The Sweet Smell of Mother's Milk-Wet Bodice

Carol A. Stos is an assistant professor of Spanish Studies at Laurentian
University.

Uma Parameswaran’s novella about Namita Neggill is about betrayal,
crushed hopes, cruelty, abuse, and—ultimately—resistance and
resilience.

We meet Namita, the sponsored wife of a landed immigrant, as she
struggles to come to terms with multiple new environments. In Canada for
only four months, and isolated from both her ethnic community and the
larger community by her in-laws’ design, she is served with divorce
papers and forced from her home by her father-in-law and brother-in-law
to seek assistance at a women’s shelter. Through flashbacks and
memories, Namita’s story begins to coalesce, and we piece together the
series of events that have brought her to this crisis. It is a technique
that effectively communicates the fragmentation, displacement, and
strangeness that Namita experiences, both as a woman deceived by her
partner and as a new immigrant in a country she scarcely knows. But her
story is a process, and although there are false starts and false hopes,
in the last chapter Namita finally comes into her own and takes matters,
very literally, back into her own hands.

In many ways, Namita’s story is typical of that of any woman abused
and abandoned, but Parameswaran adds to this the complications of being
far from home and family in a strange land—faced with an unfamiliar
legal system and the burdens of tradition, custom, and cultural
expectations—revealing yet another dimension in the reality of
immigrant women. This novella is a tantalizing presager of a longer,
more encompassing and developed novel Parameswaran plans to write. It
will be an important contribution to our understanding of the issues of
violence against women, spousal abuse, support systems for abused women,
and the failure of the Canadian legal system to protect the rights of
immigrant women.