Moving through manipulated pasts

Responding to Flesh and Paper by Pratibha Parmar

Flesh and Paper, 1990 (Film still)

Interacting with nostalgia in diaristic and experimental film through the lens of a legendary poet can bring attention to how far, or not, we have come in the pursuit of de-homogenising particular subjectivities. In the case of Flesh and Paper (1990), the life of Suniti Namjoshi: Indian, lesbian, writer, is directed by Pratibha Parmar and creates movement through interviews, self reflection, dance and landscape. The film elevates Namjoshi’s life from something bound by language, into a transcendental experience of what it means to be alive right now, as an individual in desperate need of others to create a world. Perhaps this is a desperate romantic need filtered through odic poems reserved for a lover that one couldn’t find in the post-Romantic, European sanitisation of the self. 

Parmar is known for being tongue in cheek with her films. Nina’s Heavenly Delights (2006) springs to mind. Clandestine lesbian desire quakes the comedic narratives and so-called clichés of being young and South Asian in new millennium Britain. Whilst there is a call for me as a writer to resist the homogenisation of a South Asian experience (I am not Indian, a woman or a lesbian), I found a dark humour in the Bharatanatyam dancer as a lone figure weaving myth with their hands, casting a shadow in the bright studio lights and set dressing that wasn’t quite a Hindu temple, but may evoke one to an oblivious eye. As a millennial who grew up with dial up modems rocking me to sleep, I perhaps miss the seriousness of Namjoshi and her partner, Gillian Handscombe, reading their love poems (from their anthology, Flesh and Paper, 1986) to each other dressed in ‘traditional’ South Asian garb. After interviews with young South Asian lesbians at DIY queer book launches speaking  their truth about not having any positive representations of South Asian lesbian writers having their success publicly platformed, I found myself bemused at this poetic trade off of traditional love stories. 

A brown woman and her white lover wearing shalwar kameez, lounging on the floor of a set not too dissimilar to the one where the Bharatanatyam dancer wove their wordless blessings, is what provoked me to think about nostalgia and how it is too easy to become trapped with that dancer in a historical aesthetic manufactured by the same narratives we are attempting to escape. However, the campness of this exchange evokes Bollywood drama and the eyebrow raising smirk of producers who have a certain budget and criteria to fill. Yet there’s no denying that Parmar is giving her audience grace in the extended scenic breaks for our own personal reflections after Namjoshi reckons with her lived philosophy about how “language creates worlds.” We become space and time travellers, which is for me my intention with film, traversing a fabled palace in post-colonial India and the chalky white cliffs of England that is the first glimpse of the nation for many arriving. 

Historical films should serve a purpose of self reflection, both for individuals and as community members. They should provoke questions such as, what’s changed and how have we advanced given the resources that we have now? Moving image as a tool to manipulate histories, through the use of ironic motifs and unsettling the notion of truth, is effective. They don’t serve as an archaic examination of what it really meant to be a South Asian migrant in Britain in the 1990s. Even the most privileged among us cannot be captured in a language which serves to complicate once static understandings. Flesh and Paper is using the backdrop of poetry, migration and documentary filmmaking to question a particular British notion of truth as universal. This, in turn, undermines a colonial enforcement of uniform knowledge. 

I feel empathetic to the cultural narratives that ensnared South Asian people after waves of migration. We were assigned roles not only by family tradition, but also by government and the cultural norms (policing) by institutions and the public. But with the deepest of thanks to the groundbreakers such as Namjoshi and Parmar, we are able to interact with more nuance about identity than ever before. The history between India, Britain, Pakistan and Bangladesh is a sprawling and lateral one which has a wildly elusive starting point. Currently, we’re seeing Islamophobia in India and Hinduphobia in Pakistan. Extremism is almost always taking the centre stage and steals our flowers from us. We are now challenging the here and now where positive queer histories can show us that we can go even further with our practice. I wonder, is now the time to put down the romantic images of Brahmanic poetry and philosophy, and raise our horns to call for more revolutionary ways of being with each other?