coloredgirls

V.K. Mina`s first novel, The Splintered Day, has an original subject matter and a contemporary feel that can`t be found in the fiction of the older generation of South Asian women authors, such as Bharati Mukherjee (Jasmine) and Chitra Banarjee Divakaruni (Arranged Marriage.) The Splintered Day does not continue with one heroin but instead moves through different voices in the manner of closely related short stories.

While Mukherjee and Divakaruni have focused on the Indian as an alien in America, V.K. Mina creates female protagonists who are settled into American culture. Whether they are perfectly happy or not, is another story. V.K. Mina`s character Neelam, who lives in the East Village in New York, is not fretting over her immigrant identity, but rather her lesbian identity. Not only does V.K. Mina take a distinctly urban viewpoint, but she also makes sexuality of women of color and interracial connections the crux of her novel. The first page of The Splintered Day reads:

The first time I read the book, I was sixteen...I was still a virgin. My experience consisted of two white boys who`d kissed me and a Sikh who ate my pussy badly. I loved the book. What profundeur, what glamour it had, what wisdom about interracial sex. So long surrounded by whites, I saw my dark self easily in Laferriere. I forgot my other selves: my eleven-year-old self getting beaten up by white trash Angel and enormous, West Indian Jasmine; my pussy self of labyrinthine crimson and brown folds so easily crushed...

While the female heroines of The Splintered Day consider themselves lesbians, their experiences with women range from desire without any possibility of contact, mild arousal, to outright disgust. The novel begins with a heterosexual relationship, a degrading sort that reappears throughout. The very first chapter--and perhaps the strongest--is called How I Made Love to a Negro, and refers to a book on the topic by Danny Laferriere. What follows is just one of many tales of an Indian woman falling into an abusive relationship with a black man, the first one a drug dealer with dreads named Claude who rather quickly falls into stereotype.

I let him into my bed, but I would turn his lines onto him, this Laferriere hero, his skinny black dick his access to the world, who said to me when I asked him why I should wash his clothes or buy him presents or why he never took me out, I fuck you, don`t I?

There is the novelty of interracial dating; an Indian with an African-American, except of course, Claude is no Denzel Washington in Mississippi Masala. What at first draws the reader in by the groundbreaking depiction of an Indian girl exploring her sexuality, even redefining her ethnicity, and roaming in lower to middle-class bedrooms, becomes a turn-off with the repetition of the same repressive cycles the protagonist goes through. The narrative does not push itself forward, but instead remains floating. The distinctive voice of V.K. Mina combines poetic phrasing, sexual grit, and at its best, self-deprecating, warm humor. However, it loses itself in the meandering and stagnant lives of characters who seem to ask for sympathy from the reader, but instead, extract impatience.

Nonetheless, The Splintered Day is a worthy novel that courageously encompasses the lives of real women who do exist. They feel fat and lonely, desire sex only to feel repelled, and move from work to clubs where they only find emptiness. What is surprising about the universality of these emotions is how V.K. Mina applies them to Indian-American women whose voices are rarely presented in such a light. Still, such stories can only be compelling once they are rid of stereotypes, self-pity and charged with illumination.

Alpa Patel is a multi-media artist who writes erotic poetry, started a `brown girl` comics strip, and made a short movie, Love Stinks, to be shown at the Women of Color Film Festival held at the University of Santa Cruz this April.