GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK talks to Golbarg Bashi
Golbarg Bashi: I begin my interview with Professor Spivak with her impromptu recollections about her own mother, which was occasioned by her graciously inquiring about my children and the difficulties of negotiating between an academic career and motherhood.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: My grandmother, my father’s mother, also did not know how to read and write. Apparently she had retained a modicum of being able to read some, but not write. And she was, after a thorough investigation, given in marriage when she was five. But she remained in her father’s house. Around thirteen, when she came into my grandfather’s house in the village, she was as tall as I am now. I am her same shape. I never saw her — she died in 1928. But I know she was a woman of power. I’ve heard from a cousin who knew her from the village days. My cousin told me she was the one who really looked after the land and the tenants and so on, because my grandfather was a landowner’s manager, by the old system established by the British for tax collecting. And she, this woman of power, could not speak about the fact that she had cancer of the uterus, because that’s a shameful place for cancer, until she bled out and collapsed. My father was a doctor by then. I think he had passed his medical degree in Calcutta. If a woman cannot speak because of the shame in her body, even to her son, even to her husband, then you can’t do anything with all the medical education in the world. This is the thing that people don’t understand, that the change that has to come is an epistemic change. This woman of power, my grandmother, who was, my size and had to stand with her shoulders rounded due to her own image internalization, which in fact many women have today, even in the West — ‘I don’t want to be taller than my husband.’ You see?”
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