A SPINIFEX FEMINIST CLASSIC

There was once a man who thought he could do anything, even be a woman. So he acquired a baby, changed its diapers and fed the damn thing three times a night. He did all the housework, was deferential to men, and got worn out. But he had a brother, Jack Cleverfellow, who hired a wife and got it all done.

Suniti Namjoshi is elegant and subversive in creating new...

First there was the detective novel with its stubble-chinned PI. Then came the feminist super-sleuths. Feisty, fierce and real. Now there’s Figments of a Murder. And Babes. Babes is about lust. Babes is about power. But what else is she up to? In her world women are torn asunder by love and lust, by murder and menace. Babes says she calls the shots. But does she?

I had thought once that I felt most at home in a plane in mid-air, but that isn't true. I belong to India and to the West. Both belong to me and both reject me. I have to make sense of what has been and what there is. Suniti Namjoshi traverses the cultures of the East and of the West. She muses on the patterns of her life, and of the impact of colonisation, both the resistances and the...