Life & Background
Eunice de Souza was born in Pune in 1940 into a Goan Catholic family; her father died when she was three, and the community she grew up in — its convents, its priests, its marriage market, its snobberies — is the material of her first book. She studied at Sophia College and took a master's degree at Marquette University in the United States, then a doctorate on Indian children's literature. She taught English at St Xavier's College, Bombay, for over thirty years and headed the department, and her teaching was as consequential as her poetry: Arundhathi Subramaniam, Jerry Pinto, and Ranjit Hoskote were among her students. She acted, directed plays, wrote a newspaper column, edited important anthologies of Indian women's writing and of early Indian English poetry, and published two late novels. She lived alone in Bombay with her parrots, and died there in 2017.
Fix
Fix is a short first collection of about twenty poems, mostly under a page, largely concerned with the Goan Catholic community of Bombay. Catholic Mother observes a father of six being congratulated by the parish for his fertility while his wife is invisible in the arrangement. de Souza Prabhu takes her own hyphenated, converted name apart and refuses to make peace with either half of it. Marriages Are Made lists a prospective bride's defects as a broker would — complexion, height, family history — in the flat voice of a transaction. Sweet Sixteen deals with a Catholic girlhood in which nobody explained anything and a girl was warned that she must not be touched. Other poems address the poet's mother, priests, and her own capacity for cruelty.
The poems are extremely short, unrhymed, plain, and built on the withheld ending — the effect comes from where she stops, usually one line before a reader expects. Irony is the whole method, and it is turned as often on the speaker as on the community; the self-portrait poems refuse the position of the wronged woman as firmly as they refuse the pieties of the parish. That combination of feminist critique from inside a small community and a refusal of self-pity is what distinguishes her from her contemporaries. Her anthologies matter alongside the poems: Nine Indian Women Poets and Early Indian Poetry in English were acts of canon-building that changed what was available to teach.
Why de Souza Matters
de Souza is the sharpest satirist among the Bombay poets and the most important woman poet of the group that includes Ezekiel, Kolatkar, and Mehrotra. Her poems are staples of anthologies and of examination papers on Indian English poetry, feminism, and minority community identity, and her editorial work created the syllabus that later students learned from. Her influence as a teacher at St Xavier's on the next generation of Indian poets is a standard point.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Fix1979
- Women in Dutch Painting1988
- Ways of Belonging1990
- Nine Indian Women Poets (ed.)1997
- Dangerlok2001
- Early Indian Poetry in English (ed.)2005
- A Necklace of Skulls2009