ABSTRACT
Suniti Namjoshi wanted to be a writer. A lesbian writer in English living in London, affecting people’s lives by her words rather than by administrative diktat. She addresses a foreign (woman) lover. Homosexuality exists within a context of man–woman marriages rejected for friendship between women. It exists in a context of home versus abroad. It is a poem at the head of all poems in a book ahead of all her books and she calls it ‘The Head of the Rose’. Suniti Namjoshi has consistently, at least from the publication of her The Jackass and the Lady, attempted to depict queer lives as an alternative to the dominant model of history/literature, in which her modesty of moral obligations such as self-recognition and the genesis of her queer identity are persistently represented from a feminist perspective.
