Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows / Balli Kaur Jaswa / Morrow/HarperCollins / 2017
I picked up Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows per the recommendation of a Chicana gender studies professor I met in passing. I am immensely grateful for her recommendation. Like “Jane, the Virgin,” the novel toys with genre in genius and hilarious ways. Whereas “Jane, the Virgin” plays with the tropes of romantic comedies, romance novels, and telenovela, Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows plays with tropes of romance novels and—you guessed it—erotica. In doing so, it elevates erotica as a genre and engages in some good old-fashioned postmodern meta-analysis of erotica as a genre.
Before I go further, let me give a plot teaser. Nikki, a feminist law school dropout and British Indian, applies for a job teaching a woman’s writing workshop in Southall, UK’s little Punjab. She is bummed to find out rather than teaching creative writing, she was bait-and-switched into teaching a literacy class for a group made up largely of middle-aged widows. In one of the first few classes, Nikki accidentally leaves behind an erotica novel meant as a gag gift to one of her friends. When she returns to class, she discovers one of the widows reading the stories aloud for the rest of the group. Hilarity and drama ensue.
The workshop format allows for some great commentary on the tropes of erotica. There are hilarious sections where Nikki complains about the widows tendency to compare every phallus to a vegetable. It is fascinating to read the differences between the smutty, tawdry erotica, as created and narrated by the widows, and the steamier bits of the novel written in the elevated and more subtle tone of Jaswa’s narrator. The erotic provides powerful avenues into discussions of intergenerational trauma, gendered violence, femicide, gender relations, and modern vs tradtional lifestyles. It is awe-inspiring to watch Jaswa use erotica of all things to open up these conversations so naturally. There is a great amount of healing had, as Nikki’s writing workshop becomes a space for these women to process their grief and the injustices widows and women sometimes face in traditional Punjabi communities. The women value this opportunity to take pleasure in their stories and articulate their desires so much they are willing to risk the disapproval of powerful members and organizations of their community.
There is a very cinematic quality to the writing. This is at once one of the most fun aspects of the novel and perhaps also its greatest weakness. The dialogue is so witty and on cue, the scenes so snappy and brilliant, you may be too swept up to be annoyed by what may perhaps be a lack of realism. The transformation of Kulwinder, the novel’s antagonist, may happen a little too smoothly, so much so that it feels a bit like a movie. That said, I am immensely surprised this novel hasn’t been turned into a sitcom yet. It’s a goldmine! Someone needs to get on that.
What I might appreciate most about the novel, however, is that while it may draw readers in with a steamy promise of sexual content, a solid chunk of the narrative focuses on violence against women and a femicide in the Southall community. The novel shows a community grappling with the femicide, the power relations between the families involved, and prompts the reader to think of the not-so-uncommon femicides in our lives. If the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement and the #sayhername movement has taught us anything is how widespread and interwoven into the fabric of modernity gendered violence is. The erotica workshops end up empowering the women to use their voices in a way that directly challenges the authority of the patriarchal men in the community and those complicit in the femicide.
I loved this book. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in gender and sexuality studies, feminism, postcolonialism, diaspora, narrative pacing, and postmodernism.