An Exploration of Oikospoetics in Oorkuval (The Vigil): a Malayalam Novel of Sara Joseph

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Cairo Higher Institute for Languages and Translation

Abstract

Oorukaval (2008), translated as The Vigil (2014), is a contemporary realistic adaptation of the ancient Indian epic of the legendary hero Ramayana, written in glorification of his heroic war against a demon prince. Sara Joseph (b. 1946) reintroduced the ancient myth from an oikospoetic approach, dismissing war as irrelevant to contemporary age, as she asserts an utter integration between the human, the nonhuman, the sacred, the natural, and the cultural, within an anti-war, anti-imperialist, ecological frame. The work is not gender oriented. Sara Joseph divided the linearity of the narrative into two axes: the horizontal and the vertical. Each axe encompasses a distinct division of oikoi. The oikospoetic structure corresponds to the temporal line: prewar, war, postwar eras. The paper aims to analyze oikospoetics in Joseph’s The Vigil, to clear the confusion between oikospoetics, ecofeminism, and ecopetics, and to bring into universal focus the literature of the third world minorities. The results show that oikospoetics is not identical with either ecofeminism or ecopoetics.

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