My Name is Sita by Bea Vianen

She gathers her suitcases and leaves. Azaat didn't come home. His car isn't at the door. She is glad that she will no longer have to witness the unhappy couple's scenes, glad that she will no longer have to watch the spectacle of naked children wandering around with flies on their buttocks and fat lice on their heads. No, that's not true. She will remember these things like the death meal of black vultures in the middle of the road. The scrawny chickens dragged from their pens in the dead of night by possums and left for dead on the roadside, the stench, the sadness, the isolation, the powerlessness. You can't change any of it, all you can do is watch everything choke itself in the grabbing arms of the jungle, how the vermin devour all that is beautiful in those romanticized forests with their terrifying sounds, their giant birds with bright wings spread dangerously across the sky, screeching and cursing the world below, the tuberculosis, the leprosy, the poverty, the corruption.

My Name is Sita, by Surinamese writer Bea Vianen, begins with the narrator--Sita, called S.--confronting an old woman named Adjodiadei about her past. It's hinted that Adjodiadei had an affair with Sita's grandfather, which later resulted in his abandoning their family and returning to his native India, followed by the suicide of Sita's grandmother, and later the death of her mother. Sita lives in the wreckage of these events, in the home of a father who is alternately absent and authoritarian. As she grows into womanhood, Sita is largely left on her own devices, relying on her friend Selinha for advice, but even Selinha abandons her, becoming pregnant by a Hindu, much to the chagrin of her Muslim family. Sita then finds herself the attentions of a young man named Islam, who foists himself upon her, impregnates her, and then becomes a resentful and inattentive husband.

My Name is Sita is a story of cycles, of the patterns of poverty and neglect which seem to repeat themselves with brutal specificity. Sita ends up in more or less exactly the same place as her friend Selinha, caught the snare of an interreligious relationship that is anathema to her family, though Sita lacks even the love that her friend Selinha shares. And at the end of the novel, she ends up repeating the same choices that bred such resentment in her toward her grandfather: she accepts being disowned by Islam, and lets him have their child, so that she might leave Suriname behind and travel to the Netherlands for an education. From a bird's-eye view, it's a story about the legacy of South Asian emigration to South America, whose promises were so meager that they led to a second exodus, either to Europe or back to the Indian subcontinent. We are happy for Sita at the end of the novel, but what will happen to child, ominously given the same name as Sita's neglected brother Ata, and left behind with the cruel, neglectful Islam and his family?

I don't know much about Suriname; it seems like an interesting place. It's an island of Dutch influence surrounded by French and Spanish colonial culture, and a very tiny country, basically a single city perched on the edge of a great jungle. My Name is Sita wasn't my favorite novel--it had a kind of elliptic nature that often threw me out of the story--but it struck me as a fascinating image of the difficulties in living in such a place. And I have to express my gratitude toward the publisher, Sandorf Passage, for resurrecting and republishing it, as they did with The Case of Cem, and apparently lots of other less-remembered novels from around the world.

With the addition of Suriname, my "Countries Read" list is up to 102!