As Rita grows older, she becomes more aware of a need to actually `belong' somewhere. So, when a messenger arrives, from India, looking for heirs to a distant family fortune, Rita jumps at the opportunity to travel to India, in search of her roots. At this point in the story, Maas really loses momentum -- her plot becomes contrived and she is reduced to cliches and cardboard, exoticizing depictions of Indians. In fact, the distant relative that Rita and Isabelle go to meet is connected to an old royal family (whose titles were taken away by the British). By introducing the royal relative called Rani, Maas begins to distinguish the rich traditions of India (as envisioned by westerners--the whole exotic notion of maharajahs, etc.). Maas writes:
To her right she looked down on two enormous stone elephants, facing each other with raised trunks touching as if in greeting, forming an archway closed off from the main courtyard by huge wooden doors, themselves ornately carved. Rita saw in her mind's eye those doors swing open, a turbaned sentry at each side, and the procession enter: the monarch and his councillors... (pg. 216)
However, Maas parallels opulent descriptions such as the one above with sordid descriptions of brothels in Bombay's red-light district:
The whole cubicle reeked of excretion. In the corner was a rusty potty covered with a folded newspaper, across which flies marched... The stench came mainly from that source. The walls had probably once been bright green but were encrusted with grey, mottled fungus, which emitted an odour of its own... (pg 428)
These two distinct descriptions -- a palace and a brothel --- seem to me, at least, representative of how a Westerner might perceive India -- the best and worst that this country has to offer. Ironic, because Rita isn't exactly a Westerner (if we perceive the West as encompassing those "developed" countries with large white populations -- Guyana doesn't fit into this category), yet, she carries on as though she were. Rita decries the old-fashionedness of India when she tells the messenger in Guyana, "Mr. Hanoman, people here don't find husbands and wives for their children, this isn't India. We stopped that long ago. We are free to find our own partners." (Maas, pg. 226) What a trite, and reductive statement -- I'm so tired of hearing about the arranged marriage issue -- it's almost as if there are no more nuances to explore in diasporic texts, so the arranged marriage thing is something to fall back on. It's a boring topic!
If I am being overly critical it's because I was under the impression that Maas was writing a story where a girl would travel to the country of her roots and do some soul searching. All I got was a tired text that revisited just about every stereotype (dirty Indians, sex-trafficking, opulent palaces) perceived in Western mainstream culture. Rita never gets past these stereotypes, and that really frustrated me -- especially since Maas ends the book with Rita being some sort of heroic figure (I won't say what she does) as a result of her westernized consciousness.
I was excited at the prospect of reading this book, namely because of its diasporic elements, but I ended up being really disappointed in the end. Peacocks Dancing had a promising start, but Maas ended up making too many surface distinctions based on the East/West divide. She hardly explored the subtle aspects of identity -- an element I've found to be quite paramount to diasporic texts.
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