and poked fun at the feminazies' version of patriarchy, but when it came to an alternative, which is how the book closes, she proffered nothing but the restoration of an autocracy, but this time by someone who didn't want the position. Sigh! I hesitate to suggest that I would have liked this better if Namjoshi hadn't tried suggesting a solution to the problem of patriarchy, but it may have helped.

At the beginning I loved that this was poking fun at how easily feminist political ideology can fall into patriarchal practices, and I so wanted to like this book. But it fell from a five star beginning and premise, all the way down to just two stars, meaning, in this case, read only as a curiosity or perhaps as inspiration to create your own satire.

[Keerthi Vasishta · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quick read but the critique is not the sharpest although the satire was fun initially. Part III gets increasing stranger and it feels over-wrought and poorly handled despite the polished diction.
The whole things about Gallants feels like a dig at the West and feels a bit confused...