Analyse C. Ayappan’s “Ghost-Speech” as a Story of Bonds- Broken, Exposed and Forged.
Q1. Analyse C. Ayappan’s “Ghost-Speech” as a story of bonds- broken, exposed and forged.
C. Ayappan’s short-story, “Ghost-speech” is suffused with bonds of various kinds, at various levels. He very conveniently deploys the technique of magic realism to unveil these bonds as broken, exposed and forged. The bonds that pervade this story are correlative bonds of labour, caste, society and culture; agnatic bonds of relationships, lineage and illegitimacy; bonds of love, lust and incest; bonds of life, death and afterlife.
The story is a first-person narrative of the ghost of a young pulaya girl, the already dead protagonist of the story. The story is set-up in Kerala, and C. Ayappan, a Dalit short-story writer, poet, lyricist and a playwright from Kerala, uses an upper-caste Christian and Dalit-Christian setting for it. Ayappan proclaims, “Earlier I did not think I could write about my experiences. My writing is not realist; in fact, you could call its mode fantasy. Yet I write about a reality that is not just physical reality.” Therefore, as Ayappan claims, he mixes the elements of fantasy and realism to reveal a certain kind of reality that is beyond the capacity of physicality to reach. Similarly, in this ghost-discourse, the writer uses the device of magic realism to reveal the multifarious bonds or the connections between the upper-caste Christian family, the dead pulaya girl, and her family.
The bonds of parentage that get exposed in this story with the help of magic realist elements change the whole relationship dynamics of the characters in the story. The narrator’s true parentage is not only unknown to her, but also to her mother. Rosykutty’s uncle is also a prospective father of the narrator. The pulaya girl commits suicide to relieve herself of the heartache that Kunjakko inflicts upon her. The resolution of breaking her bonds with life entangles her into further bonds of death and afterlife that reveals her true parentage. Her parentage gets
C. Ayappan’s short-story, “Ghost-speech” is suffused with bonds of various kinds, at various levels. He very conveniently deploys the technique of magic realism to unveil these bonds as broken, exposed and forged. The bonds that pervade this story are correlative bonds of labour, caste, society and culture; agnatic bonds of relationships, lineage and illegitimacy; bonds of love, lust and incest; bonds of life, death and afterlife.
The story is a first-person narrative of the ghost of a young pulaya girl, the already dead protagonist of the story. The story is set-up in Kerala, and C. Ayappan, a Dalit short-story writer, poet, lyricist and a playwright from Kerala, uses an upper-caste Christian and Dalit-Christian setting for it. Ayappan proclaims, “Earlier I did not think I could write about my experiences. My writing is not realist; in fact, you could call its mode fantasy. Yet I write about a reality that is not just physical reality.” Therefore, as Ayappan claims, he mixes the elements of fantasy and realism to reveal a certain kind of reality that is beyond the capacity of physicality to reach. Similarly, in this ghost-discourse, the writer uses the device of magic realism to reveal the multifarious bonds or the connections between the upper-caste Christian family, the dead pulaya girl, and her family.
The bonds of parentage that get exposed in this story with the help of magic realist elements change the whole relationship dynamics of the characters in the story. The narrator’s true parentage is not only unknown to her, but also to her mother. Rosykutty’s uncle is also a prospective father of the narrator. The pulaya girl commits suicide to relieve herself of the heartache that Kunjakko inflicts upon her. The resolution of breaking her bonds with life entangles her into further bonds of death and afterlife that reveals her true parentage. Her parentage gets