Bead Bai: Gendered Identity at the Interstices of Art, Trade and Domesticity: A Socio-literary Analysis of Sultan Somjee’s Bead Bai

"Unlike in the case of migrations from the Indian subcontinent to South Africa and Mauritius, women arrived in East Africa mainly as 'adjunct' wives of male migrants. There are very few official documents to record their arrival, and the mention of personal details of these women and their fascinating experiences remain excluded from the footnotes of history. One therefore has to fall back on alternate sources to reconstruct the subaltern experiences of these women migrants, whose life-narratives have been subsumed within the larger collective history of their husbands or fathers. It is here that creative reconstructions can be used as an important tangential source to capture the finer nuances of gendered individual and collective mobility. This in turn allows for a deeper insight into processes of the formation of diasporic gendered subjectivities in the context of the East African Asian diaspora."

Prof Mala Pandurang

http://glocalcolloquies.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Pandurang-Mala.pdf

Bead Bai: The Book Review Literary Trust volume xxxix no 3, March 2015. Mumbai

Gendered Experience

Mala Pandurang 

BEAD BAI
By Sultan Somjee
Create Space, Charleston, USA, 2012, pp. 435, Rs. 1246.00

Bead Bai by Sultan Somjee offers an engaging insight into the experiences of the Satpanth Ismaili community in East Africa from late 19th century onwards. The early entrepreneurs of this unique religious group developed a network of family stores that spanned across the geography of East Africa. The petty traders set off for the interior areas, spanning from the East Coast of Africa to the Congo region, with foot caravans, carrying goods for barter such as blankets, cloth, food stuff and building material. An ethnographer by profession, Sultan Somjee particularly describes the community’s involvement in the trade of beads of ‘different colours, luster, sizes and shapes’ with ethnic tribes (p. iii). Early 20th century, Satpanth women began to arrive on the East African shore as child brides, and settled to their new lives in urban as well as rural areas. Often, the merchant’s wife, mother and daughter would work at the family store in the early days, handling the bead stocks, mainly imported from Czechoslovakia. Somjee credits these women with enabling the flow of beads between the traders and the ethnic tribes, particularly the pastoral Maasai. They therefore came to be known as ‘bead bais’. In due time, an entire street in commercial Nairobi came to be known as Moti Bazaar or Bead Bazaar (p. iv). The fascinating story of the bead bais has however remained largely unheard outside the Satpanth community. 

The novel’s main protagonist, narrator Sakina, is born on 15th March 1922 in Nairobi. Historically it is the day of the Kipande massacre when ‘soldiers fired on the crowd protesting against the imprisonment of Harry Thuku’, Kenya’s first nationalist leader (p. 4). Sakina’s family lives on the street called Jugu Bazaar in a racially compartmentalized Nairobi, where Indian merchants would spread out ‘cloth, spices and beads in voluminous displays of variety’ (p. 5). Her grandfather Dadabapa’s recollections of the trajectory of his arrival in East Africa and the subsequent settlement of the family create an awareness of a larger collective history at the intersection of the colonial destinies of the Khojas, white settlers and indigenous peoples. The narrative is related in retrospect by Sakina who comments: ‘I am taken back in years listening to their stories while telling my own. I live the past as if it were today when I tell you this story’ (p. 128). Sakina reflects on her structure of her own narrative: 

Like the spangled kanga, the wild hen of savannah grasslands, my story nods its head up and down. You wonder what corner it will go to now. Where will it hide? Where will it come to rest? But kanga’s head never stops bobbing. My tale meanders along the story path bouncing up and down like the kanga’s head. When I was young, that’s how stories were told. Like the bird called kanga crisscrossing paths of time, nodding at each step, drawing past to present and pushing back present to past (p. 189).

As Sakina reaches puberty, she becomes increasingly conscious of the restrictions placed upon her in terms of what she should wear, where she can visit and with whom she can be seen talking. The concept of family honour, associated with the concept of a dependent woman or a ‘mothaj’ who is a burden on her family and community, is central to the text. Sakina’s father insists that her marriage takes place, worrying that she will be ‘a mothaj’ if she is not married off soon. Somjee deftly presents a patriarchal social milieu wherein the ideology of wifehood motherhood is a dominant factor in defining the Satpanth woman’s self-identity. Sakina is positively influenced by her independent minded stepmother, Ma Gor Bai who has lived as an outcaste Satpanth widow in Zanzibar before her marriage to Sakina’s father, a much older man. At the age of sixteen, Gor Bai set sail from the port of Diu in search of a husband who had not returned from Africa. Determined to defy her destiny as an unwanted ‘polluted’ widow, and to avoid the scorn directed towards them as ‘mothaj’ by reluctant well-wishers, she stays back in Zanzibar. Africa, therefore, became ‘the land of the second chance’ for such ostracized women. Somjee draws our attention to the historically verified presence of Indian prostitutes in Africa, through his sympathetic portrayal of Meethi Bai, the proprietor of ‘Indian lodge’ which is a brothel frequented by labourers brought in to construct the Ugandan Railway. Meethi Bai’s lodge becomes a second home to the ‘three Bombay ladies’ who escape from ‘kothas’ in Mumbai, in search for a better life.

 Sakina is married at 16, to Haiderali Devji, who is just two years older than her. She moves out of the segregated Asian section of Nairobi where she has lived all her life into rural Kenya. She finds relief from mundane domestic chores in the two hours every afternoon that she spends with the Maasai elder Ole Lekakeny (‘the storyteller of the Savannah’, p. 310) who teaches her the Maasai art of working with beads. She is fascinated by the emankeeki, which is a circular beaded neck-to-chest decoration that Maasai married women wear. Ole Lekakey assures her, ‘You will learn how to bead the bead in your fingers and let the colours sing to your eyes. You will know the Maasai art when you start beading the sky’ (p. 293). He tutors her on designing her own emankeeki which ‘displays meticulously worked out patterns according to Maasai aesthetic schemes that relate to patterns in nature such as of clouds, animal coats, trees, rocks and mountains (p. 134). The novel ends on a positive note with Sakina asserting her agency made possible through self-realization closely connected to her artistic integrity. 

Somjee’s novel not only offers a rare perspective into the gendered experiences of ‘passenger’ women who migrated from the Indian subcontinent to colonial British East Africa, but it also poetically presents a unique cultural synthesis of African and Asian art forms. Somjee lyrically renders his intimate knowledge of indigenous cultural and artistic practices in combination with his keen interest in history of trade between Satpanth–Khoja traders and their indigenous Kenyan customers.

Mala Pandurang is the Head of the Department of English, Dr. BMN Collage, Matunga, Mumbai. 

http://www.thebookreviewindia.org/articles/archives-4420/2015/march/3/gendered-experience.html

Published by Somjee family

The Begger's Dance by Farida Somjee
http://faridasomjee.blogspot.ca/p/home.html


The Cheese in Between
An IT Project Management Graphic Novel by Sadiq Somjee
www.SadiqSomjee.com

Art by Nadia Fay

http://nadiafay.blogspot.ca/

Bead Bai review in Opinion (UK) November 2014

Click below:

Bead Bai (ખોટા મોતી ના સાચા વેપારી) - Opinion ...

Opinion is a Gujarati English monthly magazine published from London for the last 14 years…Opinion is focused essentially on literary and cultural affairs of India, especially Gujarat, and those of the Gujarati Diaspora (especially from East Africa)…the title derives from Indian Opinion, the journal that Mahatma Gandhi edited in South Africa …Opinion follows committed and independent line of thinking and action…Opinion Online is a treasure house of contemporary diasporic literature…readers can write back, rate the articles and give feedback. 

From Opinion Website: http://opinionmagazine.co.uk/page/about

Earlier reviews of Bead Bai

By Professor Mala Pandurang,  Mumbai

review - Bead Bai - Mala Pandurang - Academia.edu



By Professor Kurtz Roger, New York

Bead Bai- by Kurtz, J. Roger - World Literature Today, Vol ...

Bead Bai: Author guided bookclub discussion as per request

1. Relationships/characters in Bead Bai
Talk about the relationship between grandfather and granddaughter. Stepmother/mother and daughter. Have you had experiences of such relationships through singing or storytelling or working with needle and thread?

How do you compare relationships among women and among men in Bead Bai?  How many husband-wife relationships are in Bead Bai? Talk of the different characters in the relationships.

Exclusion and inclusion in cross cultural/religious relationships. What have been your experiences in the country of your origin and in Canada or any other country that you call home now? How would you respond to cross religious or cultural situations today?

How does the author show where ‘the other’ comes from? Does he have a bias?

2. Style and structure
Does the writing style give a sense of tradition? 

How would you define the structure of this historical/ethnographic fiction? Does the structure have anything to do with tradition?

Did you feel the author’s first language is not English? How does the author give a sense of being a non native speaker of English? Read a paragraph or two to illustrate. Does that give a tone to the storyteller’s voice?

Did you sense the rhythm in the background? Where does the storyteller speak about rhythm? Read a paragraph or a line that you found musical. How does the rhythm compliment the voice of the storyteller?

Do vernacular concepts give depth to what is said?  e.g. shukhar  rass  mothaj e’sikar  darshan-deedar – check the glossary. Are these too many or unexplained or unnecessary? Any of these concepts that you felt deeply about in your own mother tongue/culture? e.g. mothaj.

Why do you think the writer included the chapter on ‘Loving Gujarati’?

3. Journeys
Talk about journeys in Bead Bai as transformative processes. Have you had similar experiences of journeys?

4. History/religion/culture
How is history/religion/culture  told? How are the characters' lives shaped by history/religion/culture? Is it important to keep these consciousnesses in families? How can we do that?

Do you think the author speaks unfavourably about any/all religions or cultural communities?

In what ways does Dadabapa illustrate the immigrant experience?  Does this continue to happen today? Compare the experience of immigration narrated in Bead Bai  on women’s lives with stories from Tajikistan today: http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/101east/2013/07/2013723935174524.html

Does the book help to appreciate where the immigrants/seniors come from? Help to reflect on the expanding diaspora world today?

Do the characters consciously maintain historical/religious/cultural consciousness?

5. Landscape/Nature
Land has a presence in the story. Why is it important for the writer to give so much space to land?

6. Ethnic art
How does the writer bring dignity to women’s art commonly called 'craft'? What does ethnic art tell you about Sakina? 

Discuss this: Ethnic art gives communal joy. It is shared aesthetics and that is important for community life/wellbeing. 

"Handmade goods surely have more of the maker’s spirit in them and, because gift-exchange is about connecting people to each other, the handmade thing will always be a better vehicle for the spirit of the gift." - Lewis Hyde author of The Gift in an interview by Gloria Robinson,
http//www.brickproject2016.com/2013/08/24/the-brick-project-conversations-part-sixteen-gloria-and-lewis

Consider how the above quote relates to hand designed work (or artefacts or material culture) mentioned in the book as communal gifts reflecting on cultures as settings.

Can you think of other stories or movies where an object is important to the story?

Are there objects in your life that have travelled with you? That tell your story? In what ways?

Did Bead Bai change your idea of ethnic art - embroidery, beadwork? Will you think of patterned art vs high art or machine made art differently?

7. Beauty
Why is Beauty important to the protagonist? In what ways is the connection between aesthetic pleasure, peace and pain described in Bead Bai?

8. Spirits as background characters
How is the presence of the spirits made known? Does Sakina’s society live in two worlds? Can this be true or is it in the writer’s imagination?

9. Talk about the different ways how the family experiences new identities in Africa that’s not totally Indian or Asian.
How are shifting identities explained to reflect on the characters? What would you call the idenity of Asians settled over generations in Africa? Have you consciously thought of how the new land has changed you?

10. Intra-religious/community tensions
How do women cope with men’s politics? Do you know of families or persons or communities  with two or more religious or cultural identities?

Bead Bai: Author interview in Kitaab: Asian Writing in English, Singapore

Why did you choose the story of a bead-maker as the subject of your first novel? Was there something larger than the story that inspired you?

 Click below:

Bead Bai Author interview in Kitaab: Asian Writing in English, Singapore

Bead Bai Review on Amazon.com
by Mehboob Habib 

5.0 out of 5 stars An amazing recollection of migration of South Asians from India to East Africa June 18, 2013

Sultan Somji has done an superb job of collecting personal stories from family/community Elders and weaved these stories into an amazing narrative of the trials and tribulations of a community in migration.