Name: Exquisite Cadavers
ISBN: 9781786499653

Meena Kandasamy

"Karim and Maya are lovers. They share a home, they worry about money, and then Maya falls pregnant. But Karim is still finishing his film degree, pushing against his tutors' insistence that his art must be Arab like him. And Maya, working a zero-hours job and fretting about her family, can't find the time to quit smoking, let alone have a child. Framed with fragments and peppered with footnotes Exquisite Cadavers is at once a bricolage of influence, and a love story that knows no borders."--Provided by publisher.

Exquisite Cadavers

It's an experimental literature of tender character studies of two people, Maya and Kareem, newlyweds of a mixed marriage whose living becomes a sort of act of political warfare. 

"Such is the domino effect of abstract discourse: these critics carry forward his work, give it lustre and texture, lend it their white-white seal of approval so that he, animal-hearted African, desert-stranded Arabian in their eyes, can be let loose into the world allowed to forage for the story he is after."

Kandasamy writes with brilliant, poetic prose with a sharp wit. The entire book is quotable [and I would quote all of it if I could] because not one line wastes its words not to impart pertinent insight or opinion or criticism. It is a concise read that displays on parallel texts the author's brilliance and thoroughness in research as a poet and activist. The book could very well be called a short story collection as the chapters do not follow a chronological flow and are only interconnected through the couple. The chapters were realistic portrayals of domestic life, of love after transient youthful desire, of loss of girlhood in exchange for motherhood. 

Yet, Kandasamy's writing is so self-aware that it strikes as also criticism of these portrayals. Layered with politics and gender and race and art and the politics muddling all those, reminding me of Olivia Laing's book talk 'Art is Political'. It is a testament to the political, racial, and social issues currently simmering. Disrobing such issues that arise in and the white [also deep-rooted orientalist and Islamophobic] gaze that peers into every aspect of mixed marriages and motherhood. It made me realise just how deeply we wade through the thick, murky waters of politics, of internal racialism -- how the media frames a group of people as black and white cardboard cut-outs, affecting, colouring everyone's views in with their own colours. Everything has become woven with the iron thread that is politics. Even love is political.

fairuza hanun

It's an experimental literature of tender character studies of two people, Maya and Kareem, newlyweds of a mixed marriage whose living becomes a sort of act of political warfare. 

"Such is the domino effect of abstract discourse: these critics carry forward his work, give it lustre and texture, lend it their white-white seal of approval so that he, animal-hearted African, desert-stranded Arabian in their eyes, can be let loose into the world allowed to forage for the story he is after."

Kandasamy writes with brilliant, poetic prose with a sharp wit. The entire book is quotable [and I would quote all of it if I could] because not one line wastes its words not to impart pertinent insight or opinion or criticism. It is a concise read that displays on parallel texts the author's brilliance and thoroughness in research as a poet and activist. The book could very well be called a short story collection as the chapters do not follow a chronological flow and are only interconnected through the couple. The chapters were realistic portrayals of domestic life, of love after transient youthful desire, of loss of girlhood in exchange for motherhood. 

Yet, Kandasamy's writing is so self-aware that it strikes as also criticism of these portrayals. Layered with politics and gender and race and art and the politics muddling all those, reminding me of Olivia Laing's book talk 'Art is Political'. It is a testament to the political, racial, and social issues currently simmering. Disrobing such issues that arise in and the white [also deep-rooted orientalist and Islamophobic] gaze that peers into every aspect of mixed marriages and motherhood. It made me realise just how deeply we wade through the thick, murky waters of politics, of internal racialism -- how the media frames a group of people as black and white cardboard cut-outs, affecting, colouring everyone's views in with their own colours. Everything has become woven with the iron thread that is politics. Even love is political.

Exquisite Cadavers

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