Review of 'Exquisite Cadavers' by Meena Kandasamy

Review of the Book Exquisite Cadavers by Meena Kandasamy

Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, the founders of the 1960s French literary movement “Oulipo”, believed in the generative potential of constraints, systematic rules, and self-restricting techniques to develop innovative literary texts. Inscribing herself into this trajectory, Meena Kandasamy, in the preface to Exquisite Cadavers, states her intention to write a novel based on the principles of Oulipo. The challenge she sets up for herself is to write a story as far removed from her life as possible. A masterful political novel is the result, with authorial decisions, inspirations, and plot points documented in the margins of the main body of the text.

As part of documenting her reflections, Kandasamy, in the preface, exposes the racial bias behind even sympathetic reception of art from the so-called Global South and the exclusionary nature of the literary avant-garde. Exquisite Cadavers, she writes, was conceived as a response to the reception of her last novel, When I Hit You, based on her own experience of a violent, abusive marriage. By relegating the novel to the status of a memoir, the reviewers brushed past the formal and artistic aspects of the novel’s construction, reducing the artist to her experience as a rape victim. In Kandasamy’s words, “No one discusses process with us. No one discusses our work in the framework of the novel as an evolving form. No one treats us as writers, only as diarists who survived.” She argues that artists from marginalized groups are often seen as the imitators of the postmodern novel, while the genre itself is commonly viewed as developing through Western innovation. This idea is reinforced by the choice of epigraph from M. NourbeSe Philip: “The purpose of avant-garde writing for a writer of colour is to prove you are human.” In this context, experimental writing for marginalized groups becomes a means to claim kinship in the postmodern novel as a genre rich with artistic and political possibilities.

The novel’s title derives its name from the French term cadavre exquis, a Surrealist technique of stringing together a set of words or images. The technique, in turn, is based on a French parlor game called Consequences, where each participant takes turns to draw on a piece of paper, fold it, and pass it along to the next, to eventually reveal a fragmented creature. Following this principle, the novel unfolds in two sections. On the right side is the love story of Karim and Maya. On the left, occupying a marginal space, and a smaller font are stories from Kandasamy’s life, her political influences, and explanations behind her creative choices. As these sections gradually unfold and intersect, the constructedness of the novel becomes apparent. It becomes politically necessary for Kandasamy to foreground her work’s artifice and align it explicitly with Oulipo and Surrealism in order to stake her claim over an intellectual tradition typically denied to writers like her.

From the outset, as one of the self-imposed constraints of an Oulipo, Kandasamy expresses her intention to separate the biographical from fiction. Yet, the autobiographical elements that she registers on the text’s margins spill over into the “main” text, blurring the boundaries between personal and fictional. One may ask if Exquisite Cadavers can exist without its margins; however, such a question is predicated on the assumption that the margin is a separable entity that can somehow be extracted from the novel proper. The margins are not merely experimental additions; they drive the text, adding theoretical and political arguments informed by the author’s material and lived experiences. Posing an enigmatic question, “Have the margins always remained disciplined?” Kandasamy invites the reader to see for themselves if it is at all possible to separate fact and fiction, novel and autobiography, form and content. The reader is actively encouraged to engage with the novel, just like in the French parlor game that inspired the title, where players can shape a fragmented trajectory to create a narrative of their choice.

The “main” text sets the scene of regular middle-class domesticity and tells the story of Karim, a Tunisian filmmaker, and Maya, his white-passing English wife of mixed-race origins. Their domestic idyll is tenuously constructed and the description carries the ominous hint of an impending collapse. The reader is led through the couple’s everyday struggles in a post-Brexit UK. Even as the novel speaks about the somewhat assimilatory process of homesteading and the coming together of a burgeoning interracial family, there are disruptive forces at work (casual racism, skyrocketing rents, intellectual dissatisfaction arising from creating art palatable to a White, middle-class audience), threatening to disrupt the façade of domesticity.

There are layered dynamics at work in Maya and Karim’s relationship: Maya’s cosmopolitan upbringing is contrasted by Karim’s acute awareness of his race and the attendant pressures of keeping his artistic and political vision alive in an environment driving him to self-commodify his art as an Arab man. While Karim tends to view everything, including his wife, through a filmmaker’s lens, Maya sees herself in various characters in films they watch together. They balance each other out, with Maya keeping him in thrall with her unpredictability and Karim balancing out her volatility with his pacifying behavior. While their relationship is far from perfect and characterized by frequent arguments, they stand firmly by each other, especially in the face of the incessant scrutiny coming from the outside world. Maya sees Karim, his artistic vision, his struggles, and people’s racist attitude toward him and drops everything to follow him to Tunisia. In turn, Karim senses the discomfort of Maya’s British and White friends in various social situations, bears all the racist jokes, and, in fact, makes jokes at his own expense to dispel discomfort and cement their social standing.

Exquisite Cadavers features relentless social commentary, uncovering exclusionary practices in life and art through juxtaposing fictional domestic struggles of the “main text” with the grim political realities of India, Kandasamy’s birthplace. The intertwining of the center and the margin creates a bricolage effect, reflected at multiple points throughout the novel. Karim’s film ideas, the novel’s cover art, fragments from dictionaries, statistics, news reports, movies, music, anthropology, and philosophy all contribute to creating a bricolage of a transnational milieu where multiple ethnicities, languages, and cultures come into contact. By detailing the violence of everyday racism both in the UK (her adopted country) and in India (her birthplace), Kandasamy crucially deconstructs the concept of home, emptying it of any easy romantic significances. If home is a place of refuge, is it still home when a right-wing state continues to kill, persecute, and arrest people who try to challenge its exclusionary narrative of Hindu homogeneity and Brahmin supremacy? Is home still a home if its very foundations lie in the coercive system of caste-based labor and discrimination? Is it still a home where every critical dissenting voice is silenced, censored, and discredited under manufactured charges of terrorism? It is up to the readers to decide. In one instant, Kandasamy derives her idea of home from Tamil poetics. The poetic formulation: Yaadum oore, yaavarum kelir (anywhere is home, everyone is kin) keeps her going as she packs up her life in India, meets new people, creates a budding family with her Belgian partner, and goes through the messy, transformative experience of giving birth, as described in the margins.

The delicate cocoon of Maya and Karim’s domesticity breaks towards the end of the novel with the sudden arrest of Karim’s brother, Youssef, on the fabricated charges of terrorism, evoking the real-life arrest of Kandasamy’s human rights activist friend, Rona Wilson. The narrative’s ending remains uncertain, presenting not one but four different possibilities. It remains up to the reader to decide and take charge of the narrative, steering it like players in the game of consequences from which the novel derives its lifeblood and name.