Shunya's Notes

Herodotus, the Iliad, and 9/11

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

Homer’s Iliad is the story of an epic war between the Greeks and the Trojans. The apparent cause of the war was the ‘abduction’ of Helen by Paris—Helen was the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta; Paris was the son of Priam, king of Troy. Menelaus, his pride wounded, called on other Greek kings bound to him by an oath. Joining forces, they set sail and laid siege to the coastal city of Troy in Asia Minor. Mostly an account of the last days of the war, the Iliad teems with intrigue, character, and incident.

Herodotus, the 5th century BCE historian regarded as the father of history, lived more than three hundred years after the Iliad was written. He is justly famous for preferring rational—rather than mythical and supernatural—explanations for human events; to understand his past he looked to the actions, character, and motivations of men. Among the more charming passages of Histories is his take on the Trojan War. In his day and age, the Iliad was considered a true account of Greek ancestry and it was obligatory for every Greek schoolboy to read it. Cultivated Greek gents were expected to recite colorful stretches from it.

From the start, Herodotus had trouble with the Iliad. He found it odd that the Trojans, ‘when the Greeks ran off with their women, never troubled themselves about the matter; but the Greeks, for the sake of a single [Spartan] girl, collected a vast armament, invaded Asia, and destroyed the kingdom of Priam’. He doubted that Helen could have been taken from Sparta against her wishes, and even if she was, wasn’t that deed the work of a rogue, unworthy of such a large mobilization by the Greeks? What also didn’t sit well with his sense of human nature was the response of the otherwise reasonable Trojans to the Greek invasion, for ‘surely neither Priam nor his family could have been so infatuated as to endanger their own persons, their children and their city, merely that Paris might possess Helen.’

The Danger of a Single Story

This talk by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie is not to be missed. I think it's worth the time for anyone interested in stories, language, reading and writing, not to mention class, politics, history, cultural and imperial hegemony, mental colonization, and so much more.

The Insularity of American Literature

Check out this essay by Anis Shivani on what is wrong with American literature. Sure, lots of red meat here, and one can always poke holes in his thesis: isn't there a super great writer X that Shivani is overlooking? But that objection may well reinforce Shivani's point, which I take to be meaningful in the sense of a statement like "Outsiders find rural Bihar rough to travel through", and citing a comfortable itinerary does not negate the qualitative truth of the statement. :-) In any case, I think it is decent food for thought. Enjoy.

"There is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world...not the United States," Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize jury, recently said. "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature...That ignorance is restraining." ...

Engdahl couldn't be more correct. We are too insular. We specialize in quantity, not quality. Our publishing model, like that of the lapsed auto industry, is a failed one. It survives only because of our gigantism--mere volume is sufficient to ensure a certain amount of financial success, but it is not producing a worthwhile cultural product. Just as we might have 500 television channels but not one will ever offer the challenging movies of Buñuel or Godard, or a Wagner opera, we might produce 175,000 books a year, but quality is elusive. What we're talking about is a business model that is outdated, cannot keep up with globalization. There ought to be no bail-out of American writers. It is a case of market monopoly run amok, taking self-publicity for truth.

We have a generally overinflated estimation of our "literary giants"--Roth, Updike, DeLillo, Pynchon, the perennially rumored contenders for the Nobel Prize--that the rest of the world might not share. Consider, from the point of view of someone in Tokyo or Cairo or Lima, what each of these writers has to offer them. These are American writers first, not in the sense that Fitzgerald or Hemingway were (questioning their Americanness), but American in a curiously isolationist way, preoccupied exclusively with the predicaments of our nation, and no other in the world. The knee-jerk defense American newspaper and magazine editors mounted immediately after Engdahl's comments--not even taking a moment to pause and consider whether he had a point--should tell us a lot about the degree to which sheer defense of our dinosaur model of literature is the driving force for so-called critics. How could they say that about us, those sissy Europeans? Our writers are as good as any other country's, no, better, yes, much better! The Europeans are just jealous. Their writers are too parochial, too small, too little studied. Did you ever hear of Le Clézio? Who is he? We don't read him here. We don't do any scholarship on him. Not to mention Dario Fo. Dario Who? Phoo!

Songs of Kabir

A new translation of poems by Kabir, the great 15th century Sufi poet from India, is due out on 5th April. "Transcending divisions of creed, challenging social distinctions of all sorts, and celebrating individual unity with the divine, the poetry of Kabir is one of passion and paradox, of mind-bending riddles and exultant riffs. These new translations by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, one of India’s finest contemporary poets, bring out the richness, wit, and power of a literary and spiritual master." Below is a sample (a few more poems from this volume have appeared in Poetry Magazine):

Except That It Robs You of Who You Are

Except that it robs you of who you are,
What can you say about speech?
Inconceivable to live without
And impossible to live with,
Speech diminishes you.
Speak with a wise man, there’ll be
Much to learn; speak with a fool,
All you get is prattle.
Strike a half-empty pot, and it’ll make
A loud sound; strike one that is full,
Says Kabir, and hear the silence.

S. Anand on Dalit Literature

In The Caravan, S. Anand provides an overview of modern Dalit literature, as well as insights into the portrayal of Dalits by many famous non-Dalit writers like Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, and Rohinton Mistry. While often sympathetic, he notes, these portrayals also tend to be unidimensional, where "Dalit characters lack distinct subjecthood prior to their involvement with high-caste characters." Anand is co-founder of Navayana, "India’s first and only publishing house to exclusively focus on the issue of caste from anticaste perspective."

The journey of modern Dalit literature has been a difficult one. But even though it has not necessarily enjoyed the support of numbers (in what has come to be the trade publishing market) we must engage with what Dalits are writing—not simply for reasons of authenticity, or as a concession to identity politics, but simply because of the aesthetic value of this body of writing, and for the insights it offers into the human condition. In a society that is still largely unwilling to recognise Dalits as equal, rights-bearing human beings, in a society that is inherently indifferent to the everyday violence against Dalits and their near-total ghettoisation in various spheres of social and cultural activity, in a society unwilling to share social and cultural resources equitably with Dalits unless mandated by law (as seen in the anti-reservation discourse), Dalit literature has the potential to humanise non-Dalits and sensitise them to a world into which they have no insight. But before we can understand what Dalit literature is seeking to accomplish, we need first to come to terms with the stranglehold of non-Dalit representations of Dalits.

More here. The other founder of Navayana is Ravikumar, author of Venomous Touch, a collection of his writings translated from Tamil.

Arab Poetry of Resistance

In the video below (via Vijay Prashad on facebook), Sudhanva Deshpande recites a few poems of resistance from the great poets of the Arab world, including Palestine and "the Middle-East at a time when the region is going through one of the most historic revolutions." The poems, recited in Hindustani with scrolling English translations, include Ticket (Samih al-Qasim), Ek Diwaliye ki Report (Samih al-Qasim), Filistini Ladka (an extract by Safi Abdi), Poochtach (Mahmoud Darwish), and Dil-e-Mann, Musafir-e-Mann (Faiz Ahmed Faiz). FYI, this is also the centenary year of Faiz's birth and Himal Southasian has a special issue on the man.

A Word on Statistics

A poem by Wislawa Szymborska
(translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak)
________________________________________

Out of every hundred people,
those who always know better:
fifty-two.

Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.

Ready to help,
if it doesn't take long:
forty-nine.

Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four -- well, maybe five.

Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.

Led to error
by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.

Those not to be messed with:
four-and-forty.

Living in constant fear
of someone or something:
seventy-seven.

Capable of happiness:
twenty-some-odd at most.

Decolonizing My Mind

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments. NB: an updated version of this essay is here.)

On English in India and the Linguistic Hierarchies of Colonized Minds

The modern era of European colonialism began in the Americas with bands of adventurers seeking El Dorado. Their early intrusions evolved into predatory monopolies like the East India Company and European states exerting direct control over the economic and political life of the colonies. The natives tended to not welcome and cooperate with the intruders, so alongside came great developments in the art of subjugating the natives, through military, political, and cultural means. In this essay, I’ll look at some cultural means of controlling the natives, particularly through language, and its effect on the psyche of the colonized, using examples from Africa and India.

When it comes to colonial quests, military might is what breaches the metaphorical Gates of Damascus. Regime change follows. Thereafter, the most efficient and durable means of colonial control happens via culture. Culture holds the keys to how a group sees itself and knows its place in the world. As Ngugi wa Thiong’o—Kenyan novelist, professor, and author of Decolonizing the Mind—has pointed out, ‘Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others.’ [1]

When done right, the native comes to elevate and mimic his master’s ways, to see his own culture as inferior, and to look down on his past as ‘a wasteland of non-achievement’. He begins to defer to the colonizer’s ideas on fundamental things like beauty, art, and politics. In time, writes Ngugi, he begins to understand himself and his culture through the eyes of the colonizer—using the latter’s concepts, categories, and judgments. Before too long, he turns into a proxy for his master: colonialism with a native face.

How does the colonizer gain such control? The easiest method, explains Ngugi, is to actively spread his language among the natives, and to simultaneously denigrate the language of the natives as crude and unfit for proper education. It is amazing how much mileage this delivers. Simply make the colonizer’s language the lingua franca of imperial administration, accord prestige and upward mobility to those who learn it in colonial schools, and before too long, there is a feeding frenzy among a native minority. This has been the way of the great colonialists of history, such as the Arabs in the 7-8th centuries, the British and the French in the 19th, and the Russians with the Baltic States in the 20th. Ngugi writes,

For colonialism this involved two aspects of the same process: the destruction or the deliberate undervaluing of a people’s culture, their art, dances, religions, history, geography, education, orature, and literature, and the conscious elevation of the language of the colonizer. The domination of a people’s language by the language of the colonizing nations was crucial to the domination of the mental universe of the colonized.

On Bal vs. Dalrymple

Every so often, a war of the words breaks out between two literary types. Onlookers, or should I say onliners, gather around to cheer, deride, or simply watch the tamasha with wonder and amusement. Many such exchanges have happened on the pages of Outlook India. A new one has just unfolded in Open Magazine between Hartosh Singh Bal, its political editor (and 3QD columnist), and William Dalrymple, UK author.

The Literary Raj — the opening salvo by Hartosh Singh Bal

The piece you ran is blatantly racist — rejoinder by William Dalrymple

Does Dalrymple know what racism really is? — response by Hartosh Singh Bal

An Inconvenient Truth — a statement on Dalrymple by Pramod Kumar KG

***

What's my take on this? I often think that we, the globalized Indian elites, haven't decolonized our minds enough. Sixty years after political independence, we still carry an inferiority complex about our literary culture. Our English language literati, chronically insecure and hungry for external validation, pursue British publishing venues and accolades over Indian ones. Yes, target markets and economics explain many things but there is more—it is as if we accord a higher caste to the British and subconsciously elevate and mimic their literary culture. It is one thing to admire and be inspired by other literary cultures, but our attitude here is one of deference, lacking the self-confidence of equals. Nothing like Bookers and Oscars, or reviews, endorsements, and fat book deals in Britain (also increasingly in the U.S.) to turn our heads. Indian novels that "make it" in the Anglophone West are then taken seriously in India—not vice-versa. Do we ever grant the same cachet to books that win Sahitya Akademi and other awards in India? Or crave translations of our best non-English books?

In his opening salvo, Bal makes many of these points. His bigger focus is inward, on the attitudes of us Indian elites, the language/culture hierarchies we subscribe to, the Anglo/American recognition we crave and which guides our sense of literary merit. We are yet to achieve intellectual independence, and "if Dalrymple appears central to our literary culture, it says something far more damaging about us than about him." I see in Bal's critique a bit of Ngugi wa Thiong'o—author of Decolonizing the Mind, a penetrating analysis of the colonization of Kenyan and other African minds.

Dalrymple, among the better UK writers to engage with India, seems to me more a vehicle for Bal's polemic. The fact that Dalrymple, a resident of India and a director of the Jaipur Literature Festival, didn't mention any Indian accolades in his profile supported Bal's point, as did the prompt edits that followed. It's unfortunate that Dalrymple took things so personally and overreacted. Ok, Bal did provokingly call him "pompous", but I see nothing racist in Bal's piece or the cartoon. Dalrymple took the attack on the festival and his role in it as an attack on his work and reputation (some damage to which actually comes from Pramod Kumar).

In Dalrymple's place, I too would have defended the festival's diversity, but then acknowledged Bal's point about the insecurities of the Indian elites and Britain's long shadow over the Indian literary scene as both valid and nothing new, and perhaps cited warm and fuzzy examples of how things may be changing. As it turns out, a story in DNA claims that Dalrymple now regrets the charge of racism he hurled at Bal. Check out the often interesting comments beneath the articles. What do you think, dear reader? Or is this really a storm in a teacup?

The War and Peace of Hindi Literature

Daisy Rockwell on the first ever English translation of Jootha Sach ("False Truth") by Yashpal (1903-76)—published as This Is Not that Dawn.

I read War and Peace a number of years ago in Allahabad, India, in March or April, when the temperatures begin to soar. Our roof-top apartment, so delightfully airy during other months, slowly transformed into an oven. This was how we learned why no landlord in India lives in the top floor of their house if they can avoid it. Frequent power outages exacerbate the situation, and by mid-day each day, the best course of action was to lie in the dark as immobile as possible and read. Napoleon's ill-advised campaign into Russia, the arrival of winter and the freeze-out of the French army provided a cooling balm to my imagination, if not my body.

I was reading War and Peace so that I might be able to continue to say, with confidence, that the Hindi novel Jhootha Sach, which means "False truth," was "the War and Peace of Hindi literature." It was a claim that was often thrown around, and one that I had carelessly made myself. Reading one book to find out if it can be used as an exemplar of another one has already read is ostensibly going about things backwards. But I had a particular motivation: Jhootha Sach was untranslated and I wanted to make the case that this fact was a tragedy for literature lovers around the world. Just imagine if War and Peace was sitting around in Russia, untranslated, and no non-Russian readers were able to access it? How culturally impoverished we would be if that were the case, even those of us who had never bothered to read it because of its notorious heft?

To the naked eye, it is this heft that is the most obvious shared characteristic between Jhootha Sach and War and Peace. The new English translation of Jhootha Sach (titled This is not that Dawn) is 1119 pages. Translations of War and Peace generally weigh in at around 1400+ pages. After size, there is their common theme: both novels are set during an Important Historical Event. Jhootha Sach is set during the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan; War and Peace is set during the Napoleonic wars.

More here. A "white chick with a Hindi Ph.D.", Daisy Rockwell has also written a critical biography of Upendranath Ashk.

Trying is All We Have

(An excerpt from a longer work of fiction. Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

It has been a month since they first slept together. He wondered why their verbal sparring had increased in recent days. Just this morning at her place, Liz set off on the youth-obsessed American culture and the skinny ideals of female beauty manufactured by the consumer industry—a conspiracy, she said, to keep women down.

‘But ideals of female beauty have always existed in every culture,’ Ved argued.

‘Yes, but ours have become horribly unhealthy and unrealistic. I saw this even in my teens some twenty years ago, when I was in fact quite skinny.’

‘Aren’t ideals usually unrealistic? I mean consider the buxom beauties of Indian temple art,’ he chuckled. ‘I’ve never met an Indian woman who came even close.’

‘My point is that ideals don’t have to be unrealistic. Can we not have realistic ideals?’

‘Perhaps in theory. But in real life there is always some power that tries to promote unrealistic ideals—to contain us, classify us, gain from us. In our culture, such power is exercised through marketing. Fortunately, women here also have the power to free themselves from the narrow ideals of beauty impressed on them.’

‘I know that sounds very logical to you,’ she retorted. ‘But it’s easier said than done. You don’t know the pressure this culture puts on women, how it ruins their self-esteem, causes them anxiety and self-loathing—not to mention eating disorders and health problems. Do you know that some college sororities even have puking contests after dinner? You don’t know. You are not constantly evaluated by the shape of your tits and butt, are you?’

‘No, but that may be because I don’t have tits,’ he tried to inject some humor.

Coetzee's Ethics

Here is the back cover blurb of a volume of essays titled J. M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature. Edited by Anton Leist and Peter Singer, published in June 2010 by CUP.

In 2003, South African writer J. M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his riveting portrayals of racial repression, sexual politics, the guises of reason, and the hypocrisy of human beings toward animals and nature. Coetzee was credited with being "a scrupulous doubter, ruthless in his criticism of the cruel rationalism and cosmetic morality of western civilization." The film of his novel Disgrace, starring John Malkovich, brought his challenging ideas to a new audience.

Anton Leist and Peter Singer have assembled an outstanding group of contributors who probe deeply into Coetzee's extensive and extraordinary corpus. They explore his approach to ethical theory and philosophy and pay particular attention to his representation of the human-animal relationship. They also confront Coetzee's depiction of the elementary conditions of life, the origins of morality, the recognition of value in others, the sexual dynamics between men and women, the normality of suppression, and the possibility of equality in postcolonial society. With its wide-ranging consideration of philosophical issues, especially in relation to fiction, this volume stands alone in its extraordinary exchange of ethical and literary inquiry.

The Quarterly Conversation has an interesting review by Ryan Michael Williams. Despite Singer, I've just placed my order folks.

Readings from 'Tablet & Pen'

An evening of music, poetry, and other readings inspired by the new anthology of literature, Tablet & Pen, hosted by its editor Reza Aslan (approx two hours). Though the anthology is about "literary landscapes from the modern Middle East", it includes selections from South Asia. While most performances were quite good, particularly resonant to me were Ajay Naidu's reading of a poem by Zeeshan Sahil (@ 33 mins), Kiran Ahluwalia's singing (@ 38 mins), and Azra Raza's reading of two poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz (@ 49 mins).

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.

In India, children’s reading materials were long (and continue to be) addressed to an urban, middle- and upper-caste child in ways that reflected his or her economic resources, family relationships, beliefs, school experiences, food habits and language. They recorded and endorsed the world, the sensibility and the authority of this child, resulting in a self-assured hold over the world that was later a key enabling factor in such children’s success. Other children, however, were not provided with such psychic support. In such books we hardly ever found a child who had come to school hungry and sits there dreaming about food, for instance, or one who had to scheme in order to acquire books for class. Children from different contexts sometimes did find a place in these stories, but were generally forced to establish their ‘smartness’. A tribal boy, for instance, needed to establish that his knowledge of the forest can be valuable for his urban, middle-class classmates; a disabled girl must excel as a craftsperson. Even in the case of middle-class children, only a restricted set of situations were generally admissible, thus glossing over the fact that children often lead complex lives. We rarely encountered a child whose mother was depressed or one who was coping with a death in the family – such children lived with the knowledge that they must anxiously guard such secrets.
...

Over the years ... it has become particularly clear that the concept and metaphor of inclusion is inadequate to address issues of marginalisation in India today. Equality and self-respect of minorities requires a rearrangement of the way that the ‘life worlds’ themselves are imagined – a process that involves a critical pulling-away from old certainties. It suggests new frameworks in which we can think about the challenge of education in a plural world, but it also involves the creation of new narrative fragments, new figures, new settings and new dramas – ultimately, a new structure of feeling and knowing, a new idiom of speech. These are radical tasks. Yet they are necessary tasks for a contemporary aesthetic.

More here.

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.)

    On their way to China Town, they pass an area with red curtained massage parlors and hookers pacing the streets in tight clothes. They stop at a red light behind a BMW. A hooker approaches its curbside window, talks to the driver, and hops in. Ved notices Liz shaking her head in what appears to be disapproval.

    ‘Consenting adults!’ he provokes her.

    ‘You don’t need to tell me that,’ she says sharply.

    ‘Why the disapproval then?’

    ‘Because it is so sad. I just wish these women had other options.’

    ‘Maybe they do. I doubt they are doing this against their will, at least not in San Francisco.’

    ‘Just because they do this, quote-unquote, voluntarily, doesn’t mean they do it because they are happy to. It’s because they don’t recognize other options. Or they are addicted to abuse, or full of self-loathing and given to self-destruction.’ Her voice bristles. ‘It doesn’t mean they like it, or choose it with a healthy frame of mind.’

    ‘But if they do it voluntarily—so let’s exclude the drug addicts—can we say we know better? Who should be allowed to save people from themselves? So many others don’t like their jobs either, or choose them with a healthy frame of mind. I have met—’

    She sighs. ‘I know that line of reasoning, but taking a job flipping burgers is not quite comparable to letting a horny customer finger your private parts.’

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’.

Here is another article on the topic in the WSJ. My review of Omprakash Valmiki's Joothan with appear here and in 3 Quarks Daily on 29th March, along with pointers to other English translations of recent Dalit literature from other Indian languages.

Mahabharata: A Conversation

Ashis Nandy and Gurcharan Das discuss the Mahabharata (in three parts: part 1, part 2, part 3; total ~25 mins): 

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.

Striking a balance between writing literary fiction and paying the rent is a constant struggle, and I thought it might be interesting to speak with other writers about it.

More here.

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.

Beholding Home

ONE SHOULD SEE ONE'S OWN HOME FROM FAR OFF

One 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.
____________________________________

Poem by Vinod Kumar Shukla (via 3QD). The Hindi original is here.

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 you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

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 Salesman

One 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.

He had traveled far and wide,
with samples of fir, linen, wool,
calico and even cow-hide.
To everyone he was polite,
for he saw in every human,
a sale personified.

For all those near and dear,
he gathered many a souvenir:
beer mugs, glass beads, and miniatures,
in anticipation of their joyous tears.

Alas! the man died
before the end of the quarter.
But there was plenty he left behind —
a fistful of modest dreams,
a big blue house, two spiffy cars,
and bona fide bone china for his wife.

At his funeral, his friends countrywide,
met to commiserate and unanimously decide,
the dear man would have met his quota,
if only he had survived.

        — 2 Aug, 1995.

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.

It is through Roberts’s observations of and attachment to the life of the slum that this book plants its foundation and Lin gropes for his own moral ballast. In vivid detail, Roberts lays out the lives of the slum-dwellers, the everyday mechanics by which they live, aiding each other in times of want, coalescing in a moment into efficient squads to combat floods, fire, and cholera. Justice is reckoned by a headman, who rules solely through the respect of his constituency, and dispensed by the community at large. As Lin is immersed in this cast of characters of every condition and persuasion, each one fully textured and brought to life as individuals with their own aspirations, needs, choices, he marvels at the miracle of it, at its inherent peace. That such a tangled mass of humanity, representing such a multitude of languages, beliefs, and lifestyles, could function as this chaotic, unified whole awes him. It’s only possible, he surmises, because of a kind of love, born of necessity, that fills up the wretched gullies, and spills out on all who come near, even a low-life such as himself.

And this, ultimately, is what Shantaram comes to be about: Love, in all its forms and degrees. The love of our fellows, our parents, our brothers and sisters and friends and mates. The love of ourselves. That most human engagement which drives us, completes us, injures us, heals us, ruins us, saves us. Never pure, simple, or clean, often untrue, it is nevertheless our unavoidable condition and our only hope. For such a tough guy, surprisingly, Roberts never flinches from his subject.

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:

Kenneth Tynan, the doyen of theatre criticism, once said: "A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car." Certainly, nobody, not even Tynan, became a critic in the expectation of receiving bouquets. Most writers have about as much affection for them as they have for head lice. But in an age when anyone with an opinion, however ill-informed or ignorant, can preserve it in print, post it on the internet and reach a receptive audience, the need for critics who can bring their authority, experience and perception to bear on works of art and articulate what makes them great or tat has never been more urgent.

James Wood is one such. Recently appointed a staff writer at The New Yorker and the professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard, he is arguably the world's leading critic, devoting his career to the study of fiction. Writers as diverse as Susan Sontag, Harold Bloom and John Banville have attested to his ability to burrow beneath the skin of a novel, showing why it is less—or more—than the sum of its parts. Like all the best critics, Wood is as dispassionate as a surgeon and as enthusiastic as a child with the latest gizmo. Whether he praises or pillories, he makes you want to read the text he has freshly filleted.

More here. Another decent article on the man here.

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)