D Susie Tharu is not something that is separate from the present. And one did meet here, perhaps, in order to make a kind of distinction between — and these terms are also my own inventions — history, which is the way the past has shaped and structured the present we inherit, and tradition which is something that we selectively create out of history in order to do what we want to do today. If we make this distinction then we can say that to a large extent we do not have this freedom to choose our history but we have a certain leeway in choosing in relation to tradition. However, tradition cannot not respect 51 history — and I don't mean history only as a sequence of events — in the sense of how history has shaped the structures of the present, invested in our everyday life. Let's take this back into women's writing. What might it involve? I could think of establishing a tradition of women's writing in a fairly common way of thinking about establishing traditions. That is, to go back to the past and select from it those kinds of writings, those forms, those themes, whatever I choose to look at, that in some way match my present concerns; because the whole idea of a corpus of women's writing is a political idea, and it emerges from a political configuration that has taken shape today and is making some gains. So I go back and choose things thatmatch my requirementsofwhatlthink the politicsof today are. And this has generally happened to most who have tried to establish a tradition of women's writing. They have gone back to the past much as we have gone back to working class or peasant forms of folk literature and so on — I don't mean the decorative versions of this — but to try and identify in it a revolutionary peasant consciousness, and then celebrate it in one way or the other. The other way would perhaps be to construct some sort of teleology. I suppose the model one would draw on, or rather two, fairly different, models, would be of course Marx, where what you're thinking about is a kind of embryonic phenomenon which grows into its full organic shape either in the present or at some point in the future, and you trace the evolution of this phenomenon through a history that you construct around that evolution, and this is essentially a teleology. Fanon does a similar thing when he is talking about nationalism. He constructs a kind of teleology of different stages in the emergence of nationalist culture and then suggests that one stage is a precursor to another, and then leads on: there is a way of measuring the advancement of this tradition. As I said earlier, the problem with both these ways of thinking about tradition is that they really do not reckon with the problem of time. And secondly, they do not seem able to capture — I'm tentative about the way I'm saying this — what is at stake in minority expression; or more than minority expression, the expression of a subjugated group of some kind. Because when you're talking about development, or the development that comes to fruition of some kind, or you're talking of celebration, you are thinking about a group that in some way has already established and understood the dimensions of what it is, and is then now projecting into the future or into the past. But a group which has to understand itself in relation to a particular Numbers 20 -21