Meera Syal (born 1963) is a very popular English actress and
writer. She has written many screenplays and two novels. She has also won many
prestigious awards including Media Personality of the Year in 2001. She has
Indian roots and descendent of an Indian family. She was born in a small town
near Wolverhampton in the West Midlands. She has good education including a BA
in English drama from prestigious Manchester University.
In 1996,
Meera Syal wrote her first novel, Anita and Me which has
semi-autobiographical notes. The novel reflects her pain and experience as an
outsider child in British society with dark skin, who gradually realises and
recognises that she was the outsider and the ‘other’. This left an indelible
mark in her writings and screenplays.
On account
of growing racism towards outsiders in her home town, Syal and her family left
that town and moved to another place. The Anita and Me was nominated for
the Guardian Fiction Prize and won the prestigious Betty Trask Award for the theme
of racial equality.
Meera Syal was awarded an MBE in 1997
and won the ‘Media Personality of Year’ award at the Commission for Racial
Equality’s annual ‘Race in the Media’ awards (2000), as well as the EMMA (BT
Ethnic and Multicultural Award) for Media Personality of the Year 2001. (British Council, (https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/meera-syal).
Her other novel, Life isn’t All Ha Hee Hee is an
ironic and dry narration of ‘ethnic’ culture presently marketed and sold as a
style accessory in the Western world in which Chila and her two female friends are employed or exploited in the novel. Proctor writes:
On one level Life isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee
is a wry look at the way ‘ethnic’ culture
is currently marketed as a style accessory in the West and how Chila and her
friends either exploit or are caught up in that scene. Like her work to date,
Syal laughs at her protagonists without restoring to the usual clichés and
stereotypes... Her work in fiction and on-screen is exemplary for how it uses
humour to both challenge the limits of political correctness and to contribute
to a politicised understanding of British Asian culture. (Proctor n.pag.)
Syal’s
screenplay My Sister-Wife is no exception. In this screenplay, she
explores the predicament of the characters who live in western societies but
hug the customs and traditions of their original roots. It is a disastrous idea
for the migrants if they try to incorporate the norms and traditions of both
cultures into their lives.
The
presentation of the play by Meera Syal, One of Us catches the attention of the BBC. The BBC
gave Syal an assignment to write a script for a television show about the
Muslim women of Pakistan. She used this opportunity to show off her skills and wrote My Sister-Wife. Clash of
ages in Meera Syal’s play My Sister-Wife
is one of the major themes. In the play, Syal attempts to present a clash of
ages with an intersectional feminist presentation. The
clashes are dominant in the life of the immigrants to Europe from Asia. It
aims to corroborate the story by following the
analysis of characters, culture, religion, and ages.
Meera Syal
was studying English and Drama at Manchester University, when her stage play, One
of Us, came to the attention of the BBC. Syal was commissioned to write her
first television script, on the subject of Pakistani marriage. She relished the
opportunity, pointing out that “the pleasure of writing as an Asian woman is
the pleasure of exploding stereotypes”. The resulting feature-length drama, My
Sister-Wife, was a joint winner in the TV Drama category of the Commission
for Racial Equality’s Race in the Media Award. (http://www.screenonline.org.uk/).
For this project, “...Syal cooperates with Asmaa Pirzada who makes a research
on four sister-wives in London” (Ranasinha 254).
Polygamy among Pakistani Muslims is the core of the screenplay My Sister-Wife and this article. To exemplify the key
points, the playwright tries to emphasise the character-analysis style to
converse with the theme of the suffering of Pakistani Muslim women in a new,
liberal, open, and inclusive western culture. This style is very apt to
describe the dilemma of characters crushed between their intolerant traditions
and the modernised and open life in their new western adopted homeland.
Farah is a young, attractive,
ambitious, and successful Muslim woman of conservative Pakistan origin. She was trapped in love with a
cheat, Asif Shah who hid his marriage and two
grown-up daughters. She was shocked to know the truth about his marriage and
daughters and decided to break the relationship because he was already married already and "He’s
a liar, mummy. He lies at me No-one lies at me" (Scene
5).
However, Farah was
obsessed with love with Asif and her parents used this infatuation,
particularly her mother Mumtaz who tricked her
into marrying Asif. The mother brainwashed Farah that
he had just married his first wife, not for love but for family tradition,
while he truly loves Farah. Moreover, his marriage to his first wife is not legally registered in Britain; hence, it is
null and void.
In traditional Islam, women enjoy a
secondary status because she is looked upon and treated as the weaker sex (zaifah)
who is: emotional, irrational, unpredictable, irresponsible, indecisive, risk aversive
and mischievous and therefore is in need of man’s constant supervision,
protection and domination. (Kusha n.pag.).
Mumtaz was a greedy woman who had her
eyes on the wealth of Asif. She feels that the marriage is a suitable prospect
for her daughter to enjoy his wealth because
Asif is an affluent young man. Due to her rigid and fundamental leanings, she
was comfortable with her daughter marrying a man who was already married
because he belonged to the same religion and race. The mother used every trick
to convince her daughter to marry any Pakistani Muslim
even if he is not a proper match for her beautiful young daughter, "Could not get me to marry the village idiots in
flares your friends kept suggesting. Asif is rich and brown so he’ll do...I’ll
fab in the harem and if Maharaj-ji
gets bored, he can swap me for a bloody camel"
alleged Farah (Scene 5).
Farah was an educated woman, and she was
conscious of her rights as a woman in the secular British system. The national
objectives of British society have been defined very clearly. The aim is to
provide every citizen with the basic needs and complete freedom to have a life
of his or her own choice. However, Islamic society denies this right to women.
The aim is to create a democratic society that is strong and free, in which
every citizen, irrespective of religious beliefs and preaching, will occupy an
equal and honoured place and be given full and equal opportunities for growth
and marriage. It aspires at ending religious
oppression based on religion and doing away with present inequalities based on
gender and religion.
Muslim women have been fighting for
their human rights all over the world. They are facing discrimination and
violence both in Islamic and non-Islamic countries. This is often connected to
the obligation to dress as Muslim women and cover their head or entire body.
(Soltanoi n. pag.)
However, the fundamentalist mother of
Asif convinces her daughter in the name of "Honour
[and] duty to the family" (Scene 5). The mother further advocates the case
of cheat Asif that if he divorces his first
wife, it would again shame him in the eyes of Farah’s family and friends.
Furthermore, the mother of Farah adds that she can live cheerfully with the man, first, she loves,
and second, he is wealthy and can adjust easily
as I did: "love is simple", added
Mumtaz who has passed
her life with the large family of Tariq, her husband, and whom she met for the
first time only at the wedding night.
The
writer Meera Syal tells the readers how irrationally and forcefully the parents
of Farah and Asif ignore gender equality, geographical liberty, and the gap
between the two generations. They impose their faith and will on them and feel
that what suits them and their generation in Pakistan will suit their daughter.
The parents were also unmindful of the huge
cultural gap between the fanatic Pakistani culture and the liberal and secular
Western British culture. They transported this fanatic culture to Britain.
Internally, Farah
herself has submitted herself to the fundamental traditional values of her
family. Yielding to this tradition, Farah admitted that only marriage can make
a woman a decent woman, "Finding respectability at twenty-nine and
two-third..." (Scene 10) mumbled Farah to herself on her wedding day and
her first night.
Ruvani Ranasinha, in her
famous book, South Asian
Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation, dedicated a full chapter to evaluate the efforts of Meera Syal and Hanif Kureishi as they are described as ‘cultural mediators’
through their literary and creative works. Even such a great writer could not
understand the divided self of Farah and other such types
of women. Ranasinha writes:
Kureishi’s and Syal’s work charts the
uneasy relationship between post-colonialism and multiculturalism, addressing,
in particular, the legacy of colonialism, and its efforts on immigrants and
their descendants in contemporary Britain. What is distinctive about their
generation is that they act as cultural translators, in their mediations
between majority and minority communities rather than between countries. The
politics of first-generation migrant writers’ reconstitution of the foreign
country for the target Western audience contrasts with the later minority genre
that juxtaposes, challenges and reinforces dominant notions of their
communities. (Ranasinha 221)
Farah was born
and brought up, educated and preserved for a thriving career in England and is
leading a very happy life. Yet, she could not resist marrying an already
married elderly man with two daughters. However, she was trapped in love with
the man she loved very passionately, and he was already a married man, Asif
Khan. Asif lives with his mother, first wife, and two daughters in one huge
house. He dupes Farah by claiming she is his only true love and that he was
looking for her.Yet, Farah sees frequently that Asif visits
to make love with his first wife, Maryam who
has already mothered two daughters with Asif.
Maryam always lives
in a hidden dark world. No one outside the
family of Asif knows anything about Maryam and her marriage to Asif. People
have no idea that she is the wife of Asif. Their first marriage was not legally
registered in Britain. Her only duty is to cook and do the shopping for
household needs every day. She is very submissive, obedient, and looks after
the household needs very well because she has no other choice.
The film revolves around Muslim ideals of femininity.
According to the Koran, a man is legally entitled to “possess” up to four
wives. Farah and Maryam are engaged in a cruel battle to win the commitment and
love of their husband, Asif. Maryam emerges as the ‘winner’, as the woman who
retains her sanity. Farah's descent into madness is attributed by her advisor,
Fauzia, to her adherence to Western values, which equate sharing with weakness.
(Shalini n. pag.)
Maryam discovers a competitor in Farah.
Both were trying to outdo each other to please and satisfy Asif. Paradoxically, both believe that Asif likes the
style and form of others. Maryam begins to appear as a modern woman. She begins
to wear stylish western dresses; starts cutting her black long hair in stylish
western looks; drives a car; gets a job in the company of her rival Farah and starts working. She becomes very bold and
aggressive, like a modern woman, and starts to treat her husband rudely and is
rude enough to scold him, saying "shut up." Contrary to this, Farah starts to
wear conventional Pakistani clothes and stops getting hair-cuts.
In her
article “Citizenship and Gender in Asian-British Performance,” Meenakshi
Ponnuswami concludes “the complexity and insight of My Sister-Wife lie
in Syal’s sympathetic attitude if the cautionary portrayal of Farah’s longing
for an ethnic home to be nostalgic about; Syal suggests that the inability to
relinquish a sentimental t to an imagined history endangers rather than
empowers women” (48). Syal, in My Sister-Wife, is essentially concerned
with the diversity between the values and convictions of the children of the
first generation of immigrants.
Rather than focusing on conflicts
between cultures, she portrays the discord between generations within the same
community. This focus on the differences between two generations within one
community forms the basis of her appeal to new generations of readers, for whom
these differences may be part of their own experience. (Ranasinha 225)
The rigid and fundamental
first-generation immigrants in My Sister-Wife
are represented by the parents of Farah and Asif
who very strongly cling to their convictions and traditions. Mother of Asif, Sabina forces to prepare traditional
health tonics at home. She compels everyone to give those healthy drugs
to children, and shockingly, parents also allow those drugs enthusiastically.
The strictest of those is known as the Hanbali
school and forms the basis of hard-line currents in Islamic thought, including
Saudi's ultra-conservative Wahhabism and variants of Salafism. It
is this current that has further isolated women in the eyes of the law in
states where Islamic law is practised or enshrined. (Dina Elbasnaly, Lewis
Sanders IV).
Farah's pleas to shift to another house
have no impact on stubborn Asif. He does not budge even when Farah tells him
that his mother has given her medicine that can kill her child instantly. Asif
was not ready to smash the family traditions. He refused to live in a separate
house with his second wife. The bitter dramatic irony is that the play happens
in a very modern and civilised country and culture that has a very modern,
liberal, and progressive culture and the best medical facilities available
there.
The women’s reversal of roles testifies
to the authority of the traditional Pakistani husband. Frighteningly expressive
in her silence, and wearing a dark veil covering half of her face, Maryam at
first carries out her duty as an obedient wife and servant with precision. But
when Maryam gets a job and starts to wear Western clothes, make-up and
jewellery, Farah becomes withdrawn and subdued. Housebound, pregnant and pale,
she takes to her bed, usurping Maryam’s role as abject ghost-figure of the
haunted house. In their periods of silence, Asif's two wives are equally
desperate to understand their confusing position in this Western-Asian world.
(Shalini n. pag.).
Farah was
torn between two cultures ― one was dark but still alive, and the other modern
but powerless to smash the darkness. In the beginning, Farah is a symbol of
resistance but in the next part, she surrendered herself to the Islamic
patriarchy. She lost all the courage to smash Islamic patriarchy and enlighten
the enslaved other women in the misogynistic Islamic world. Syal says that “she
visits India at the age of twenty-two and finds out that the first generation
of immigrants clings to traditions which are outdated in its homeland. Asif's
mother symbolizes that generation that clings to traditions that have already
been neglected in its home” (Ranasinha 225).
The mother of Asif, Sabia, tries to
convince the two wives of Asif that the best and the easiest
way to achieve Asif’s love and favour is to deliver a baby boy. She takes Farah
to a witch for magic called Mata-ji to prepare her mixture that ensures that a baby
boy will be born to Farah. Farah saw many women who were seeking the blessing
and help of the same witch. Hence, the first generation of immigrants took this
evil and formed its ethnic customs in Britain. Farah also falls prey to the
witch Mata-ji and her witchcraft.
She firmly believes that the Mata-ji
has supernatural healing powers. The mental condition of Farah begins to worsen
as she loses her first child due to the potions of Sabina. She has such blind
faith in a witch, Mata-ji
that she ignores the advice of her educated English friend, Poppy:
Farah: how can we resolve anything when
there's always another person to run to when things go wrong. She’s got some
potion from that Mata-ji witch Southall. She put a spell on him….
Poppy: listen to yourself. You’re an
intelligent woman, you have got a career….you have to get out of there!....
Farah: because if I can get him into my
own space, I can fight her if I could have a baby, I know I could get him
back....
Poppy: I’m a woman. No woman I know
could live like this. (Scene 65)
Farah
becomes obsessed with the thought that she must recapture Asif and thinks that
delivering a baby boy is the lone way to win the favour of her husband. She finds out that Asif has coerced
Maryam to abort because the foetus was a girl. Then she begins to converse to the ghosts of the four sister-wives who come into
sight only to her. Asif calls Farah ‘the madwoman in the attic.’ She even notes the start and finish times of Asif
and Maryam sex time sessions. Finding that
Maryam was expecting again, she conspired to poison her with the tonics she
bought from the witch. However, accidentally Asif
is poisoned and dies. Ultimately, both the wives failed to give birth to a baby boy. With
this accident, Meera Syal symbolises the death of Islamic patriarchy that
represses itself through its evil means.
There are moments of extraordinary
visual poetry, notably a scene where Maryam after Asif goes away, offers Farah
a hand (literally) in friendship. The camera cuts from a close-up of the two
women sitting on the stairs ― their faces engulfed in shadows ― to a
high-angle shot of the pair partly obstructed by imposing wooden balustrades.
Their facial expressions are no longer readable; all we see is Maryam’s
illuminated palm reach out to Farah, who grasps and holds it in her hand. For a
moment, the gesture seems genuine. It is all the more disturbing that, in the
ensuing events, any chance of female solidarity is abandoned as the women
murderously compete for their husband’s devotion. (Shalini n.pag.)
In the play,
women are oppressors of women and oppressed too and support Islamic patriarchy
and polygamy. Mumtaz, Sabina, Mata-Ji, Maryam, and Farah ― all the characters
carry out these evils. Mumtaz and Sabina force Farah and Maryam to accept
polygamy. Magic-player Mata-ji gives potions to Maryam and Farah to control
Asif and give birth to a baby boy.
Maryam and Farah compete for Asif’s
love by trying to produce a male heir, underling the degree to which they are
enmeshed in patriarchy. The text offers no solutions but tends towards a
nuanced critique of polygamy. Syal suggests that the script took a polygamous
set up in a wealthy family as a metaphor for the painful adaptation processes
facing women of my generation. (Ranasinha 257)
Asif also realises that polygamy is
evil and admits it while talking to his friends:"...I
am honest with my wife. Suppose that’s my burden, coming from a primitive culture" (199). Asif confesses but surrenders
to the burden of cultural practices he
perseveres to internalise and for which he finally has to pay a very heavy
price.
Sabina and her son, Asif are dead at the end. The play symbolises an intersectional feminist reading
and Islamic patriarchy for the distress of the immigrants who leave their
homeland due to religious fundamentalism and poverty. However, in the new land,
they have no courage to shun those evils. The play is a message to be
open-minded and the characters should adjust to the new, better life. Being a
good woman or man does not mean surrendering to intersectional feminism or the
patriarchal model of life. It is a misogynist model.
Despite being a child of the Indian
Diaspora, Meera’s narrative is distinct from the majority of diasporic writing
in that it reveals an affection for the local village community, rather than
the tropes of transatlantic travel preferred by writers such as Salman Rushdie
and V. S. Naipaul. (Proctor n.pag).
To conclude, the play presents the
quandary of the immigrant characters who are connected to their rigid society
and ethnicity, but they carry the burden to implement
those values in a new liberal and forward
culture. It is not only the oppression of women but
men are also the
victim. Asif could have easily lived either with Farah or Maryam but he keeps both of the wives and the
children. The mother, Mumtaz, Sabia, wives
Maryam, Farah, and husband Asif ― all internalise the Islamic patriarchy. Women and
men, particularly the first-generation immigrants in the play, are both, the oppressor and oppressed.
The play conveys the
idea that men and women must have the courage to choose a superior life and a
better future with self-respect. They should not follow their faith blindly in
life. The play shows that blind submission to senseless traditions may lead to
disastrous outcomes. The play is an excellent study of the clash of the ages
and of intersectional feminism.
Web Cited
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