Mother-Weights and Lost Fathers

That parent-child relationships should play a significant role within South Asian American literature is perhaps no surprise, since this is crucial material for any writer. But the particular forms they so often take – a dysfunctional mother-daughter dynamic, leading to the search for maternal surrogates; and the figure of the prematurely deceased father – are more perplexing. Why do families adhere to these patterns in so many South
Asian American texts and what does that tell us about this œuvre? More precisely, why are mothers subjected to a harsher critique than fathers and what purpose does this critique serve? How might we interpret the trope of the untimely paternal death? In this article I will seek to answer these questions – arguably key to an understanding of this growing body of writing – by considering works produced between the 1990s and the early twenty-first century by a range of South Asian American writers.

Mother-weights and maternal mysteries
The prominence of maternal themes within this literature perhaps relates to the high number of South Asian women writers published in the USA. 1 Women's writing is, after all, often matrilineal in its need for female role models and its urge to empower the older generation, especially in traditionally colonial and patriarchal contexts. Within the particular works under consideration here, the relationship between the usually female protagonist and her biological mother may take different forms, but it is paradigmatically difficult. Fictional mothers are variously depicted as small-minded, materialistic, controlling and unsympathetic towards their daughters. Thus, in Meena Alexander's novel, Manhattan Music (1997), Sandhya's mother, Sosa, is portrayed as critical and implacable and Sandhya emigrates from India to the United States in part to escape this bad relationship, as do the main characters of other novels: Gita in Kirin Narayan's Love, Stars, and All That (1994), and Priya in Amulya Malladi's The Mango Season (2003). Priya's problematic relationship with her 'Ma' is mirrored by the aggression between Ma and her own mother and, although Priya may believe that by leaving Hyderabad for the US she has broken this vicious circle of mother-daughter animosity, hostilities resume almost as soon as she returns from America: 'it had just been three days, but I was already tired of being in India, at home, and especially tired of my mother' (Malladi 12; emphasis in original). Malladi establishes an ostensibly inextricable connection here between the motherÁdaughter relationship, ideas of nationhood and home as domestic space, 2 ideas which I will return to a little later.
Such thinking is not limited to fictional texts. Indeed, when Alexander recalls a visit from her own mother to New York in her memoir, Fault Lines (1993), she considers that the fact . . . I had married a man of my choice, come with him to another country, given birth, and found myself a university job, all in short order, none of that counted. What I felt was the burden of her on my soul, a gravitational pull, a mother-weight. What she felt inside her gave me no room, and I did not have the suppleness of spirit to speak to her. (163) Connected to this notion of an oppressive and inescapable maternal presence or 'mother-weight' is the deployment of what one might term a 'maternal mystery', which often drives plot and character development in fictional works through questions surrounding a protagonist's mother. A case in point is Vineeta Vijayaraghavan's novel, Motherland (2001). Brought up for the first four years of her life in southern India by her maternal grandmother, Ammamma, Maya is then sent to America to join her mother, Kamala. The particular maternal mystery underpinning the novel Á explored through Maya's return to the ancestral homeland one summer at the age of fifteen Á is connected to the reasons behind Kamala's earlier decision to leave her daughter behind. Their relationship has in fact never recovered from Maya's powerful sense of abandonment by her mother and seems to have broken down irreparably, its dysfunctionality apparently well beyond the classic problems of adolescents and their parents.
The reader is forced, for much of the novel, to question Kamala's actions. In a cyclical movement of past, present and future, it is only by returning to India, the site of her grandmother's home, that Maya can discover what actually happened * Kamala was too traumatised to look after her as a baby because Maya's twin sister had died. Kamala then blamed her mother for the tragedy since it had been her idea for Kamala to give birth in India rather than America where, Kamala believes, more advanced medical facilities would have ensured her baby's survival. Rather like Maya, Kamala has to return to India Á to attend to her own dying mother Á in order to achieve reconciliation, healing and forgiveness with both her mother and Maya. The symbolic moment of Ammamma's death therefore allows Kamala to take on her full role of mother to Maya. Indira Ganesan's earlier novel, Inheritance (1997), anticipates the central premise of Motherland through its protagonist, Sonil, who also returns from the US at the age of fifteen to her grandmother's South Asian home hoping to discover why her mother, Lakshmi, deserted her. Although the characters and situations in Inheritance are less psychologically developed than those of Motherland, the narrative relies on the strikingly similar notion that only with the death of Sonil's maternal grandmother can Lakshmi tell her daughter why she could not bring her up.
South Asian matriarchs are sometimes presented as loving figures Á for instance, Mira in Beena Kamlani's short story, 'Brandy Cake' (1999), and Leela in Kavita Daswani's novel, For Matrimonial Purposes (2003) Á yet even where they are depicted more favourably, they embody ancestral ways, and not necessarily in a positive sense. Their defence of certain traditional customs, such as arranged marriage and a woman's duty to stay at home, allows writers to question such mores. As Marianne Hirsch has argued: there can be no systematic and theoretical study of women in patriarchal culture . . . no theory of women's oppression, that does not take into account woman's role as a mother of daughters and as a daughter of mothers, that does not study female identity in relation to previous and subsequent generations of women, and . . . that relationship in the wider context in which it takes place: the emotional, political, economic, and symbolic structures of family and society. (202) Although Hirsch is here addressing Western feminist concerns in the early 1980s, her statement suggests that maternal issues provide an especially rich prism through which to understand South Asian American women, with their roots in a traditionally 'patriarchal culture', especially at the firstgeneration stage. Thus, in The Mango Season, Malladi critiques what she views as the limited opportunities on offer to Indian women trapped by patriarchal expectation, whilst highlighting their own failure to challenge and liberate themselves from particular societal norms. In this sense, her writing exhorts Indian women to be more self-determining, but her implication is that they can more readily achieve this in the brave new world of America.

Surrogate mothers
In Love, Stars, and All That, Narayan qualifies her critique of South Asian motherhood by demonstrating that India is where Gita can receive unconditional love * from her unofficial surrogate mother, Saroj Auntie. This situation suggests that return visits to India, however troubling and problematic, can be rescued and redeemed by a sympathetic figure in loco parentis. Both Love, Stars, and All That and Vijayaraghavan's Motherland show that the theme of replacement mothers Á in the latter case, a role played by Maya's maternal grandmother Á is almost as important as the trope of the dysfunctional, absent, emotionally unavailable or unloving biological matriarch and that it in fact provides a necessary narrative alternative. In other words, the 'wicked stepmother' motif of Western fairy tales is reversed, since surrogate, rather than biological, mothers appear to be better placed to provide maternal love * and have apparently given more consideration to the matter.
The eponymous protagonist of Jhumpa Lahiri's short story, 'Mrs Sen's' (1999), is more nurturing to Eliot, the white American boy in her care, than his single, working mother in this South Asian American version of traditional US narratives in which carers of colour offer Caucasian children superior protection to that of their biological parents. Returning to Indian terrain, Alexander's novel, Nampally Road (1991), presents Mira's birth mother as a notable presence-asabsence, and when Mira moves to Hyderabad after studying in Britain, she instead forges a bond of love with Durgabai, a wise older doctor, whose name means 'little mother'. At the most obvious level, Mira does this to compensate for her failed relationship with her own family who 'were strangers to me' (104). At a more figurative level, such free-thinking older women as Durgabai and Saroj Auntie offer an alternative model of Indian womanhood, although the suggestion is that the greater freedom they enjoy and the higher degree of loving support they can offer have come at a price: Durgabai is a widow, whose son lives abroad, and Saroj is unwillingly childless.
The notion of maternal surrogacy also reflects the tradition, within the more affluent strata of Indian society, of ayahs (or nursemaids) to perform activities which such figures as the cold and unsympathetic Mama in Anita Desai's novel, Fasting, Feasting (1999), refuse to countenance (compare Jain 1658, 1660n). In Fault Lines Alexander recollects that, as a child, she was 'constantly circled by guardians', including 'three ayahs' (87); and Daswani critiques the Mumbai bourgeoisie in For Matrimonial Purposes through the figure of Indu, a beautiful socialite whose slender white fingers, tips coloured a brilliant pink, [were] amazingly unchipped given she had two infant boys. (It must have to do with the fact that the feeding, changing and washing were all left to others). (71) Ginu Kamani's short story, 'Lucky Dip ' (1995), similarly attacks India's social elite through its depiction of surrogate maternity; its protagonist, Maya, is a young girl cared for by her ayah, cooked for by a servant, and entertained by her grandmother. Her mother is too busy socialising to play any active role in Maya's daily life and even complains when asked to join in one of her daughter's games. The ayah, forced to earn her living caring for someone else's child (compare Hai 420n), is heartbroken to be separated from her own daughter but when Maya suggests to a classmate, Savitri, that Maya's mother may be able to reunite the ayah with her daughter, Savitri retorts 'We'll ask Mummy . . . No Mummy cares about other people's children' (Kamani 36). Deploying 'Mummy' as a scathingly ironic, anglophone shorthand for the indifference to children imputed to middle-and upper-class Indian women, Kamani implies that the poor have more humanity than the wealthy * mordant social comment framed through an explicit attack on the institution of surrogate motherhood.
Although writers betray an explicit discomfort vis-à-vis these traditional practices, they also exercise a protectiveness towards them. Thus, a wealthy, unnamed woman in Motherland defends boarding schools by arguing that 'parents are not always the best people to raise their own children' (Vijayaraghavan 74), while Sonil argues in Inheritance that her upbringing by aunts is culturally acceptable because Indian 'parenting' often involves 'other relatives' (Ganesan 56). Revealingly, however, this explanation of her circumstances does little to assuage the pain of her mother's rejection. Writers' blend of pride and disquiet towards issues of maternal surrogacy generates an interesting tension whereby this theme is both worthy of comment and straightforwardly accepted as part of an apparently rigid social world. The treatment of non-biological mother figures or 'motheringwomen' (Reyes 9), who span socio-economic backgrounds, begs wider questions, then, about what kinds of audience writers are addressing * a point reinforced by an element of ethnographic explanation, by turns defiant and uneasy, which suggests that a non-South Asian readership is generally assumed.

The function of fathers
In contrast to these portrayals of unsatisfactory motherÁ daughter relationships Á and the concomitant need for maternal surrogates Á are the affectionate ties which exist in these works between women and their fathers. In the nonfictional context of S Mitra Kalita's Suburban Sahibs (2003), a work of extended reportage, Pradip Kothari and Harish Patel are ambitious for their daughters in the United States. This is in fact Harish's raison d'être, rather as it is for Mahesh Vasi, albeit in a more sinister sense, in Nikita Lalwani's British Asian novel, Gifted (2007). Such texts thus offer feminist variations on the stereotype of the tough immigrant patriarch anxious only for his sons to succeed. In The Mango Season, moreover, Priya's father provides a positive embodiment of India, offering unconditional love and unquestioning acceptance of his daughter, and it is through Priya's relationship with him that Malladi's story draws its greatest emotional force.
The combination of Priya's respect for her father and dismissive attitude towards her mother could be read as misogynist, yet the easier understanding here between father and daughter signals that, in a largely patriarchal culture, women's fathers can sometimes be more empowering to them. For Hirsch, this is because a 'mother projects upon her daughter her own ambivalence about being female' (206). Alexander has commented that, as a young woman: my mother didn't approve of me writing at all . . .
[she] thought I should be a good needlewoman, learn how to make good sambar . . . and take care of my husband. I should have a certain amount of education but not too much. My father . . . was a scientist who said to me once . . . 'When I write a scientific paper, I publish it. If you write a poem, you should publish it' . . . Otherwise I had no encouragement within the family. It happens a lot in patriarchal societies that fathers encourage their daughters because they're the ones who can . . . There's no easy way the mother could encourage the daughter to go into the public domain . . . Women writers . . . have had fathers who enabled them in some way Á look at Virginia Woolf's father Á rather than mothers, who gave them something else. (quoted in Maxey 25) A more common paradigm in these works, however, is the absent or deceased patriarch: Gita's father died when she was very young in Love, Stars, and All That; Renu lost her father as a teenager in Ganesan's novel, The Journey (1990); and in several of Chitra Divakaruni's stories in The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (2001), a father has either left ('The Love of a Good Man') or died ('The Intelligence of Wild Things', 'The Blooming Season for Cacti', 'The Names of Stars in Bengali'). In Lahiri's short story, 'A Temporary Matter' (1999), Shukumar loses his father while still an undergraduate, an event which prompts him to study India professionally; while Lahiri's novel, The Namesake (2003), explores, in a more sustained and considered manner, the impact of Ashoke's death on his son, Gogol. Similarly, Sameer Parekh's novel, Stealing the Ambassador (2002), is marked by Vasant's death and the ways in which his son, Rajiv, struggles to come to terms with this. And in two début cinematic features Á M Night Shyamalan's Praying with Anger (1992) and Krutin Patel's ABCD (1999) Á South Asian American protagonists have lost their father. 3 In each of these works, the leading character, usually second-generation, is in early life and, in each case, a father's death is considered to be premature.
Following their parents' deaths, Raj and Nina, the eponymous 'ABCDs' or 'American-Born Confused Desis' in the film, ABCD, 4 choose hegemonic, white American culture through their selection of white partners over the Indian ones their mother had urged upon them. Raj and Nina's rejection of their ancestral culture implies that assimilation into 'mainstream' (read, 'white') America has been made possible because their parents' deaths have freed them from traditional expectations. Indeed, the trope of parental death has been used as a way of superficially and speedily resolving more complex cultural dilemmas. One wonders what would have happened if their father and mother had survived. Patel, the film's writer-director, appears to have facilitated a tidy, if problematic, dénouement through the figure of premature parental death.
In The Namesake, Ashoke's sudden death might, at first sight, be interpreted as a similarly convenient plot device. As for Raj and Nina, this death is almost a filial punishment for Gogol since, before his father died, Gogol had, like them, neglected his family and avoided their wishes and values, to sometimes hurtful effect. But Ashoke's passing exercises the opposite effect on Gogol to Raj and Nina because it propels his decision to embrace his heritage through an inter-ethnic marriage to Moushumi, a fellow Bengali American. The connection between this marriage and Ashoke's death is spelled out by Lahiri's narrator: 'Gogol is aware, without having to be told, that his father's death has accelerated certain expectations, that by now his mother wants him settled' (The Namesake 191). As Pankaj Mishra has noted, Gogol is motivated by guilt (44), and this sensation combines with regret and a heartfelt desire for a kind of vicarious closeness to his father now that it is too late to achieve this directly.
For both Gogol in The Namesake and Rajiv in Stealing the Ambassador, the early death of a father, and the things left unsaid between parent and son, are complicated by questions of cultural identity * in particular, problems of cultural belonging for the son, coupled with a broader discomfort towards parental values. Such difficulties are rendered more poignant and confusing by bereavement and the painful mixture of filial guilt and remorse it elicits. In both cases, however, the death of a father proves pivotal, since it leads Gogol to marry (albeit unsuccessfully) in a bid to preserve Bengali culture in America, and it results in Rajiv's trip to India and the opportunity to forge a stronger bond with his paternal grandparents. Recalling Motherland, Rajiv also learns during this visit to India that Vasant's relationship with his own father was tense and unresolved, rather like that between Vasant and Rajiv.

Conclusion
Each of these works refers, by implication, to a specific historical moment, ranging from the 1950s (Fault Lines) and 1960s ('Lucky Dip') to the 1990s (The Namesake) and into the twenty-first century (For Matrimonial Purposes), yet they present South Asian parentÁchild dynamics as part of an essentially unchanging landscape. Although this move may be interpreted as part of a wider tendency by members of the South Asian diaspora to regard the ancestral country and its culture as remaining atrophied within a remembered or imaginary past (Ganguly 29Á31,40,44), it does not account for writers' continued reliance on such schematic archetypes as the unfeeling birth mother, the warm maternal surrogate and the prematurely deceased biological father. Starting with the first trope, one explanation might be that the difficulty faced by these fictional characters in relation to their biological mothers Á a form of 'matrophobia' in Lynn Sukenick's phrase (quoted in Hirsch 202) Á allows them to flee traditional expectations through emigration to the United States. As we have seen, South Asian mothers, and the bad relationships they signify, provide justification for leaving. Radhika Mohanram has even gone so far as to argue, discussing 'Her Mother' (1991), a short story by Anjana Appachana, that 'mothers and daughters cannot have a relationship while in India' (34). Or as Firoze puts it in Love, Stars, and All That: I used to look down on people who'd come from the Third World to be educated in America and Europe and who then would just stay. I thought they were selfish, that it was their duty to go back. Like Gita: she never spoke of returning. I couldn't understand it, a smart woman like her and all she could do in India. Now I see that there were things about her background that she was escaping, that dreadful mother and who knows what else. (Narayan 200) Firoze is right to read Gita's decision in personal terms, and Bapsi Sidhwa makes Feroza Ginwalla, the protagonist of her novel, An American Brat (1994), ask herself similar questions when she decides to settle in late 1970s America rather than return to Pakistan. Yet the sheer repetition of these ideas across a succession of texts, produced over two decades, suggests a lingering sense of anxiety and even guilt about emigration among certain writers. For this reason, South Asia must remain the realm of the 'mother-weight' and, where women cannot emigrate Á for example, Sowmya in The Mango Season and Uma in Fasting, Feasting Á the Indian home is depicted as a realm of subtle and not-so-subtle tyranny, maternal pressure, claustrophobia, snobbery and limited opportunities.
But if a patriarchal, class-ridden South Asia is under attack, why are mothers, rather than fathers, made to represent the shortcomings of this rejected society? At a straightforward biological level the mother's body constitutes, in Alexander's words, 'the first home' (Fault Lines 24) and the absence of later maternal nurturance becomes a powerful symbol for wider social injustice. Moreover, as Susan Peck Macdonald has argued (albeit in a different literary context), the good, supportive mother is potentially so powerful a figure as to prevent her daughter's trials from occurring, to shield her from the process of maturation, and thus to disrupt the focus and equilibrium of the novel . . . if the mother is to be present . . . [she] must be flawed in some way, so that instead of preventing her daughter's trials, she contributes to them. (58Á59) In other words, a mother must be unsupportive if her daughter is to achieve selfhood within the narrative. And in these works, that selfhood is expressed through emigration.
Taken further, these writers are drawing on the age-old trend whereby nationalism has mapped territories as female through such terms as 'motherland' (overtly deployed by Vijayaraghavan) and 'mother country' * complicated, of course, by its colonial overtones (Kolodny;McClintock 357;Bhattacharjee 321;Wong and Santa Ana 200). Ostensibly embodying the continuation of gendered, national traditions, South Asian mothers thus serve as a synecdoche for much more, forming a key element of a tripartite conception of cultural identity, predicated on selfhood, nation and family, and belonging to the powerful, subcontinental trope of 'Mother India' (Ash 153; Mohanram 21; Jain 1654Á60). But rather than suggesting lost mothers/motherlands Á in the manner of the vanished Afghan mother/nation in Khaled Hosseini's novel, The Kite Runner (2003), for instance Á many of these South Asian American literary works directly reject the mother/motherland in their bid for individuation through the putting-down of American roots. Ketu Katrak has argued that postcolonial women writers . . . challenge the romanticisation of motherhood as motherland, mother earth, woman as earth-goddess possessing mysterious powers of fertility. Women writers' demystification of such notions reveals certain negative, even violent experiences of motherhood. (211) The very idea of a 'motherland' is under scrutiny, then, but crucially these South Asian mothers' 'experiences of motherhood' are not voiced. Indeed, their perspective Á rather like that of ayahs (compare Hai 404, 409; Brians 107) Á is rarely privileged. That position might even contain its own form of feminist resistance to traditional maternal obligations and Hindu values of wifely self-sacrifice (Katrak 232), rather than the daughters' simplistic belief that their mothers unthinkingly perpetuate patriarchal ideas. To offer the mother's point-ofview is Á barring a few exceptions (for instance, Kamala in Motherland) Á beyond the purview of these daughter-centric texts.
For Naoko Sugiyama, the literary discourse of mothers and daughters is also a means of providing 'women of colour [with] . . . an alternative grand narrative' which can impose order on 'the fragmentation and decenteredness of today's society' (76Á77). Within South Asian American literature, one might read such 'fragmentation' as the chaotic emotional effects of emigration (in such first-generation texts as Manhattan Music, The Mango Season, and Love, Stars, and All That) and as an unresolved bicultural confusion (in a second-generation novel like Motherland, for example). The use of the motherÁ daughter plot also reflects other branches of Asian American literature which inscribe the connection between mothers and daughters, a maternal mystery, and the ancestral homeland (Wong and Santa Ana 195,201). One could contend, then, that in drawing on matrilineal patterns, these writers are positioning themselves within longer-standing traditions of 'minority' writing in the United States and that this may also account for South Asian American literature's greater reliance on maternal issues than any comparable tendency within, say, British Asian writing. The 'motherÁdaughter romance', in Patricia P Chu's phrase (143), has proved a successful literary strategy, in creative and commercial terms, for a number of Asian American women writers, possibly because it is a formula which manages to be universal and culturally specific at the same time (compare Ho 57; Chu 165Á66). Such personal narratives as Motherland and The Mango Season are not the most threatening proposition in political terms, yet writers like Alexander, Kamani, Desai, Malladi and Daswani make sharply resonant points about class, caste and feminism through their matrilineal fictions, which generally refuse to offer the homage to one's mother often associated with the 'literature of matrilineage' (Maglin 258). In other words, the personal is political here, in both South Asian and diasporic contexts.
Beyond the paternal representations within such maleauthored works as Stealing the Ambassador, fathers may be treated more positively than mothers by women writers here, because they have encouraged, even driven, the emigration which is so emancipatory, it seems, to their daughters (and sons), and because those fictional daughters may, at the same time, expect more emotionally from their mothers than their fathers. It may appear easier to understand Á and, depressingly, therefore to condemn Á one's own sex and to project onto the mother, rather than the father, 'all the bad things which are too scary to be recognised as part of oneself' (Bettelheim 70); hence the continual punishing of distant or passive mothers. It is still unclear why paternal deaths recur so frequently across these cultural productions. In one sense, the passing of a parent or elder and the impact of this event on a young adult is simply a universal trope in literature and film, a traumatic rite of passage which forces that character to take responsibility for their life more quickly than they might otherwise have done, because it prompts a necessary, inevitable re-evaluation of their priorities. It is therefore a means of increasing the dramatic potential of a plot, moving the story forward and emphasising underlying tensions between characters. In the cultural context of these texts, however, additional elements are at work. Through the device of paternal, rather than maternal, deaths, 5 South Asian American writers may be trying to demonstrate the effects of migration on older men, who make the decision to leave the ancestral homeland in the first place in the bid for a better life, serve as principal breadwinner, struggle to maintain their amour propre in trying circumstances, and do not always succeed in emotional or material terms (Roy 104). In Stealing the Ambassador, for instance, Vasant loses his initial idealism when he discovers American life to be stressful and disappointing, and his heart attack arguably results, at least in part, from these experiences. Interestingly, Parekh opens up the cause of Vasant's death to differing interpretations, so that his son, Rajiv, a doctor, attributes it to an unhealthy diet and 'not enough exercise', whereas Rajiv's grandfather, Bapuji, believes Vasant's heart was 'broken . . . it was that place [America] which killed him' (Parekh 60). 6 As though to support Bapuji's version, the narrative painstakingly reveals that the major source of Vasant's disillusionment is a feeling that, no matter how long he lives in the US, he can never be truly accepted as American.
In common with other Asian American texts, Parekh's novel is crucially concerned with concepts of Americanness, the need for immigrants to 'claim the nation' (Kim 103Á11) and the ultimately hollow nature of the American Dream. Vasant claims America in part because of the 1960s immigrant generation to which he belongs, whereas his American-born son has developed more transnational attitudes, no doubt because Rajiv has seen the difficulties faced by Asian Americans in securing a sense of national belonging in any straightforward fashion (Srikanth 95). In literary terms, then, it makes sense Á as with the motherÁdaughter plot Á to view the thematic prevalence of South Asian American paternal deaths in the wider context of Asian American literary practices. For Sau-ling Cynthia Wong and Jeffrey J Santa Ana, Japanese and Chinese American men's writing offers multiple examples of 'male anxiety over emasculation and failed paternity [which] lingers . . . in the form of fear of cultural extinction resulting from excessive assimilation ' (199). This 'fear of cultural extinction', although not expressed in the form of 'failed paternity', might be said to haunt South Asian American cultural production too. South Asian patriarchy Á or the culture of the father Á faces a crisis in the new nation through the assault of foreign influences, the pressure to assimilate, and the personal and professional disempowerment faced by some male immigrants. This crisis is thus figured in more allegorical terms through the widespread image of the paternal death. It also means, however, that patriarchy is not attacked through the figure of the father. But in their different ways, both fathers in the US and mothers in South Asia must be sacrificed if their fictional children are to achieve American selfhood.


Denying Difference to the Post-Socialist Other: Bernhard Heisig and the Changing Reception of an East German Artist

This article traces the reception of East German artist Bernhard Heisig’s life and art—first in East Germany and then in the Federal Republic of Germany before and after the Wall. Drawing on post-colonial and post-socialist scholarship, it argues that Heisig’s reception exemplifies a western tendency to deny cultural and ideological difference in what the post-socialist scholar Piotr Piotrowski calls the “close Other.” This denial of difference to artists from the eastern bloc has shaped western understandings of Heisig’s life and art since reunification. Once perceived as an intellectually engaged, political artist, both in East and West Germany, after the fall of the Wall and German unification, Heisig was reinterpreted as a traumatized victim of two dictatorships, distorting not only our understanding of the artist and his work, but also of the nature of art and the role of the artist in East Germany.

Figure 1
Bernhard Heisig, Fortress Breslau -The City and its Murderers, 1969. Oil on Canvas. In East Germany, by contrast, Heisig's life and art were interpreted quite differently. His Nazi past was not seen as a traumatic source for creativity, but rather as the reason he chose to become a communist and to live in East Germany, where he remained throughout the Cold War period. For him, as for many German intellectuals in the wake of World War II, Communism's critique of imperialism and its emphasis on pacifism seemed to offer a better path for the future. Rather than an artist obsessed by trauma, Heisig was presented in East German scholarship as a politically engaged artist who created more from his intellect than his psyche. His wartime paintings were linked to his biography, but the emphasis was on how they functioned as a critique of the continuation of fascism in the West. They were "never a simple history illustration." 13 Not only did East German critics interpret Heisig's images of war differently than post-Wall critics, they also emphasized a greater variety within the artist's oeuvre, which include portraiture, murals, still lifes, and literary illustrations. These artist rather than a painter and for having a straightforward, realist style. In a review of the Fifth Regional Art Exhibition in Leipzig published in the national magazine Sonntag in 1959, Horst Jaehner stated that Heisig's portrait drawings and lithographs on the Paris Commune showed he was one of the most talented artists of the younger generation in the exhibition. 15 In another review, this one of a small exhibition of his prints and drawings, the unnamed author praised Heisig's portraiture, stating that "every single one of these faces betrays something of the soul."   The following year, in August 1961, Heisig became director of the Leipzig Academy, one of East Germany's four main art schools, and introduced a painting class to the curriculum.
Three months later, he exhibited two paintings and ten lithographs at the Sixth Regional Art  These texts about Heisig's paintings at the Sixth reveal the importance of art in East Germany, where not only did the head of State visit the exhibition and offer his opinion on some of the works displayed, but the exhibition itself was discussed in great detail in the press. The interest in Heisig's paintings reflected both the importance of the Paris Commune to East Germany and the importance of Heisig's role as one of East Germany's earliest history painters. These early articles also offer insight into Heisig's working process and, in particular, his interest in engaging with others in the creation of his art. As one article noted, Heisig responded to criticisms raised by the jury that the paintings were too static by reworking one of the compositions. 22 This is one of the first mentions of Heisig's tendency to rework paintings, and the reason given is an intellectual rather than emotional one.  5), for example, which was the most controversial of those he created, bright colors swirl together in organic shapes that combine the large, simplified face of a working woman with the shapes and symbols of the city into a composition that, according to the Leipzig journalist Rita Jorek, "did not make it easy" for the viewer. 26 In a positive review, Jorek explained that these murals "are not to be understood as an illustration of thoughts and ideas, but rather as independent artistic creations." She then quoted Heisig as stating that "all too frequently it is forgotten that the happy attitude towards life that a work can produce also has an ideological function." This article was the first of four in a series published in the Leipziger Volkszeitung that engaged with the complexity of Heisig's murals from both positive and negative perspectives. The intent of the series was to help the general public to better understand and appreciate art, presumably in response to the State's desire-heavily promoted in the wake of the building of the Wall in 1961-for a higher quality of art for the "educated nation." 27 23 Resignation letter from Heisig to Binder, 19. February 1964. Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (HGB) Archive. As will be discussed later, Heisig's resignation as director was later seen by western scholars as politically motivated, a punitive action based on the controversial speech he gave in April 1964. His resignation letter, however, predates this event, and its pre-conference date is confirmed by two other documents at the Archive of the Leipzig Academy.  fig. 6) combined multiple moments and events into one image, which showed more than fifteen people engaged in hand-to-hand combat in the final days of the Paris Commune. Early on, critics in Leipzig praised the work as "energetic" and "explosive," a "symphony of dramatic tones" that made "the unstoppable strength of the Communards noticeable." 28 As the exhibition wore on, however, critics from places other than Leipzig began to attack the painting on both stylistic and thematic grounds.
These attacks culminated the following spring with an article by Harald Olbrich in Bildende Kunst in which he stated that Heisig's "superficial interests in problems of form... and writhing amorphously doughy masses decidedly limit the Party value of the Commune."    he stated that these works mark "the possible beginning of a thematic enrichment of his painting and maybe even a new socialist history painting." He ended the article by stating that painting was not just for a circle of aesthetes; it was something that was needed in East Germany.
The following year, in 1969, Heisig was at the center of another controversy, this time over the "loud, brutal, wild -and very sensitive" painterly style evident in his painting, The Brigade (1969), which was on display at the Regional Art Exhibition in Leipzig.      In a three-page review of the exhibition published in Die Weltbühne, the Berlin art historian Lothar Lang pointed out Heisig's painterly debts to Kokoschka and Corinth, before arguing that he had a different world view than these artists: Heisig reflected on the problems of the world in his art, but as a socialist, and his work contributed "to the intelligent socialist art" that required viewer engagement. 43 Lang also pointed out that it would be a disservice to Heisig to think of him simply as a "painter of landscapes or still lifes" since "his most important achievements are in portraiture and history." Mentioning Heisig's self-portraits, portraits of his mother, Lenin, the musical director Vaclav Neumann and The Brigadier, Lang stated that "from now on, Heisig must be considered one of our best portraitists." He then turned to Heisig's "history" paintings, stating that they contribute to "the historical consciousness of our time." He divided them into three main categories: the Paris Commune, German fascism, and the events and problems of the present.  Second, Heisig's paintings of war and conflict were largely interpreted in terms of his "personal entanglement" in the "horrors," "nightmare" or "barbarism" of the Second World War, rather than from an intellectual investigation of the mechanisms of oppression that led to it. 52 The latter was only rarely mentioned. Instead, Heisig was called a "deeply frightened warner," "traumatically touched" by his experiences, which "churn his innards" and "afflict him to the present day." 53 His work was thus seen as an "attempt to free himself from [the] angst" produced by his "traumatic experience of the destruction of his home town of Breslau." 54 As such, they were considered "authentic" expressions of the artist's personal experiences in the "chaos of German history." 55 A third element shared by most of the articles written by West German authors-and one also visible in East German texts, albeit to a lesser degree-was the desire to place Heisig's work within a Gesamtdeutsch (German without regard for East or West) tradition. In particular, leading Expressionist artists of the early 20 th century, including Beckmann, Corinth, Kokoschka and Dix, were frequently mentioned as important precursors to Heisig's work.
While the "Germanness" of Heisig's art was an important factor for most of the West   In the introduction to the catalog, the exhibition's curators-Peter Pachnicke from the East and Jörn Merkert from the West-pointed out that in comparison to music and literature, which can cross political borders relatively easily, the lack of access to original works in the visual arts had led to deep-seated stereotypes on both sides of the Wall. In the West, East German art was often thought to be "beautified Party-conforming Realism without artistic individuality," while in the East, West Germany was often thought to be an "art market dictatorship [promoting] abstract art with no relation to reality." 64 Such stereotypes only began to be redressed in the 1970s and 1980s. Now a deeper look at individual artists was needed, they argued: a comprehensive exhibition of Heisig's work was wanted by both sides.
The introduction-like the catalog as a whole-combined eastern and western perspectives of Heisig's work. It pointed out that in the West, his work first gained notice in the late 1970s at the documenta exhibition in 1977, and that it was particularly valued because of the "self-tormenting intensity with which he grappled with German history -and not as a moral finger pointer, but rather as someone involved… [Heisig] has created the 'work of mourning' that, according to Alexander Mitscherlich, is necessary for coming to terms with the darkest phase of German history." These works appealed to the West's recent "hunger for images" stemming from decades of abstract art, but were also different from the "wild painting" that had emerged there in the 1980s: "This is not painting from the gut… [here is] an intact, precisely calculated image… Heisig: a painter who sets the whole of his artistic means [in play]…" In addition to his value for the West, the introduction also emphasized his commitment to society: "for Bernhard Heisig, it is important to have the chance 'to work on a world view,' since he is convinced that the best art requires a connection to-and interaction with-society." The introduction is followed by nine articles, three of which are by East Germans: Pachnicke, Kober, and Sander. Pachnicke's article is by far the longest in the catalog and follows directly after the introduction. It attempts to correct some of the misunderstandings that surround Heisig's work in the West. First, he looks at the often-vehement artistic debates that took place in East Germany, especially those in the 1960s in which Heisig's Paris Commune paintings played a role. These conflicts, he explains, were a "dispute of opinions"-rather than merely clashes with "dogmatic narrow-mindedness"-over the definition of Realism in East Germany. 65 They were an attempt-ultimately successful-to "push through a new understanding of Realism against an historically outmoded [one, i.e., illusionism]." Also at stake was the role of the artist in society: "[Artists like Heisig] wanted a dialogical relationship to the public," rather than a didactic one. 66 These debates, Pachnicke points out, were the crucible in which Heisig forged his views on art; they were a "method of recognizing-and being able to formulate-his own truth." 67 Another important point Pachnicke made was that Heisig's theme (Thema) is not war, as is often contended in the West, but rather conflict; war is simply the subject matter "preparedness" for this theme-predates his wartime experiences. 68 As Heisig has stated, just being in war is not enough to make one want to paint it; one needs a special leaning toward it. According to Pachnicke, this leaning was already evident in Heisig as a child.
Pachnicke also emphasized the importance of structure in Heisig's work, reinforcing the point made in the introduction to the catalog. He then ended the article by pointing out that Heisig's images are "not just about oppression and angst. An insatiable hunger for beauty, harmony and continuity fills… many of Heisig's landscapes, nudes and portraits."     88 Although the West also had politically active artists, the emphasis in western scholarship has tended to be on aesthetic innovation rather than on content. German and Cold War contexts in which it was created, and thus denied East German art any role in post-war German culture except as a negative foil. 89 Although this article has focused on Heisig's reception in Germany, the difficulties of interpreting these figures extends into English-language scholarship, which is only beginning to address East German art. 90 An important recent contribution to the field is the catalog for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's blockbuster exhibition in 2009, Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures, which conclusively proved that East Germany did have art.
And yet the catalog suggested that this art was created by dissidents or, in the case of official artists like Heisig, contained subversive content that "passed undetected through the censors." 91 The catalog left unchallenged the Cold War stereotype that sees official art in East Germany as little more than kitsch or political propaganda. In fact, in one of the two articles to focus on East German art, the German sociologist Paul Kaiser dismissed all official art in East Germany in one fell swoop, stating that the government "created a backwardlooking system of art whose conceptual guiding feature was an antimodernist, uncritical, apologetic socialist realism." 92 This view evidences the totalitarian approach to East Germany that came to prominence in Germany in the 1990s but that has largely fallen out of favor in recognize the quality of East German film and material culture. 95 The visual arts, however, have yet to follow suit: none of the artists held in high esteem by the East German government-such as Heisig-are well-known outside of Germany, the result of a lingering Cold War-era ideological emphasis on the necessity of "freedom" for the creation of art, and thus the incompatibility of art and State Communism.
The rewriting of Heisig's life and art to fit into western preconceptions impedes our ability to understand the artist and the complexity of art in East Germany. When Heisig clashed with cultural functionaries in the 1960s, he was not fighting for modern art in the western sense of artistic autonomy; rather he was fighting for a greater openness to the forms of modern art, which he believed artists could use in their efforts to create art that made a connection to the people. He did not believe in art for art's sake of the West nor the idea that the artist should be a loner. In fact, already in the 1950s he argued against the "artistic suicide" that he saw taking place in the West, where artists were rejecting a connection to society and the people in favor of exploring their psyches. 96 Instead, he believed artists should be involved in the world in which they lived and chose to live in the East because he felt he, as an artist, was needed there, and was excited to "participate in the creation of a world view," especially one that fought against imperialism. 97  In 2009, post-socialist scholar Piotr Piotrowski argued that to develop a truly global art history, scholars need to recognize "the one who speaks, on whose behalf, and for whom... not to cancel Western art history, but to call this type of narrative by its proper name, 'Western.'" 99 A study of Heisig's reception illustrates the profound impact of the temporalgeographical location of the "speaker" on the scholarship produced: texts written during the Cold War, for example, acknowledged Heisig's commitment to and engagement in East German society, whereas those written afterward elide these connections to emphasize trauma instead. This change in Heisig's reception illustrates the dominance today of a western perspective on East German art that differs from that which existed before the Wall fell. It also reveals the West's inability to see or accept difference in the close Other. Heisig's themes are reinterpreted through a lens that elides socialist criticisms of capitalism as well as alternatives to the West's emphasis on the individual. If we are to write a world history of art, however, we need to incorporate not just the art of the Other, both close and distant,