Subaltern Speech: A Deconstructive Reading of Geeta Abraham Jose’s by The River Pampa I Stood

Abstract

This article addresses the mechanisms of silencing women’s stories— the critical silences that dwell the interstices of masculinist, genealogical and hegemonic discourses of the family and community-- through a reading of By the River Pampa I Stood. It examines the way the text uses the trope of "silence" to problematise the potentially productive and apparently problematic processes of writing subaltern histories "from below." Jose’s narrative, like many of those written by female writers all over the world, may be seen as a part of the feminist project of recovering silenced subaltern voices. It is a work that successfully inscribes itself at the crossroads of critical questions on the category of women, agency, speech/silence, subaltern debates on the dominant historiographies and feminist ethnography.