Lucy’s language ladder’s cultural climb
Paula Xiberras
Black British by Hebe de Souza is a novel about trying to discover where we belong and how, even a place which seems quite alien to us and that does not share our cultural capital, can in fact be our home.
Talking of home Hebe is a big fan of Tasmania pointing out Cradle Mountain and bushwalking. Hebe also enjoys the drive to Launceston and admires the Tasmanian architecture. It is in Launceston, where friends live that Hebe hopes to visit next year.
It’s a suitable irony that the name Hebe means youth and this book is the coming of age of Hebe’s chief protagonist Lucy.
Lucy’s family migrated from Goa to Kanpur, a place where the language and religion were different to her own family’s language (originally Kondeni rather than Hindi) and faith (Catholic rather than Hindu).
However, the tangled connection to her birth home is symbolised by the serpentine story of the snake, or more precisely python that expires in the family’s backyard and is retrieved by her cousin.
Fast forward a number of years and while visiting the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland Lucy meets the same cousin who invites her to his home there where the pythons skin remains preserved and on display. The serpent symbolic of how we never dispense with our first home memories but they remain part of our ‘skin’ with us wherever we locate and connect us forever to our past.
The novel opens when Hebe’s protagonist returns to Kanpur beinng greeted by a stranger and ironically in her home country where she absent for many years is now the stranger
The displacement of Lucy and her sisters is explored throughout the novel in some very original incidents not necessarily the always the usual anecdotes of the coming of age novel, although some of those are there too, such as the kindly aunt who makes outfits for the girls that they of course do not like but are required to accept with delight. An example of the novel and Lucy’s originality is the main character’s altercations with the nuns at her convent school. In the clash of cultures Hebe’s character erupts when asked to address the nuns as ‘sisters’ and the head nun as ‘mother’ that they are not her sisters and mother. Eventually her beloved and wise uncle Hugh attends school with her to distract her from her discomfort.
Black India encourages us to consider the importance of language as a part of culture, how it is the glue that binds us together and how the loss of a language has profound implications for the loss of one’s cultural identity, as a language often has words unique to that culture. A quote in the book tells us that ‘to remove a language is a way of fracturing the social cohesion of a group’.
The book is also about burgeoning feminism and with the family of three girls it’s appropriate that the girls are encouraged to pursue the many options that are open to them and in their Uncles Hugh’s words ‘not to hold the ladder for someone else to climb’.
Hebe’s novel ‘Black British’ is out now published by Ventura Press.