Category: Fiction & Poetry
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Putty in Her Hands
(An excerpt from a longer work of fiction. Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily)
Sasha calls on Saturday afternoon, ‘Are you free?’ Sasha is a Russian escort, 28, slim, dark-haired, with dreamy green eyes. She needs a ride in an hour to Plaza Hotel, downtown. After a three-day break, she accepted a two-hour job today, but her car will not start. ‘I’ll make up to you,’ she tells Ved suggestively.
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Storybooks for a Plural World
Here is an article that examines children’s storybooks in India, the kind I grew up reading, like the popular series Amar Chitra Katha. I did of course enjoy them as a kid but as an adult, I’ve had to unlearn so much of their implicit worldview and “wisdom”. Indeed, were I responsible for a child today, I’d agonize over exposing her to most Indian storybooks. Others might say the same about storybooks from other cultures, but for years now, I’ve wanted to write an article such as this about Indian storybooks:
… Yet more than 50 years later, it comes as a shock to find, in book after book … both protagonist and audience so obviously elite and upper caste. It took the women’s movement and activists raising questions of caste and religious community for the public to realise how systemic, and how related to the nature of power and authority, these representations were.
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The Man in the BMW
(An excerpt from a longer work of fiction. Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)
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The New Dalit Consciousness
Laura Brueck on the emerging complexity of Dalit consciousness in Himal Southasian:
Hindi Dalit literature’s moment has arrived.
After years of obscurity and unflattering comparisons to the maturity
and expressiveness of Dalit literature in languages such as Marathi and
Tamil, creative Dalit writing in Hindi is finally reaching a more
visible level of popular recognition. Hindi Dalit novels,
autobiographies, short-story and poetry anthologies, as well as volumes
of literary criticism, are today being regularly published by Delhi’s
top Hindi-language publishing houses, Rajkamal and Radhakrishna
Prakashan. Dalit writers infuse the pages of Delhi’s top Hindi literary
magazines, such as Hans and Katha Desh, with their
poetry, prose and political perspectives….With the growing shift of Hindi
Dalit literary voices from marginalised spheres of ‘alternative’ social
discourse to more mainstream platforms, Hindi Dalit literature is
quickly becoming deeply embedded in the changing cultural politics of
modern India. But it is wrong to think of Dalit literature as speaking
in a single voice in the Hindi literary and political landscapes. In
what might be best categorised as the Hindi Dalit literary sphere, there
exists a plurality of people, life experiences, literary voices and
perspectives that often find themselves at odds with one another when
trying to fulfil the demands of a mainstream audience for a
recognisable, ‘authentic’ and even ‘digestible’ Dalit literary voice.
There are fissures within the Dalit literary sphere, situated along the
fault-lines of gender, geography (urban and rural) and class, which
create a vibrant and vital field of debate over the strategies of
‘writing resistance’. -
Mahabharata: A Conversation
Ashis Nandy and Gurcharan Das discuss the Mahabharata (in three parts: part 1, part 2, part 3; total ~25 mins):
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Working the Double Shift
Emily St. John Mandel on striking a balance between writing literary fiction and paying the rent:
Most novelists have day jobs, even the published ones whose books get good reviews. Writing is my second career, and one of the very few things that it has in common with my first career—contemporary dance—is the necessity of maintaining secondary employment. I’ve been supporting myself since I was eighteen years old: I’ve made sandwiches and cocktails and uncountable lattés, put price stickers on wine glasses, supervised the unloading of trucks at 7am on Montreal winter mornings, sold everything from clothing to furniture to vases in three cities, run errands for architects, scheduled meetings, designed and coded websites, written reports and managed offices; all the strangely varied occupations that a person accumulates when the primary objective is not to establish a career, per se, but just to pay the rent while they’re working on a novel.Some of these jobs have been quite pleasant, and it’s nice to able to afford rent and groceries; but the phrase “day job,” of course, implies that one’s passions lie elsewhere.
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Platonic Love
(A poem by Curt Anderson)
We dine at Adorno and return to my Beauvoir.
She compliments me on my Bachelard pad.
I pop in a Santayana CD and Saussure back to the couch.
On my way, I pull out two fine Kristeva wine glasses.
I pour some Merleau-Ponty and return the Aristotle to Descartes.
After pausing an Unamuno, I wrap my arm around her Hegel.
Her hair smells of wild Lukacs and Labriola.
Our small talk expands to include Dewey, Moore and Kant.
I confess to her what’s in my Eckhart. We Locke.
By this point, we’re totally Blavatsky.
We stretch out on the Schopenhauer.
She slips out of her Lyotard and I fumble with my Levi-Strauss.
She unhooks her Buber and I pull off my Spinoza.
I run my finger along her Heraclitus as she fondles my Bacon.
She stops to ask me if I brought any Kierkegaard. I nod.
We Foucault.
She lights a cigarette and compares Foucault to Lacan.
I roll over and Derrida.Category: Fiction & Poetry -
Beholding Home
ONE SHOULD SEE ONE’S OWN HOME FROM FAR OFFOne should see one’s own home from far off.
One should cross the seven oceans
to see one’s home,
in the helplessness of the unbridgeable distance,
fully hoping to return some day.
One should turn around, while journeying,
to see one’s own country from another.
One’s Earth, from space.
Then the memory of
what the children are doing at home
will be the memory of what children are doing on Earth.
Concern about food and drink at home
will be concern about food and drink on Earth.
Anyone hungry on Earth
will be like someone hungry at home.
And returning to Earth
will be like returning home.Things back home are in such a mess
that after walking a few steps from home,
I return homewards as if it were Earth.
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Love After Love
(A Poem by Derek Walcott)
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved youCategory: Fiction & Poetry -
The Death of a Salesman
Yes, I too had that youthful phase when I dabbled in poetry. From 17 to 27, I too wrote imaginary heartbreak poems, gooey lovesick poems, metaphysical angst poems, faux disenchanted poems, pseudo-sophisticated poems, aloof ironic poems, woo-the-maiden poems, voluptuous sorrow poems. Most that survive I can scarcely read now without wincing, but I cannot bring myself to delete them from my computer (they are safely encrypted though—without my consent, they are like ashes in the fireplace!). Below is one I still like enough; I wrote it in an office cube and it’s from the tail end of my poetic phase. Not that poetry has gone out of my soul; I think it has found home elsewhere in my imagination. 🙂
The Death of a SalesmanOne fine morning, the salesman died,
an event well beyond his foresight.
Death would come one day, he felt sure,
but to him after the others,
for he believed in his exemplary life,
in the larger human cause,
not just his own, as his critics surmised.Category: Fiction & Poetry -
Shantaram: A Review
Gregory David Roberts, the author of this semi-autobiographical novel, is an ex-junkie and an ex-con. A one-time gun-runner; dealer in drugs, black-market currencies, and forged passports; favored associated of a Bombay mafia don; escapee from an Australian maximum security prison, Roberts gives us a novel based closely on the events of his remarkable life and calls it Shantaram, “man of peace.” You are right to be skeptical. The story’s narrator is not a peaceful man and the book is loaded with enough violence to propel the modern Bollywood-styled blockbuster that it’s slated to become (starring Johnny Depp and Amitabh Bachchan, directed by Mira Nair, 2009). But then, to get caught up in that is to miss the point; Shantaram is the story of a violent man’s search for the man of peace within himself.
The story begins in the early 1980s, with the narrator already a fugitive from the law. Having jumped from the towers of his Australian prison, where he was serving a 19-year sentence for armed robbery, he escaped with the help of friends to Bombay, where he hopes to stay out of trouble and lose himself from the law. He has no plan and little money, nor has he been to India before. But he is almost immediately in love with Bombay and within hours of being in the city, he meets the comically affable, young cab-driver, Prabakar, who, in the course of a day, helps him escape from a scene of mob violence, finds him a cheap hotel, and sets him up with a little dope to smoke. When Prabaker asks to know his name, the fugitive instinctively fishes for a false one and suggests “Lin,” short for “Lindsay.” Prabakar is tickled by this name, gleefully remarking that it sounds like an Indian word for “dick.” Thus, it becomes the appellation for the man who struggles to know himself through the course of the narrative, faltering and stumbling, even as the earnest and loving Prabakar shines ever more brilliantly as the foil to Lin’s depravity.Within a few days, Lin finds himself settled in Prabakar’s slum, living cheek by jowl with 25,000 of India’s destitute who have migrated from every corner of India to live in this city of dreams. He finds himself cast as the slum “doctor,” dispensing first aid to the stream of humanity that flows past his shanty door, and is quickly drawn into the lives of his neighbors, learning Hindi, making friends, and fully participating in the life of the community. He remains among them for two years, but he never reveals the truth of his past to any of his fellow slum-dwellers.
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How Fiction Works
Good critics, seems to me, are as rare as good artists, and for some reason their skills rarely coincide in a single person. At the very least, a good critic situates the work in a larger context and challenges us to read more closely and to demand more from art. One critic I have profitably read for years is James Wood, via his essays on Hamsun, Martel, Updike, Zadie Smith, Coetzee, and others. The aesthetic qualities he values in literary art include psychological realism with “characters who’ve been let off the leash by their creator, and for whom the largest metaphysical questions are in play.” In addition, Wood is noted for coining the genre term hysterical realism, which he uses to denote the contemporary conception of the “big, ambitious novel” that pursues vitality “at all costs.” Hysterical realism describes novels that are characterized by chronic length, manic characters, frenzied action, and frequent digressions on topics secondary to the story.
Wood has ripped into lots of famous writers: Updike, DeLillo, Rushdie, Franzen, Pynchon, Toni Morrison, etc. — rippings I largely agree with. The writers he admires include Bellow, Chekhov, Lawrence, Woolf, and Naipaul. In his disdain for postmodern trends, he has been accused of betraying an evangelical zeal at times (he agrees). Notably, I found his own first and only novel, The Book Against God, rather unremarkable for its character and conflict, which a critic as demanding as Wood himself would have taken to task for its humdrum vision. His gifts are more evident in his two books of essays, to which he has just added a third one, How Fiction Works. Here is a rave review:
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You Who Live Safe
You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find, returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud
Who does not know peace
Who fights for a scrap of bread
Who dies because of a yes or no.
Consider if this is a woman,
Without hair and without name
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children,
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.(– Prefatory text to Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi)
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Peter Brook’s Mahabharata
Earlier this year I saw Peter Brook’s Mahabharata for the third time in fifteen years. Each time my admiration for it has grown. Not only is the epic itself among the greatest stories ever told, Brook’s stage production is sublime too. I consider it one of the greatest dramatic productions of all time. Its notable lack of appeal to Indians, except to a sliver, may be because it is in English and stars mostly non-Indian actors (including, heaven forbid, some black Africans in major roles!), not to mention that it treats the epic simply as a great work of literature, without the cloying religiosity that has informed most Indian dramatizations (with predictable “box-office” success).Its international, multi-racial cast is fitting, driving home the point that the Mahabharata is both a universal story and the heritage of all humanity. Brook wrote the script with Jean Claude Carriere, an accomplished student of Buddhism, and it brings out some of the best philosophical and existential dilemmas of the epic. Costumes are tasteful, music score hauntingly beautiful, dialog taut and poetic. Battle scenes are creatively shown, like the Chakravyuh formation in war that traps Abhimanyu to his death.
One thing I noticed more this time—which you won’t find in popular Indian renditions—is Krishna’s ambivalent role in the story (he’s not “cute” either). Nor is he above cheating and murderous advice (for example, to kill Karna when he is down, to hit Duryodhana’s thigh, to sacrifice Bhima’s son). The conclusion is inescapable: the Creator too is flawed, much like His creation. In the end, with the catastrophic destruction of the war in which nearly everyone is killed, we wonder if Arjuna’s doubts were any less profound than Krishna’s “divine truths”. Was it all worth it? Should one aspire to act without attachment to the fruit of the action? A perfectly defensible interpretation is that Krishna brainwashes Arjuna into “understanding” his duty (or dharma), after which the great warrior exhibits no further doubts—hardly a commendable state. -
Diary of a Bad Year
On this 4th of July, here is an excerpt from a longer excerpt of JM Coetzee’s new novel, Diary of a Bad Year, due out in Jan 2008.
When the phrase “the bastards” is used in Australia, its reference is understood on all sides. “The bastards” was once the convict’s term for the men who called themselves his betters and flogged him if he disagreed. Now “the bastards” are the politicians, the men and women who run the state. The problem: how to assert the legitimacy of the old perspective, the perspective from below, the convict’s perspective, when it is of the nature of that perspective to be illegitimate, against the law, against the bastards.
Opposition to the bastards, opposition to government in general under the banner of libertarianism, has acquired a bad name because all too often its roots lie in a reluctance to pay taxes. Whatever one’s views on paying tribute to the bastards, a strategic first step must be to distinguish oneself from that particular libertarian strain. How to do so? “Take half of what I own, take half of what I earn, I yield it to you; in return, leave me alone.” Would that be enough to prove one’s bona fides?
Category: Fiction & Poetry -
Five Chinese Classics
Have you read, or heard of, the great classical Chinese novels written between 14th and 18th centuries? Still part of folk culture, they’re known to most Chinese. I learned of them and their contexts while reading The Search for Modern China by Jonathan Spence. Here are five of them:
Journey to the West: “China’s most beloved novel of religious quest and picaresque adventure” … published in the 1590s in the waning years of the Ming dynasty, when “essayists, philosophers, nature poets, landscape painters, religious theorists, historians, and medical scholars all produced a profusion of significant works, many of which are now regarded as classics of the civilization.” The novel’s hero, “a mischievous monkey with human traits … accompanies the monk-hero on his action-filled travels to India in search of Buddhist scripture.” * It’s “a first-rate adventure story, a dispenser of spiritual insight, and an extended allegory in which … pilgrims journeying toward India stands for the individual journeying toward enlightenment.” Indeed there aren’t many books in which “go west, young man” would be a call to go to India. 🙂Golden Lotus: Published anonymously in early 17th century, this is a “socially elaborate and sexually explicit tale, the central character (who draws his income both from commerce and his official connections) is analyzed through his relationships with his five consorts, each of whom speaks for a different facet of human nature.” It can be read as “allegory, as a moral fable of the way greed and selfishness destroy those with the richest opportunities for happiness; yet it also has a deeply realistic side, and illuminates the tensions and cruelties within elite Chinese family life as few other works have ever done.” *
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Youth
(A Poem by Czeslaw Milosz )
Your unhappy and silly youth.
Your arrival from the provinces to the city.
Misted-over windowpanes of streetcars,
Restless misery of the crowd.
Your dread when you entered a place too expensive.
But everything was too expensive. Too high.
Those people must have noticed your crude manners,
Your outmoded clothes, and your awkwardness.There were none who would stand by you and say,
Category: Fiction & Poetry -
On Telling Stories
We often ask what it is that makes us human, and much has been written about the unique (or not) gifts of humankind: our fully opposable thumbs, in-line toes, upright stance, tool use, large brains, reason, language, self-awareness. But if I had to choose a single defining feature of the human animal, I’d have to say it’s our penchant and need for story-telling: human beings are the story-telling species; in fact, we’re story junkies.From stories around the campfire to wandering minstrels, movies, television, gossip, books, speeches, performances: we listen to stories; we tell stories. All the time. Everywhere. I’m doing it right now. We have no other way of being in the world; our apprehended reality is a network of stories, part fictional, part factual. We listen to news and other “true” stories to get information about our world, but what function does pure fiction fulfill? Why do we love a good yarn?
While facts provide us with hard and specific information, fiction helps us understand the relationships between those facts. Through stories we expand upon our empirical knowledge to grasp those aspects of experience which are factually empty.
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A Qawwali Concert
A year or so ago, I attended an open-air Qawwali concert in Jaipur by the famous Sabri Brothers, who claim direct descent from Mian Tansen himself, the legendary Hindustani musician in Akbar’s court. Qawwali, for the uninitiated, is the devotional music of the Sufis of the Indian subcontinent. A famous recent exponent of the form was Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.The concert, hosted by Rajasthan Tourism, was free to all. I noticed that the first quarter of the audience space was far better lit; it had nice sofas and comfy chairs and the quality of seating steadily declined further back. This front section was of course for “Invitation Only” pass bearers. (No points for guessing where I was.) I watched sodas being served by liveried waiters to these chosen people, cordoned off from the rest by ropes and policemen. At least one person expressed solidarity as I grumbled about this open discrimination at a tax-sponsored event.
The concert of course couldn’t begin until the chief guest had arrived, who was none other than Shrimati Vasundhara Raje Scindia, the Chief Minister of Rajasthan. As my father had predicted, she showed up an hour late—apparently a habit with her—in keeping with the time honored way of Indian honchos asserting their importance to the masses. Meanwhile, the audience had rearranged the neatly laid out chairs and blocked all passageways. I looked around from where I sat—there was no way to leave except to climb over chairs, which were now all occupied. In other words, I was trapped in the middle of a crowd getting boisterous by the minute. My attempts to relax and see the humor in the situation were proving only partially successful.
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Reading Milosz
(By Adam Zagajewski, Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh — © NYRB)
I read your poetry once more,
Category: Fiction & Poetry
