Becoming a Girl in Shillong: The Gendered Identity of D in Daribha Lyndem’s Name Place Animal Thing

Abstract

This paper examines the gendered identity of D, the narrator-protagonist of Daribha Lyndem’s Name Place Animal Thing (2020), a book of ten interconnected stories about a Khasi girl growing up in Shillong. Because the book offers no conventional plot in which a heroine acts, chooses and changes and because D is for much of the narrative a witness rather than an agent, the paper asks where her gender resides and how it is constructed. Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler’s accounts of gender as something acquired and enacted, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality and scholarship on Khasi matriliny, it advances three arguments. First, D’s gender is narrated retrospectively, the paper shows that an adult voice sorts childhood memory into categories and that this retrospective position allows D to claim an interpretive authority the child lacked. The noun-centred structure of the chapters, echoing the children’s game that gives the book its title, mirrors this process of classification. Second, D’s identity is intersectional: she is not simply a girl but a Khasi girl of a particular class in a town where the distinction between Khasi and dkhar organizes everyday life. Third, it is formed in domestic spaces, through a household of women, including the grandmother Mei and the domestic worker Bi, whose authority and labour D observes, and through men and migrants such as Bahadur, whose subordinated masculinities she watches without being able to alter. The paper concludes that matriliny cannot be read as a simple guarantee of female empowerment, since D’s gender cannot be separated from hierarchies of class and ethnicity.