02 May 2011
"One Step Towards the Sun: Short Stories by Women from Orissa" , a Review by Bhaswati Ghosh
In recent publishing history, the universe of Indian Writing in English (IWE) has been continually expanding, with a plethora of new titles spilling off the market shelves. While that is sweet news for the authors of these books, their counterparts writing in India’s various regional languages often don’t receive similar attention. The obvious reason for this is that regional languages have limited readerships, mostly restricted to readers from the respective regions. In the prevailing scenario, the best solution to this problem is making these writings available in English. According to Valerie Henitiuk, “...The past couple of decades have seen a rapid rise in the distinct phenomenon of Indian Literature in English Translation (ILET).” One Step Towards the Sun is an important new addition to this phenomenon.Edited by Henitiuk along with Supriya Kar, both of them academicians in the field of literary translation, the book is a collection of twenty-five short stories written by women from the eastern Indian state of Orissa. The very fact that women writers from this state could make their voices heard only as recently as the 1970s makes this anthology critically significant. What makes it interesting and a great read is the amazing diversity on offer--in terms of the periods of writing covered, themes, and writing styles.
Traversing through the milieus these stories present, one discovers that the women writing these stories are every bit as sensitive to issues concerning their own gender as they are about the wider humanity. As is to be expected, women’s issues form the core of many of the stories--exposing the many levels of exploitation the female is subjected to--sexual, domestic, social, and psychological. In Basanta Kumari Pattnaik’s “In Bondage”, the nameless protagonist is brought to a big city by her brother and sister-in-law so they can use her as an unpaid maidservant. In “The Worn-Out Bird”, Aratibala Prusty narrates the tragedy of a mother who is imprisoned for killing her daughter’s rapist. However, her act of revenge goes in vain, as upon her release she learns of her daughter’s suicide, after suffering even more sexual violence.
The reader need not lose all hope though. For sharing the pages with such grim tales are characters that refuse to bow down to social prejudices, despite undergoing the greatest torment. One such woman is Pata Dei, the protagonist bearing the story title by Binapani Mohanty. As she returns to her father’s village home with a child, slanderous accusations are hurled her way and villagers question who the child’s father is. Defiant and fearless, Pata Dei narrates to the villagers the trauma of the night when a group of her own village men had raped her. Turning to her infant son, she says, “Why should you cry, dear? Don’t be afraid of these people. None of them is man enough to stand up and admit to being your father. But your mother is always there for you...”
Besides highlighting the varied kinds of trials faced by women, the anthology presents a gamut of themes, from Partition riots, old age, poverty, marital issues, and the impact of natural calamity on humans. Deprivation and hunger present themselves as stark contrasts to the riches of Orissa--splendid art and architecture. In Gayatri Basu Mallik’s “Ruins”, the narrator, while on a trip to see Konark, the sun temple that is Orissa’s architectural pride, is bemused to experience “the ruins of real flesh and blood” as he encounters an old woman whose entire life had been a series of misfortunes.. Banaja Devi echoes a similar idea in her story, “A Classic”. Here, the narrator comes across what appears to be a sculpture in a railway station, but, on closer inspection is revealed to be a beggar family--emaciated and driven to the edge by hunger.
One story that deftly tackles two themes--hunger and marital infidelity is “A Mother From Kalahandi” by Gayatri Sharaf. A seemingly blissful marriage starts falling apart for the heroine, Amrita, as she accidentally discovers her husband Swapnesh’s secrets. On probing, Amrita learns that Swapnesh has bought a young girl from the famine-struck district of Kalahandi for a paltry amount, only to bring her to the city for his sexual gratification. A social worker herself, Amrita decides to become a foster mother to the child born of her husband’s extra-marital relationship. At the same time, she convinces the biological mother to return to her village and liberate herself from the clutches of Swapnesh’s exploitation.
One Step Towards the Sun also impresses because of its stylistic variety. From elements of fantasy to disjointed soliloquy, plot twists and lyricism, the stories arrest the reader as much with the unfolding story as with the words that unveil it.
It is to Henitiuk and Kar’s credit that they have produced a book of writing translated from a regional Indian language without the need for tedious footnotes or a painstaking glossary. The translations have standardized almost all of the original text, including some of the very localized expressions. Although the end result makes for easy readability, it can be a bit of a disappointment for someone seeking to derive a taste of local flavours offered by phrases and idioms unique to the region. One wonders if certain regional expressions couldn’t have been incorporated into the translated narratives without hindering the readability. However, this is a small omission in an otherwise excellently produced anthology. Even as IWE basks in the warm light of international awards, this book has taken but a solid step towards the sun as far as furthering ILET is concerned.
ONE STEP TOWARDS THE SUN:
Short Stories by Women from Orissa
Edited by Valerie Henitiuk and Supriya Kar
Publisher: Rupantar
Price: Rs. 295.00
ISBN 978-81-906729-1-7
BHASWATI GHOSH is an Indian writer whose work has appeared in leading Indian dailies such as The Times of India, The Statesman, and The Pioneer; as well as in U.S. magazines such as Cause and Effect, ByLine, and Teenage Buzz. An anthology of true stories, Letters to My Mother, published by Adams Media, carries her story, “On Angels’ Wings”. Another story of hers, “A Sparrow’s Flight”, has been published in the anthology My Teacher is My Hero, also published by Adams Media. In 2009, she won the Charles Wallace (India) Trust Fellowship for translation. Her English translation of “Shilpi Ramkinkar Alaapchari”, a Bengali book based on the renowned sculptor-painter, Ramkinkar Baij, is due to be published by Delhi-based Niyogi Books.
08 April 2011
Hunter for Asian American Immigrant Stories Finds A Home at the Library of Congress
Walking through the Library of Congress’ Asian Reading Room, librarian Remé Grefalda briskly pointed out the major collections. “These stacks contain books from our Chinese collection,” she dispassionately declared as she breezed to the next shelves. “Over there are volumes from our Japanese collection.” As we approached some displays in the middle of the room, her pace and tone shifted. “And these are some of our books and documents from the Asian-American Pacific Islander Collection,” she said, beaming with the pride of a parent.
The library’s Asian division recently introduced the Asian-American Pacific Islander Collection, its latest collection, and one which differs greatly from the other holdings. It’s a repository of the stories and histories of Asian immigrants and their descendants who have made America their home. It was born in large part through the passion and dedication of Grefalda, an immigrant herself.
Grefalda was born in Hong Kong to Filipino expatriates and spent part of her childhood in the United States. She settled permanently in this country in the 1970s, living first in New York and now in Washington, D.C. She is a published poet, playwright and author, founding editor of Our Own Voice: For Filipinos in the Diaspora, and the founder and sole curator of the Asian-American Pacific Islander Collection.
In 2006, Grefalda, then a volunteer at the library, put together a symposium on Carlos Bulosan, a twentieth century Filipino-American novelist and poet. The event was such a success, she says, that it spurred the formation of the Asian-American Pacific Islander Collection. It also led to Grefalda being hired as a librarian and curator.
The first sub-collection was named after Bulosan, the author of America Is in the Heart. Since then, Grefalda has established over two dozen Asian-American Pacific Islander collections including the archives of the leading authority on Chinese American History, Betty Lee Sung ; noted author and ceramicist Jade Snow Wong; the conceptual diaries of art director James Miho; and the files of U.S.-bound refugees from the Vietnamese Overseas Initiative for Conscience Empowerment.
“Remé is a hunter. She loves finding, taking care of, and promoting the materials,” said Gem Daus, adjunct faculty in the University of Maryland’s Asian American Studies Department. Indeed, Grefalda is constantly on the lookout for books, publications, documents and other ephemera that preserve the Asian immigrant experience. She expressed her concern that “if we don’t record Asian immigration and assimilation history, then we will lose it – the second and third generations will lose it.”
Grefalda understands how second generation immigrants – those born in the United States to foreign-born parents – might resist their own cultural heritage “because they feel they are more American.” But she believes this is not often the case with subsequent generations. Grefalda points to the hankering many Americans eventually feel for a sense of where they came from and who they are. “People are not interested in generic American,” she mused, saying people ask themselves, “What made you … you?” She warns that if children and grandchildren of immigrants do not educate themselves about their heritage and begin recording their own unique experiences as ethnic Americans, “then you are lost.”
Grefalda is also passionate about what she perceives as the need for immigrants and their descendants to begin telling, writing and documenting their stories through all media – books, articles, plays, videos, blogs, even tweets. “Absence of narratives about our reflections on our immediate and remote past have offered up zero history for our younger brothers and sisters,” she asserted, adding that immigrants need to “document our lives here if we are to pass on a legacy to our sons and daughters.”
She is very supportive of students sent by Daus, mostly second and third generation immigrants who research American History as experienced by Filipinos. This is the very generation Grefalda exhorts to write and record the immigrant American story. Grefalda promotes publishing and has even published some of the students’ papers.
The intrepid purveyor of immigrant history and legacy hopes that the Library of Congress’ Asian-American Pacific Collection will eventually have a specialist on the Asian immigrant experience. In spite of her role in birthing this new collection, she humbly protests that she is not that specialist – just someone who strongly believes that the stories of Asian immigrants and their children should be woven into the larger American narrative. In the meantime, she invites individuals and groups to consider donating their own archives and collections to the portfolio she nourishes. Knowing that the author of this profile is well connected in the LGBT community, she asked, “Know how I can get the papers of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender APA organizations?”
Contact ERWIN DE LEON on Twitter @ErwindeLeon.
Read more
The library’s Asian division recently introduced the Asian-American Pacific Islander Collection, its latest collection, and one which differs greatly from the other holdings. It’s a repository of the stories and histories of Asian immigrants and their descendants who have made America their home. It was born in large part through the passion and dedication of Grefalda, an immigrant herself.
Grefalda was born in Hong Kong to Filipino expatriates and spent part of her childhood in the United States. She settled permanently in this country in the 1970s, living first in New York and now in Washington, D.C. She is a published poet, playwright and author, founding editor of Our Own Voice: For Filipinos in the Diaspora, and the founder and sole curator of the Asian-American Pacific Islander Collection.
In 2006, Grefalda, then a volunteer at the library, put together a symposium on Carlos Bulosan, a twentieth century Filipino-American novelist and poet. The event was such a success, she says, that it spurred the formation of the Asian-American Pacific Islander Collection. It also led to Grefalda being hired as a librarian and curator.
The first sub-collection was named after Bulosan, the author of America Is in the Heart. Since then, Grefalda has established over two dozen Asian-American Pacific Islander collections including the archives of the leading authority on Chinese American History, Betty Lee Sung ; noted author and ceramicist Jade Snow Wong; the conceptual diaries of art director James Miho; and the files of U.S.-bound refugees from the Vietnamese Overseas Initiative for Conscience Empowerment.
“Remé is a hunter. She loves finding, taking care of, and promoting the materials,” said Gem Daus, adjunct faculty in the University of Maryland’s Asian American Studies Department. Indeed, Grefalda is constantly on the lookout for books, publications, documents and other ephemera that preserve the Asian immigrant experience. She expressed her concern that “if we don’t record Asian immigration and assimilation history, then we will lose it – the second and third generations will lose it.”
Grefalda understands how second generation immigrants – those born in the United States to foreign-born parents – might resist their own cultural heritage “because they feel they are more American.” But she believes this is not often the case with subsequent generations. Grefalda points to the hankering many Americans eventually feel for a sense of where they came from and who they are. “People are not interested in generic American,” she mused, saying people ask themselves, “What made you … you?” She warns that if children and grandchildren of immigrants do not educate themselves about their heritage and begin recording their own unique experiences as ethnic Americans, “then you are lost.”
Grefalda is also passionate about what she perceives as the need for immigrants and their descendants to begin telling, writing and documenting their stories through all media – books, articles, plays, videos, blogs, even tweets. “Absence of narratives about our reflections on our immediate and remote past have offered up zero history for our younger brothers and sisters,” she asserted, adding that immigrants need to “document our lives here if we are to pass on a legacy to our sons and daughters.”
She is very supportive of students sent by Daus, mostly second and third generation immigrants who research American History as experienced by Filipinos. This is the very generation Grefalda exhorts to write and record the immigrant American story. Grefalda promotes publishing and has even published some of the students’ papers.
The intrepid purveyor of immigrant history and legacy hopes that the Library of Congress’ Asian-American Pacific Collection will eventually have a specialist on the Asian immigrant experience. In spite of her role in birthing this new collection, she humbly protests that she is not that specialist – just someone who strongly believes that the stories of Asian immigrants and their children should be woven into the larger American narrative. In the meantime, she invites individuals and groups to consider donating their own archives and collections to the portfolio she nourishes. Knowing that the author of this profile is well connected in the LGBT community, she asked, “Know how I can get the papers of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender APA organizations?”
Contact ERWIN DE LEON on Twitter @ErwindeLeon.
31 March 2011
Lessons of Anime: How to Cope with Japan’s Tragedy by Andrew Lam
Lessons of Anime: How to Cope with Japan’s Tragedy
In Japan’s most popular cultural genres known as manga (comic books) and anime (animation films and series), there’s a recurrent theme in which the country is routinely devastated.
Tokyo, home to more than 30 million people, is destroyed so often in the Japanese collective imagination there’s an alternative version of the ultramodern mega-metropolis: one made of shattered concrete and glass debris.
Take the popular animated film Akira, for example. “Tokyo is destroyed by an apparent nuclear explosion, leading to the start of World War III.” So goes Wikipedia’s note on the world-famous manga series turned anime.
Wikipedia goes on, “Thirty-one years after Tokyo's destruction, Neo-Tokyo, a new metropolis built on an artificial island in Tokyo Bay, is gripped by political strife, anti-government terrorism and gang violence.”
Or take Desert Punk: “After a global nuclear catastrophe Japan has been reduced to a desert and the surviving humans seek out a meager living in the hot sands,” goes the description of the anime series.
“A devastating war fought between two major nations with ultra-magnetic weapons far greater than anything seen earlier brings about total chaos and destruction throughout the world, resulting in several earthquakes and tidal waves,” begins the plot description of the anime Future Boy Conan, in which humanity is on the brink of extinction.
The examples are endless, but you see the point: Nihilistic themes dominate Japanese narratives of itself.
Now try this scenario: Japan has fallen apart. Its towns and villages devastated by such a massive earthquake that the earth’s axis itself is affected and by the subsequent tsunami, its nuclear reactors exposed, sending radiation into the atmosphere. Millions live without water and electricity. Millions more live in panic and fear as the tremors continue and radiation leaks into food and water and land.
Japan is facing a crisis it hasn’t seen since World War II.
This, alas, is no scenario at all, but a reality. So, what purposes do these apocalyptic stories serve? And how does one watch these animes, now that their visions have become prophetically superimposed on the real world.
I write this as someone who was born into a world devastated by war. As a South Vietnamese soldier’s son – an army brat -- I witnessed much destruction and suffering at a very young age. I saw dead bodies strewn about in rice fields, burned out villages, maimed survivors, homeless refugees trudging along highways, and many begging on the streets of Saigon.
As a teenager in America, I was enthralled by Bugs Bunny and Disney movies showing children laughing. In this world, evil is always conquered. The princess marries the prince, and everyone is guaranteed a happy ending. That is, I bought into the American optimism, bought my own ticket on the little train that could.
Now, however, as an adult, as a seasoned journalist who has witnessed tragedy after tragedy around the world, I find myself drawn back to the Far East, and increasingly drawn to Japanese manga and anime. I watch them religiously in middle age.
Why? Because many of these stories, albeit far more complex and enticing, are similar to the folktales my Vietnamese grandmother told. On those frightful nights when the bombs fell in villages and their reverberations shook the city, Grandma’s ancient stories with their ambiguous if flat-out unhappy endings were strangely soothing.
The princess died and her heart turns into a ruby, which was then carved into a teacup. The fisherman, her true love, came back and cried and his tear fell in the cup, which and melted into blood.
Or she’d tell of a younger brother, who gave up his love for a beautiful woman so that his older one could marry her. The younger man went to the forest and died, turning into a betel tree. Then the older brother searched for him, died and turned into a limestone. The wife followed, and sat leaning on the tree, when she turned into a vine. When chewing betel nut together with the vine leaf and limestone, your spit will turn into the color of blood.
A few years ago in Japan, I interviewed professor Koike Kazuo, the celebrated author of the Lone Wolf and Cub manga series. It is the story of a samurai who walked the path of death while pushing a small cart in which sat his little boy. Their entire clan had been massacred.
The boy watches undaunted as his father stabs and slices their enemies. In the final episode, the boy’s father is killed by their ultimate nemesis, an old man who has masterminded their clan’s destruction. Undaunted, the little boy picks up his father’s spear and rushes to drive it through the old man, who, recognizing the boy’s samurai spirit, embraced him in death, calling him “Grandson of my heart.”
I asked Kazuo sensei why such a tragic ending would be considered children’s entertainment. He thought about this for a while before answering, “On the deepest level, serious mangas are about spiritual drama and love.”
This struck a chord in me. Despite the age of high-tech wizardry, manga/anime continue to distill an ancient ethos of the Far East; a shared cultural matrix between Japan and East Asia, in which fatalism informs the floating world. It teaches that life is precious, and spending time serving the greater good may be the only control one has in the face of unpredictable calamity and uncontrollable and often violent cosmos.
When one lives life for the sake of others by protecting what one considers precious, then one will achieve his human/spiritual truth regardless of the outcome.
Indeed, if American fairy tales are in the business of protecting children from the reality of a cold and belligerent world, Japanese fairy tales told through certain genre of mangas and animes are doing quite the opposite: preparing their charges for the day in which their normal and seemingly sunny life may be abruptly thrown into complete chaos and destruction. Thus, hidden behind those round eyed and perfect-faced cartoon characters are stories of human sufferings and survival rivaling the tragedy of Job.
No wonder these Japanese genres are rivaling the church of Disney, and anime continues to enthrall children and young adults across the globe. It is in part because they don’t belittle their viewers but treat them as adults to be.
Now, as I watch in horror the story of Japan in the aftermath of the huge earthquake and devastating tsunami, I see their points more clearly. My grandmother’s old fairy tales, with their countless wars and natural disasters, evolved over the millennia and merge with anime as warning, as an admonitory mythos, and as a way to prepare the next generation for cataclysm and grief.
Here’s another inspirational and true story with anime sensibility. The story, which has been widely distributed on the Internet and global media, is told by an immigrant in Fukushima, where the nuclear reactors continue to send radiation out of their broken roofs and walls.
A nine-year-old boy watched as the tsunami swept away his father from the balcony of his school. His sister and mother, too, were presumably swept away with their house near the beach. Yet, despite such losses, when given a bag of food, he went to the front of the food line and gave it back to the food distributors. He told the astonished man who gave him the food to nourish himself, “I see a lot more people hungrier than I am. If I put it there, then they will distribute the food equally.”
The adult who told this story wept, “Who knew a boy in the third grade could teach me a lesson on how to be a human being at a time of such great suffering?” The boy, having no superpower, having lost his family, nevertheless becomes a kind of anime hero, someone who sacrifices for the greater good and achieves human truth.
A year after the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City were destroyed by terrorist attacks, I visited Ground Zero. There were many visitors and gawkers about, and next to me were a few teenagers with their charming Midwest accents, snapping photos. As they surveyed the terrible destruction before them – shattered concrete and melted steel of what was once an ivory citadel -- one of them said, with reverence in his voice, “Man, this is, like, right out of Akira!”
I watch anime nightly along with news of Japan’s unfolding devastation, and the story lines ring truer now. In this post 9/11 world, where war drones fly and preemptive strikes and revolutions are the norm, where ominous storms keep gathering and growing stronger -- if not at our shores then in our collective unconsciousness – and where the earth keeps trembling, it may very well be that those apocalyptic narratives are the very medicine that could assist us all. Adults and children alike, in Japan and elsewhere, now bear witness to the churning tides.
New America Media editor ANDREW LAM is the author of East Eats West (Heyday Books, 2011), his new collection of 21 essays. His previous book, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora won a Pen American award in 2006.
Read more
In Japan’s most popular cultural genres known as manga (comic books) and anime (animation films and series), there’s a recurrent theme in which the country is routinely devastated.
Tokyo, home to more than 30 million people, is destroyed so often in the Japanese collective imagination there’s an alternative version of the ultramodern mega-metropolis: one made of shattered concrete and glass debris.
Take the popular animated film Akira, for example. “Tokyo is destroyed by an apparent nuclear explosion, leading to the start of World War III.” So goes Wikipedia’s note on the world-famous manga series turned anime.
Wikipedia goes on, “Thirty-one years after Tokyo's destruction, Neo-Tokyo, a new metropolis built on an artificial island in Tokyo Bay, is gripped by political strife, anti-government terrorism and gang violence.”
Or take Desert Punk: “After a global nuclear catastrophe Japan has been reduced to a desert and the surviving humans seek out a meager living in the hot sands,” goes the description of the anime series.
“A devastating war fought between two major nations with ultra-magnetic weapons far greater than anything seen earlier brings about total chaos and destruction throughout the world, resulting in several earthquakes and tidal waves,” begins the plot description of the anime Future Boy Conan, in which humanity is on the brink of extinction.
The examples are endless, but you see the point: Nihilistic themes dominate Japanese narratives of itself.
Now try this scenario: Japan has fallen apart. Its towns and villages devastated by such a massive earthquake that the earth’s axis itself is affected and by the subsequent tsunami, its nuclear reactors exposed, sending radiation into the atmosphere. Millions live without water and electricity. Millions more live in panic and fear as the tremors continue and radiation leaks into food and water and land.
Japan is facing a crisis it hasn’t seen since World War II.
This, alas, is no scenario at all, but a reality. So, what purposes do these apocalyptic stories serve? And how does one watch these animes, now that their visions have become prophetically superimposed on the real world.
I write this as someone who was born into a world devastated by war. As a South Vietnamese soldier’s son – an army brat -- I witnessed much destruction and suffering at a very young age. I saw dead bodies strewn about in rice fields, burned out villages, maimed survivors, homeless refugees trudging along highways, and many begging on the streets of Saigon.
As a teenager in America, I was enthralled by Bugs Bunny and Disney movies showing children laughing. In this world, evil is always conquered. The princess marries the prince, and everyone is guaranteed a happy ending. That is, I bought into the American optimism, bought my own ticket on the little train that could.
Now, however, as an adult, as a seasoned journalist who has witnessed tragedy after tragedy around the world, I find myself drawn back to the Far East, and increasingly drawn to Japanese manga and anime. I watch them religiously in middle age.
Why? Because many of these stories, albeit far more complex and enticing, are similar to the folktales my Vietnamese grandmother told. On those frightful nights when the bombs fell in villages and their reverberations shook the city, Grandma’s ancient stories with their ambiguous if flat-out unhappy endings were strangely soothing.
The princess died and her heart turns into a ruby, which was then carved into a teacup. The fisherman, her true love, came back and cried and his tear fell in the cup, which and melted into blood.
Or she’d tell of a younger brother, who gave up his love for a beautiful woman so that his older one could marry her. The younger man went to the forest and died, turning into a betel tree. Then the older brother searched for him, died and turned into a limestone. The wife followed, and sat leaning on the tree, when she turned into a vine. When chewing betel nut together with the vine leaf and limestone, your spit will turn into the color of blood.
A few years ago in Japan, I interviewed professor Koike Kazuo, the celebrated author of the Lone Wolf and Cub manga series. It is the story of a samurai who walked the path of death while pushing a small cart in which sat his little boy. Their entire clan had been massacred.
The boy watches undaunted as his father stabs and slices their enemies. In the final episode, the boy’s father is killed by their ultimate nemesis, an old man who has masterminded their clan’s destruction. Undaunted, the little boy picks up his father’s spear and rushes to drive it through the old man, who, recognizing the boy’s samurai spirit, embraced him in death, calling him “Grandson of my heart.”
I asked Kazuo sensei why such a tragic ending would be considered children’s entertainment. He thought about this for a while before answering, “On the deepest level, serious mangas are about spiritual drama and love.”
This struck a chord in me. Despite the age of high-tech wizardry, manga/anime continue to distill an ancient ethos of the Far East; a shared cultural matrix between Japan and East Asia, in which fatalism informs the floating world. It teaches that life is precious, and spending time serving the greater good may be the only control one has in the face of unpredictable calamity and uncontrollable and often violent cosmos.
When one lives life for the sake of others by protecting what one considers precious, then one will achieve his human/spiritual truth regardless of the outcome.
Indeed, if American fairy tales are in the business of protecting children from the reality of a cold and belligerent world, Japanese fairy tales told through certain genre of mangas and animes are doing quite the opposite: preparing their charges for the day in which their normal and seemingly sunny life may be abruptly thrown into complete chaos and destruction. Thus, hidden behind those round eyed and perfect-faced cartoon characters are stories of human sufferings and survival rivaling the tragedy of Job.
No wonder these Japanese genres are rivaling the church of Disney, and anime continues to enthrall children and young adults across the globe. It is in part because they don’t belittle their viewers but treat them as adults to be.
Now, as I watch in horror the story of Japan in the aftermath of the huge earthquake and devastating tsunami, I see their points more clearly. My grandmother’s old fairy tales, with their countless wars and natural disasters, evolved over the millennia and merge with anime as warning, as an admonitory mythos, and as a way to prepare the next generation for cataclysm and grief.
Here’s another inspirational and true story with anime sensibility. The story, which has been widely distributed on the Internet and global media, is told by an immigrant in Fukushima, where the nuclear reactors continue to send radiation out of their broken roofs and walls.
A nine-year-old boy watched as the tsunami swept away his father from the balcony of his school. His sister and mother, too, were presumably swept away with their house near the beach. Yet, despite such losses, when given a bag of food, he went to the front of the food line and gave it back to the food distributors. He told the astonished man who gave him the food to nourish himself, “I see a lot more people hungrier than I am. If I put it there, then they will distribute the food equally.”
The adult who told this story wept, “Who knew a boy in the third grade could teach me a lesson on how to be a human being at a time of such great suffering?” The boy, having no superpower, having lost his family, nevertheless becomes a kind of anime hero, someone who sacrifices for the greater good and achieves human truth.
A year after the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City were destroyed by terrorist attacks, I visited Ground Zero. There were many visitors and gawkers about, and next to me were a few teenagers with their charming Midwest accents, snapping photos. As they surveyed the terrible destruction before them – shattered concrete and melted steel of what was once an ivory citadel -- one of them said, with reverence in his voice, “Man, this is, like, right out of Akira!”
I watch anime nightly along with news of Japan’s unfolding devastation, and the story lines ring truer now. In this post 9/11 world, where war drones fly and preemptive strikes and revolutions are the norm, where ominous storms keep gathering and growing stronger -- if not at our shores then in our collective unconsciousness – and where the earth keeps trembling, it may very well be that those apocalyptic narratives are the very medicine that could assist us all. Adults and children alike, in Japan and elsewhere, now bear witness to the churning tides.
New America Media editor ANDREW LAM is the author of East Eats West (Heyday Books, 2011), his new collection of 21 essays. His previous book, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora won a Pen American award in 2006.
25 March 2011
A Tale of Little Magazines by Rahad Abir
What is a little magazine and why is it there? What is its history and who first brought it out? Before getting into the answers let us first see the definition of little magazines.
A little magazine is a periodical, usually not published for profit, that prints reviews, essays, fiction, or poetry, supposedly devoted to high literary standards. Little magazines often run innovative or experimental works. Some are widely influential, but others are virtually unknown except to the editors and contributors.
The publicity and expansion of little magazines began mainly at the turn of the twentieth century. But its real journey started in the mid-nineteenth century. The Dial, (Boston, 1840-1844), jointly edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, is considered as the original model. At the end of the nineteenth century and in the beginning of the twentieth, little magazines became popular in England, France and America through the imagist, symbolist and other movements. In Bengali literature, Promoth Chowdhury's Sobujpatra (1914) is thought to be the original model for little magazines. Other than that, Bankim Chatterjee's Bangodarshan (1872) is also a point of reference.
Mizan Rahman, a young promising poet, researcher and editor of a little magazine, has edited two books regarding little magazines in Bangladesh and thoughts around little magazines in the two Bengals. Undoubtedly, this is a pioneer work and these books are first in linking the two Bengals. Bangladeshey Little Magazine Chorcha, Otit O Bartoman (Little Magazine Practice in Bangladesh, Past and Present) is divided mainly into three parts. In the first part of the book come write-ups on the subject of little magazine practice, in the past and present, in Bangladesh. Ahmaad Majhar has written about Dhaka-based little magazine practice and activities. We come to know from his write-up that the little magazine wave came up in Bangladesh strongly in the 1960s.
Saptak (1962), Baktabbya (1963), Swakkhor (1963), Sad Generation (1963), Samprotik (1964), Kanthoswor (1965), Chhotogalpo (1966) and several other little magazines caused a big movement in the field of little magazines in Dhaka. And it is to be noted that Abdullah Abu Sayeed's Kanthoswor played a vital role then. The magazine was published continuously for twelve years. Kanthoswor was a strong voice of the emerging litterateurs of our country, most of whom are well-known names in Bengali literature today. The second part, named as a supplement, includes several renowned litterateurs' write-ups on little magazines. The writers include Buddhadev Bose, Shibnarayan Roy, Subimol Mishra, Robin Ghosh and so on. And in the third part is a list of nearly all little magazines published throughout Bangladesh.
Dui Banglar Little Magazine Bhabna (little magazine thinking in two Bengals) is a compilation of write-ups regarding little magazine thoughts of several litterateurs from the two Bengals, eleven from each. In the writers' list there are not only renowned litterateurs but young emerging litterateurs as well.
From these books it becomes clear that the little magazine is the real ground for rearing future writers. It is the best territory for all kinds of experiments in literature. Newspapers, magazines are nothing but institutions. They do not build up a writer. Moreover, like taking the cream from the milk, they collect good writers from little magazines.
We also come to know of the significant characteristics of little magazines. For instance, little magazines are not traditional and popular. Most writers in little magazines are young and newcomers in literature. Loss is the common word in the dictionary of little magazines. Anyone who wants to publish a little magazine does so at risk of financial loss. On the other hand, if a little magazine becomes profitable, it soon loses its characteristics.
RAHAD ABIR is a short story writer and translator from Bangladesh. He has three published books: Aamar Dui Prenika Ebong Tiktiki’ (2007, Oiitijho), Mirza Sahiban (Translation, Oitijjho, 2007), and Bhalo Bou (Translation, Kothaprokash, 2008). This article was first published in The Daily Star.
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A little magazine is a periodical, usually not published for profit, that prints reviews, essays, fiction, or poetry, supposedly devoted to high literary standards. Little magazines often run innovative or experimental works. Some are widely influential, but others are virtually unknown except to the editors and contributors.
The publicity and expansion of little magazines began mainly at the turn of the twentieth century. But its real journey started in the mid-nineteenth century. The Dial, (Boston, 1840-1844), jointly edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, is considered as the original model. At the end of the nineteenth century and in the beginning of the twentieth, little magazines became popular in England, France and America through the imagist, symbolist and other movements. In Bengali literature, Promoth Chowdhury's Sobujpatra (1914) is thought to be the original model for little magazines. Other than that, Bankim Chatterjee's Bangodarshan (1872) is also a point of reference.
Mizan Rahman, a young promising poet, researcher and editor of a little magazine, has edited two books regarding little magazines in Bangladesh and thoughts around little magazines in the two Bengals. Undoubtedly, this is a pioneer work and these books are first in linking the two Bengals. Bangladeshey Little Magazine Chorcha, Otit O Bartoman (Little Magazine Practice in Bangladesh, Past and Present) is divided mainly into three parts. In the first part of the book come write-ups on the subject of little magazine practice, in the past and present, in Bangladesh. Ahmaad Majhar has written about Dhaka-based little magazine practice and activities. We come to know from his write-up that the little magazine wave came up in Bangladesh strongly in the 1960s.
Saptak (1962), Baktabbya (1963), Swakkhor (1963), Sad Generation (1963), Samprotik (1964), Kanthoswor (1965), Chhotogalpo (1966) and several other little magazines caused a big movement in the field of little magazines in Dhaka. And it is to be noted that Abdullah Abu Sayeed's Kanthoswor played a vital role then. The magazine was published continuously for twelve years. Kanthoswor was a strong voice of the emerging litterateurs of our country, most of whom are well-known names in Bengali literature today. The second part, named as a supplement, includes several renowned litterateurs' write-ups on little magazines. The writers include Buddhadev Bose, Shibnarayan Roy, Subimol Mishra, Robin Ghosh and so on. And in the third part is a list of nearly all little magazines published throughout Bangladesh.
Dui Banglar Little Magazine Bhabna (little magazine thinking in two Bengals) is a compilation of write-ups regarding little magazine thoughts of several litterateurs from the two Bengals, eleven from each. In the writers' list there are not only renowned litterateurs but young emerging litterateurs as well.
From these books it becomes clear that the little magazine is the real ground for rearing future writers. It is the best territory for all kinds of experiments in literature. Newspapers, magazines are nothing but institutions. They do not build up a writer. Moreover, like taking the cream from the milk, they collect good writers from little magazines.
We also come to know of the significant characteristics of little magazines. For instance, little magazines are not traditional and popular. Most writers in little magazines are young and newcomers in literature. Loss is the common word in the dictionary of little magazines. Anyone who wants to publish a little magazine does so at risk of financial loss. On the other hand, if a little magazine becomes profitable, it soon loses its characteristics.
RAHAD ABIR is a short story writer and translator from Bangladesh. He has three published books: Aamar Dui Prenika Ebong Tiktiki’ (2007, Oiitijho), Mirza Sahiban (Translation, Oitijjho, 2007), and Bhalo Bou (Translation, Kothaprokash, 2008). This article was first published in The Daily Star.
21 March 2011
Featured Article: Indian Feminism and Sexual Discourse by Sarojini Sahoo
Indian Feminism and Sexual Discourse
1901
She was born into a Christian family in Bastar (now Chhatisgarh) in 1901 when her father, a doctor by profession, stayed away in Burma (now Myanmar). Later she studied medicine at Cuttack Medical School where she earned her LMP (the degree for Medical Practitioner during British Colonial times) in 1921 and started her career as the superintendent of the Cuttack Red Cross. During this time, she got involved with a fatherly person and was caught red handed by his wife. They had physical relations, but her lover cum mentor wholeheartedly wished her marriage with a suitable person.
The period between 1921 and 1927 was also a productive phase of her literary life. She wrote several volumes of poems like Anjali and Archana, and novels on social issues like Bharati and Parasmani in Oriya. Through her writing, she protested against purdah, child marriage, caste system, untouchability, discrimination against women. And she advocated women's rights, steps towards their empowerment, and widow remarriage.
While working with Red Cross and also while in a relationship with her mentor lover, she got herself involved with a barefoot doctor and imposter who settled in Delhi. Her mentor was against her marriage with that unknown person, but she resigned from her service and became an Aryasamajis. She got married to that stranger and left for Delhi and opened a clinic in Chandinichowk.
She began to write in Hindi while continuing her writing in Oriya. She came out with a volume of Hindi poems entitled Baramala. She also became an influential editor of several Hindi periodicals such as Mahabir, Jeevan and Nari Bharati. Kuntala Kumari was invited to deliver the convocation addresses at Allahabad University and at Benaras Hindu University. That was a mark of rare recognition accorded to a woman of those days.
But her marital life was not happy and her husband exploited her as a source of income to which she wanted to resist. She died at only her 37 years of age with illness and mental trauma. Eminent Hindi novelist Jainendra Kumar’s novel Kalyani was based on her struggle and her pathetic life.
She was Kuntala Kumari Sabat, the veteran feminist poetess and writer of Oriya Literature. Though her pre- and post-marital life were not so peaceful and her life was dangling between love, sex, oppression, and harassment by the male-dominated mentality of feudal India, we never find any sexual agony or find any of her own saga of life in her poems, rather than she always tried to hide her sexual expression with a coated version of mysticism in the form of Sufi ideology. This trend was prevailed for many years and even after few decades in the beginning of post colonial. where era we can see the poetess expressed their love feelings as a form of Bhakti poems.
1914
In 1930, a Romanian young boy met a 16-year-old Indian girl and both fell in love. The boy had come to India to study Indian Philosophy and the girl was his teacher’s daughter. They couldn’t hide this affair and were soon caught by the mentor. The boy was asked to leave the mentor’s residence and never to contact the girl again.
Later, the boy became a world famous philosopher and wrote a semi-autobiographical novel first published in Romania in 1933. It was written specifically for a literary prize and sold very well in Romania, garnering both fame and money. The novel was translated into Italian in 1945, into German in 1948, into French in 1950, and into Spanish in 1952.
The girl was married at the age of twenty and had two children. She engaged herself in writing and published volumes of poetry and prose, wrote many books on Tagore, but was not famous until 1974.
However, the girl was not aware of that Romanian novel until she heard about it from her father who had visited Europe in 1938 or 1939. She also came to know that the book was also dedicated to her. But it was not until 1972, when a close Romanian friend of the author came to Kolkata, and she finally understood that the author had described a sexual relationship between them in his book. She subsequently had a friend who translated the novel for her from the French and she was shaken by his depictions. In 1973, when she went to America to attend a seminar on Tagore. She met the author again after 43 years and talked personally to him. She also warned the him that she would sue if his book ever came out in English. The author assured her that he wouldn’t publish the English version of his novel. But perhaps she didn’t believe the author and she herself couldn’t check her agony -- the agony of her love being misrepresented. So she wrote a novel.
Later after her death, in 1974, the University of Chicago Press published the English translation of both the Romanian and Indian novels both as companion volumes depicting two sides of a romance. In her novel, she wanted to paint how an Indian girl fell in love with a western boy, depicting the whole thing as being more concerned with emotion rather than to physical co adherence.
The Romanian author was Mircea Eliade and the Indian girl was Maitreyi Devi. The English translation of the Romanian novel is entitled The Bengal Nights while the English translation of the Indian novel is titled It Does Not Die.
1919
After six years of dating incidents of Maiytreyi, a young poetess of Punjab married an editor of a literary magazine to whom she was engaged in early childhood and changed her name. Later she became the author of 70 works, which included novels, short stories, and poems. She was elected a fellow of the Sahitya Akadmi, in India, as one of the 21 immortals of literature. She was honored with the Padma Vibhushan, the Jnanpith Award and the Padma Shree. She also received three D Lit degrees from Delhi, Jabalpur, and Vishva Bharti Universities.
She was born in 1919 in Gujranwala, now in Pakistan, the only child of a school teacher, a poet and an editor of a literary journal. When she was 40 years old, she got herself involved with an Urdu poet and left her husband, but that Urdu poet did not prepare to marry her as he had a new woman in his life. Later, she became involved with another painter and lived the last 40 years of her life with that artist, who also designed most of her book covers. For the rest of her life, she maintained her two lovers with equal potency of love and without any confrontation.
The author was Amrita Pritam, who died on October 31, 2005 and her two lovers were Imroz and Sahir Ludhianvi. Penguin India has published a book titled Amrita-Imroz: A Love Story (ISBN: 0143100440) by Uma Trilok.
1934
In 1934, after four years of romance of Maitreyi-Eliade, a Keralite girl was born and spent her childhood in that city. She began writing at the age of 17 in both Malayalam and English. At the age of 15, she got married to a man 15 years elder to her and their first son was born after only one year of their marriage.
In her writing, she soon got involved in controversy as her writings were a type of confession where she did not hide her sufferings and her traumas that started from her teenage years and then went on and on. She was the first woman writer to write and discuss about her sexual desires in her writings. She did not hide in her writings either her lesbian relationships or her husband’s homosexual tendencies, nor did she hide her extra-marital relationships. But strangely enough, her husband always supported her writings.
In Chapter 27 of her most discussed and controversial autobiographical book My Story, she writes, “During my nervous breakdown, there developed between myself and my husband an intimacy which was purely physical … after bathing me in warm water and dressing me in men’s clothes, my husband bade me sit on his lap, fondling me and calling me his little darling boy….I was by nature shy… but during my illness, I shed my shyness and for the first time in my life learned to surrender totally in bed with my pride intact and blazing.”
Though in numerous interviews, she praised her husband for showing his support for her writings, in her book My Story, she told that her husband supported her writings because her writings were a source of income for him. However, her husband died after a long illness. She later tried her luck in politics and failed.
At the age of 65, she converted herself to Muslim to marry a young man. After converting herself to Islam, she argued that Purdah in Islam is the most wonderful dress for women in the world. And she had always loved to wear the purdah as it gives women a sense of security. Only Islam gives protection to women. About her conversion to Islam, she told that she had been lonely all through her life. At night, she used to sleep by embracing a pillow. But she was no longer a loner. Islam was her company. According to her, Islam is the only religion in the world that gives love and protection to women. But in 2006, she issued a statement at a book release ceremony organized by Kairali Books in Kochi that she deeply regretted converting to Islam and was disillusioned with the treacherous behavior of her Muslim friends. She claimed that all her wealth amounting to several lakhs, gold ornaments, books and other valuables had been looted by Muslims.
She was Kamala Das or Madhavikutty or Kamala Surraiyah. She had been shortlisted for the Nobel Prize for literature in 1984 along with Marguerite Yourcenar, Doris Lessing, and Nadine Gordimer. Apart from that, she received many awards for her literary contributions like the Asian Poetry Prize, Kent Award for English Writing from Asian Countries, Asian World Prize, Sahitya Academy Award and Kerala Sahitya Academy Award etc. She passed away on 31 May 2009 in Pune at the age of 75.
The Role of Sexuality From a Colonial Perspective
These four feminist writers of the last century, opposite to each other’s character, tried to raise women’s voices, which apparently may seem very contradictory, confusing and even delineating different values for feminine aspects. Following the work these feminists, anyone can argue that womanhood is, as a whole, a paradigmatic myth, which incorporates multiple myths of the woman in a mystic form. We have no way to oppose this parenthesis. But as a female (please note that I am not saying the word ‘feminist’), I can feel every situation was true for me if any day I would be either Maitreyi or Kamala or Amrita or Kuntala. It is a very vague argument why Maitreyi was not like Kamala or Amrita was not like Kuntala. Maitryi could admit her relationship with Eliade as Kamala did. Why didn’t Amrita bore all her pathos as Kuntala did? These are vague arguments.
I think the transformation of a woman’s heart from Kuntala to Kamala must be possible due to the development of feminism in India. The reason and development of feminism in India is different from that of the Western world. The pre-colonial social structure and the role of women reveal in them was theorised into feminism. It was more a social than any individual matter. Female mass was considered equal to male mass but the status of the individual female body remained as puritan as it was in feudalistic patriarchal society. In pre-colonial India, we see that plural marriage was allowed for males and even we find our male intellectuals, writers, politicians were able to get married to another woman in the case of the death of their first wife.
It is also ironically true that the female mortality rate was considerably higher in comparison with males due to lack of proper nutrition. But we never find a single instance of any woman remarrying after became a widow in those days, though the marriage of widows was legalized from the early days of British rule.
Women were taught to act as a goddess of sacrifice and as Simone told us in her The Second Sex, the women were trapped into an impossible ideal (the myth of the mother, the virgin, the motherland, nature, etc) by denying the individuality and situation of all different kinds of women. So we find when our pre-colonial feminists used to write essays, they often chose the titles like “Women’s Duty for Household” or “The Legendary Female Figures in Indian Myths,” where the patriarchal tone was still there. So an attempt to reconstruct Indian womanhood as the essence of Indian Culture through the Nationalist movement could be seen where the individual feminism was deliberately denied. Kuntala and Maitreyi were products of these pre-colonial societies.
The largest and the most mainstream women's organisation in India at this time was the All-India Women's Conference. A wing of Indian National Congress, it was founded in 1927, was many-layered, and always attempted to reflect the regional diversity of the movement. Within one year of Maitreyi- Elliad’s meeting at Kolkata, the Indian National Congress passed the Karachi Resolution in 1931 where 'swaraj' or 'self rule' in free India was declared, but the gender issue was still marginalised as evidenced by the fact that only one of the resolutions expressly mentions protecting women's rights (as part of workers' rights).
Undoubtedly, post-colonial India was different from that of pre-colonial India and women’s education was flourishing. And the age-old binaries that had characterised dominant philosophical and political thinking on gender were reconstructed with an array of oppressive patriarchal family structures: age, ordinal status, relationship to men through family of origin, marriage, and procreation, as well as patriarchal attributes: dowry, siring sons, etc., kinship, caste, community, village, market, and the state were put into questionable range. Along with these questions, ‘rights of women’s bodies’ are also seen as antithetical to these patriarchal milieus.
I have to write this article in support of Kamala Das or Amrita Pritam because some of our scholars always try to carve a separate identity for sexuality other than feminism. They define feminism in order to avoid the uncritically following as the protest for male hegemony and in their conception; sexuality has no role to protest such hegemony. If feminist writing during twentieth century colonial India was characterised by societal hierarchies and a need to demarcate an Indian identity, feminist debates in post-colonial India dealt with ways in which feminist sexualities were practiced. This is why the whole country mourns the demise of Amrita and Kamala.
Dr. SAROJINI SAHOO is a distinguished bilingual South Asian feminist writer, and an associate editor of a feature-oriented English journal Indian AGE. She has been listed among 25 Exceptional Women of India by Kindle English magazine of Kolkata and has been conferred with the Orissa Sahitya Academy Award 1993, the Jhankar Award in 1992, the Bhubaneswar Book Fair Award and the Prajatantra Award. She is also in the advisory board of Indian Journal of Post Colonial Literature, published from the English Department of Newman College, Thodupuzah, Kerala. One essay collection, one novel and two anthologies of short stories in English have been published to her credit so far. Bengali translation of two of her novels have been published from Bangladesh and in Oriya, there are eight short stories collections and eight novels in published form to her credit. She is also a known blogger for her ideas in feminism and has gained worldwide fame. Her Blogs are SENSE & SENSUALITY, FEMININE-FRAGRANCE and INDIA.
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1901
She was born into a Christian family in Bastar (now Chhatisgarh) in 1901 when her father, a doctor by profession, stayed away in Burma (now Myanmar). Later she studied medicine at Cuttack Medical School where she earned her LMP (the degree for Medical Practitioner during British Colonial times) in 1921 and started her career as the superintendent of the Cuttack Red Cross. During this time, she got involved with a fatherly person and was caught red handed by his wife. They had physical relations, but her lover cum mentor wholeheartedly wished her marriage with a suitable person.
The period between 1921 and 1927 was also a productive phase of her literary life. She wrote several volumes of poems like Anjali and Archana, and novels on social issues like Bharati and Parasmani in Oriya. Through her writing, she protested against purdah, child marriage, caste system, untouchability, discrimination against women. And she advocated women's rights, steps towards their empowerment, and widow remarriage.
While working with Red Cross and also while in a relationship with her mentor lover, she got herself involved with a barefoot doctor and imposter who settled in Delhi. Her mentor was against her marriage with that unknown person, but she resigned from her service and became an Aryasamajis. She got married to that stranger and left for Delhi and opened a clinic in Chandinichowk.
She began to write in Hindi while continuing her writing in Oriya. She came out with a volume of Hindi poems entitled Baramala. She also became an influential editor of several Hindi periodicals such as Mahabir, Jeevan and Nari Bharati. Kuntala Kumari was invited to deliver the convocation addresses at Allahabad University and at Benaras Hindu University. That was a mark of rare recognition accorded to a woman of those days.
But her marital life was not happy and her husband exploited her as a source of income to which she wanted to resist. She died at only her 37 years of age with illness and mental trauma. Eminent Hindi novelist Jainendra Kumar’s novel Kalyani was based on her struggle and her pathetic life.
She was Kuntala Kumari Sabat, the veteran feminist poetess and writer of Oriya Literature. Though her pre- and post-marital life were not so peaceful and her life was dangling between love, sex, oppression, and harassment by the male-dominated mentality of feudal India, we never find any sexual agony or find any of her own saga of life in her poems, rather than she always tried to hide her sexual expression with a coated version of mysticism in the form of Sufi ideology. This trend was prevailed for many years and even after few decades in the beginning of post colonial. where era we can see the poetess expressed their love feelings as a form of Bhakti poems.
1914
In 1930, a Romanian young boy met a 16-year-old Indian girl and both fell in love. The boy had come to India to study Indian Philosophy and the girl was his teacher’s daughter. They couldn’t hide this affair and were soon caught by the mentor. The boy was asked to leave the mentor’s residence and never to contact the girl again.
Later, the boy became a world famous philosopher and wrote a semi-autobiographical novel first published in Romania in 1933. It was written specifically for a literary prize and sold very well in Romania, garnering both fame and money. The novel was translated into Italian in 1945, into German in 1948, into French in 1950, and into Spanish in 1952.
The girl was married at the age of twenty and had two children. She engaged herself in writing and published volumes of poetry and prose, wrote many books on Tagore, but was not famous until 1974.
However, the girl was not aware of that Romanian novel until she heard about it from her father who had visited Europe in 1938 or 1939. She also came to know that the book was also dedicated to her. But it was not until 1972, when a close Romanian friend of the author came to Kolkata, and she finally understood that the author had described a sexual relationship between them in his book. She subsequently had a friend who translated the novel for her from the French and she was shaken by his depictions. In 1973, when she went to America to attend a seminar on Tagore. She met the author again after 43 years and talked personally to him. She also warned the him that she would sue if his book ever came out in English. The author assured her that he wouldn’t publish the English version of his novel. But perhaps she didn’t believe the author and she herself couldn’t check her agony -- the agony of her love being misrepresented. So she wrote a novel.
Later after her death, in 1974, the University of Chicago Press published the English translation of both the Romanian and Indian novels both as companion volumes depicting two sides of a romance. In her novel, she wanted to paint how an Indian girl fell in love with a western boy, depicting the whole thing as being more concerned with emotion rather than to physical co adherence.
The Romanian author was Mircea Eliade and the Indian girl was Maitreyi Devi. The English translation of the Romanian novel is entitled The Bengal Nights while the English translation of the Indian novel is titled It Does Not Die.
1919
After six years of dating incidents of Maiytreyi, a young poetess of Punjab married an editor of a literary magazine to whom she was engaged in early childhood and changed her name. Later she became the author of 70 works, which included novels, short stories, and poems. She was elected a fellow of the Sahitya Akadmi, in India, as one of the 21 immortals of literature. She was honored with the Padma Vibhushan, the Jnanpith Award and the Padma Shree. She also received three D Lit degrees from Delhi, Jabalpur, and Vishva Bharti Universities.
She was born in 1919 in Gujranwala, now in Pakistan, the only child of a school teacher, a poet and an editor of a literary journal. When she was 40 years old, she got herself involved with an Urdu poet and left her husband, but that Urdu poet did not prepare to marry her as he had a new woman in his life. Later, she became involved with another painter and lived the last 40 years of her life with that artist, who also designed most of her book covers. For the rest of her life, she maintained her two lovers with equal potency of love and without any confrontation.
The author was Amrita Pritam, who died on October 31, 2005 and her two lovers were Imroz and Sahir Ludhianvi. Penguin India has published a book titled Amrita-Imroz: A Love Story (ISBN: 0143100440) by Uma Trilok.
1934
In 1934, after four years of romance of Maitreyi-Eliade, a Keralite girl was born and spent her childhood in that city. She began writing at the age of 17 in both Malayalam and English. At the age of 15, she got married to a man 15 years elder to her and their first son was born after only one year of their marriage.
In her writing, she soon got involved in controversy as her writings were a type of confession where she did not hide her sufferings and her traumas that started from her teenage years and then went on and on. She was the first woman writer to write and discuss about her sexual desires in her writings. She did not hide in her writings either her lesbian relationships or her husband’s homosexual tendencies, nor did she hide her extra-marital relationships. But strangely enough, her husband always supported her writings.
In Chapter 27 of her most discussed and controversial autobiographical book My Story, she writes, “During my nervous breakdown, there developed between myself and my husband an intimacy which was purely physical … after bathing me in warm water and dressing me in men’s clothes, my husband bade me sit on his lap, fondling me and calling me his little darling boy….I was by nature shy… but during my illness, I shed my shyness and for the first time in my life learned to surrender totally in bed with my pride intact and blazing.”
Though in numerous interviews, she praised her husband for showing his support for her writings, in her book My Story, she told that her husband supported her writings because her writings were a source of income for him. However, her husband died after a long illness. She later tried her luck in politics and failed.
At the age of 65, she converted herself to Muslim to marry a young man. After converting herself to Islam, she argued that Purdah in Islam is the most wonderful dress for women in the world. And she had always loved to wear the purdah as it gives women a sense of security. Only Islam gives protection to women. About her conversion to Islam, she told that she had been lonely all through her life. At night, she used to sleep by embracing a pillow. But she was no longer a loner. Islam was her company. According to her, Islam is the only religion in the world that gives love and protection to women. But in 2006, she issued a statement at a book release ceremony organized by Kairali Books in Kochi that she deeply regretted converting to Islam and was disillusioned with the treacherous behavior of her Muslim friends. She claimed that all her wealth amounting to several lakhs, gold ornaments, books and other valuables had been looted by Muslims.
She was Kamala Das or Madhavikutty or Kamala Surraiyah. She had been shortlisted for the Nobel Prize for literature in 1984 along with Marguerite Yourcenar, Doris Lessing, and Nadine Gordimer. Apart from that, she received many awards for her literary contributions like the Asian Poetry Prize, Kent Award for English Writing from Asian Countries, Asian World Prize, Sahitya Academy Award and Kerala Sahitya Academy Award etc. She passed away on 31 May 2009 in Pune at the age of 75.
The Role of Sexuality From a Colonial Perspective
These four feminist writers of the last century, opposite to each other’s character, tried to raise women’s voices, which apparently may seem very contradictory, confusing and even delineating different values for feminine aspects. Following the work these feminists, anyone can argue that womanhood is, as a whole, a paradigmatic myth, which incorporates multiple myths of the woman in a mystic form. We have no way to oppose this parenthesis. But as a female (please note that I am not saying the word ‘feminist’), I can feel every situation was true for me if any day I would be either Maitreyi or Kamala or Amrita or Kuntala. It is a very vague argument why Maitreyi was not like Kamala or Amrita was not like Kuntala. Maitryi could admit her relationship with Eliade as Kamala did. Why didn’t Amrita bore all her pathos as Kuntala did? These are vague arguments.
I think the transformation of a woman’s heart from Kuntala to Kamala must be possible due to the development of feminism in India. The reason and development of feminism in India is different from that of the Western world. The pre-colonial social structure and the role of women reveal in them was theorised into feminism. It was more a social than any individual matter. Female mass was considered equal to male mass but the status of the individual female body remained as puritan as it was in feudalistic patriarchal society. In pre-colonial India, we see that plural marriage was allowed for males and even we find our male intellectuals, writers, politicians were able to get married to another woman in the case of the death of their first wife.
It is also ironically true that the female mortality rate was considerably higher in comparison with males due to lack of proper nutrition. But we never find a single instance of any woman remarrying after became a widow in those days, though the marriage of widows was legalized from the early days of British rule.
Women were taught to act as a goddess of sacrifice and as Simone told us in her The Second Sex, the women were trapped into an impossible ideal (the myth of the mother, the virgin, the motherland, nature, etc) by denying the individuality and situation of all different kinds of women. So we find when our pre-colonial feminists used to write essays, they often chose the titles like “Women’s Duty for Household” or “The Legendary Female Figures in Indian Myths,” where the patriarchal tone was still there. So an attempt to reconstruct Indian womanhood as the essence of Indian Culture through the Nationalist movement could be seen where the individual feminism was deliberately denied. Kuntala and Maitreyi were products of these pre-colonial societies.
The largest and the most mainstream women's organisation in India at this time was the All-India Women's Conference. A wing of Indian National Congress, it was founded in 1927, was many-layered, and always attempted to reflect the regional diversity of the movement. Within one year of Maitreyi- Elliad’s meeting at Kolkata, the Indian National Congress passed the Karachi Resolution in 1931 where 'swaraj' or 'self rule' in free India was declared, but the gender issue was still marginalised as evidenced by the fact that only one of the resolutions expressly mentions protecting women's rights (as part of workers' rights).
Undoubtedly, post-colonial India was different from that of pre-colonial India and women’s education was flourishing. And the age-old binaries that had characterised dominant philosophical and political thinking on gender were reconstructed with an array of oppressive patriarchal family structures: age, ordinal status, relationship to men through family of origin, marriage, and procreation, as well as patriarchal attributes: dowry, siring sons, etc., kinship, caste, community, village, market, and the state were put into questionable range. Along with these questions, ‘rights of women’s bodies’ are also seen as antithetical to these patriarchal milieus.
I have to write this article in support of Kamala Das or Amrita Pritam because some of our scholars always try to carve a separate identity for sexuality other than feminism. They define feminism in order to avoid the uncritically following as the protest for male hegemony and in their conception; sexuality has no role to protest such hegemony. If feminist writing during twentieth century colonial India was characterised by societal hierarchies and a need to demarcate an Indian identity, feminist debates in post-colonial India dealt with ways in which feminist sexualities were practiced. This is why the whole country mourns the demise of Amrita and Kamala.
Dr. SAROJINI SAHOO is a distinguished bilingual South Asian feminist writer, and an associate editor of a feature-oriented English journal Indian AGE. She has been listed among 25 Exceptional Women of India by Kindle English magazine of Kolkata and has been conferred with the Orissa Sahitya Academy Award 1993, the Jhankar Award in 1992, the Bhubaneswar Book Fair Award and the Prajatantra Award. She is also in the advisory board of Indian Journal of Post Colonial Literature, published from the English Department of Newman College, Thodupuzah, Kerala. One essay collection, one novel and two anthologies of short stories in English have been published to her credit so far. Bengali translation of two of her novels have been published from Bangladesh and in Oriya, there are eight short stories collections and eight novels in published form to her credit. She is also a known blogger for her ideas in feminism and has gained worldwide fame. Her Blogs are SENSE & SENSUALITY, FEMININE-FRAGRANCE and INDIA.
05 February 2011
Featured Article - The Subaltern Autobiography: Investigating Agency, Style and Voice by Niharika Mallimadugula
The Subaltern Autobiography: Investigating Agency, Style and Voice
This essay seeks to analyse the agency position asserted by the subaltern women in their autobiographies, the subaltern autobiography as a departure from conventional styles of writing; subversive use of language, preserving the aesthetics of an oral narrative in the written form and the politics of translation as seen in Jameela’s and C.K Janu’s autobiographies and Bama’s Sangati - which stands of particular importance because of its position as documenting the autobiography of a community, raising the question- can a woman’s agency be autonomous?
Nalini Jameela’s Autobiography of a Sex Worker has two main undercurrents: that Jameela took to sex work purely for socio-economic reasons is evident in her detailed account of the early years of her life and the second is her assertion to stand by this profession and treat it like any other. She certainly advocates for a feminism that recognises and accepts this agency; although there are several instances in the book where a better financial position leads her to quit the occupation. There is thus an inherent contradiction to the standpoint. Michael Foucault spoke of agency as arising from the “dialectic of freedom and constraint.” This essentially means that where there is struggle and oppression, an agency subverting that will most naturally arise. It is quite ambiguous if Jameela is standing for sex work as a profession to find salvation from stringent poverty or for sex work as a profession without poverty and other socio-economic reasons clouding the decision. It seems both. Many of the comparisons she makes in the book support the latter as she delves into the idea of sex, free sex and the social constraints when it comes to sex; by comparing sex with professions such as teaching and music, both of which are greatly valued, she is advocating for sex work by bringing in the concept of a Veshya, meaning ‘she who seduces’, deducing that it is the insulting connotations that have come to make all the difference. Does this mean then that we have a culture that is less “progressive” than what we had in the days of Veshyas and courtesans?
There is then a deconstruction of the fundamental ideals based on which sex and sexuality have been based and an honest dissection of ideological and cultural prejudices. This question is very valid: “If, by mutual consent, a man and woman decide to have sex, then what is wrong?” This agency leads us to question her subaltern position in the context of her profession; clearly she refuses to accept “victim” status as most people term it. But there is a growing necessity to understand victimisation as a step to survival power. ‘This 'survivor not victim' approach came to typify a new approach to women in such circumstances, that later reflected in policy and law. Believing women to be victims had led to protectionist, problematic policies but by seeing them as reflective individuals who had the capacity to negotiate and survive what life threw their way, there was an affirmation of their identities that brought into focus their rights.’
That makes it plain that Jameela’s survival capacity and a free mind converge to form an agency emphasising on the power of both a mind and body. This also necessitates the understanding that Jameela’s victim status (relative to her agency) comes from the social taboo of sex and sex workers more than their economic status and living conditions.
However, there is certainly a need to not undermine her fight for dignity and respect for the lives of sex workers, irrespective of the politics of choice.
Sangati captures Bama’s poignant feminist consciousness and assumes a significant place given that it is one of the first female voices to emerge from the Dalit community. She reveals a ‘social vision’; that is, the conviction that no matter how submerged a human being is in the ‘culture of silence’ they are capable of looking at the world critically in a dialogical encounter with others (Freire). Therefore, Bama’s socio-feminist stance comes from oppression as well as a constant investigation. The ambiguity of agency, as seen in Jameela’s doesn’t surface in comparable quality here. It is surprisingly evident that her life history and experiences has been rudimentary in shaping her agency, clearly conforming to Foucault’s theory of freedom and constraint. By detailing the daily lives of the Dalit women of which cold blooded violence forms an inherent part, she shocks with obscene language, the vulgarity and the oppression of the female body. And this is precisely what Dalit writing set out to do. The challenge and revolt therefore, extends to form and content as well, justifying its purpose. ‘Dalit literature describes the world differently, from a Dalit perspective. Therefore, it should outrage and even repel the guardians of caste and class. It should provoke them into asking if this is indeed literature.’ Lakshmi Holmstrom in her introduction to Sangati says that Tamil literature has been stringent in its distinction between the written and the colloquial form- Sen-tamil and Kodun-tamil. Despite gaps being bridged in modern times, Dalit literature is still a striking deviant. ‘If it brings to Tamil Literature subject matter hitherto considered inappropriate, it uses a language hitherto considered unprintable.’
This account could also be bracketed post-colonial where the trinity of religion, men and the upper castes form the coloniser, resulting in a triple marginalisation. Sometimes, women in their ignorance could also play this role; mothers and grandmothers who become the upholders of patriarchy.
Hence, in this ‘writing back’, Bama’s colloquial language could also seen as restoring forms of their oral culture, or as a means of embracing realism. There are multiple instances in Sangati where past events, take the song form and the Paati is the carrier of many stories, myths and legends. It is altogether another issue that these songs and stories themselves become instruments of oppression rather than a means of liberation. But paradoxically, they lead Bama to question the authenticity of these and a realisation that they were meant to suppress women and keep them in fear succeeds in the condemnation of these which becomes the first step to liberation. Apart from that, Bama does draws attention to the many cultural beliefs of the pariah community (the original and not the hybrid form that came to be because of the influx of Christianity) is surprisingly progressive and only a little more conventional than the Adivasi community. Therefore, she “others” the upper caste women in this sense and says that their confinement, financial dependence and a lack of identity without husbands makes them far inferior to the self-sufficient Dalit women.
C.K. Janu’s autobiography, Mother Forest falls under the personal-political categorisation of autobiographies. The agency here arises from continued state oppression of the Adivasi community although the personal voice is milder. Reiterating the theory of the state or government being the colonial power in the postcolonial context, this account authenticates colonial oppression, given the nature of the struggle in a postcolonial context. In fact, Arundhati Roy connects a particular incident of revolt by the Adivasi community to the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre: ‘For the Kerala Police to open fire on a group of hundreds of people including women, children, old people and infants is an act that has few parallels in recent history. The event that comes to mind is Jallianwalah Bagh. … Had they belonged to any other community that mattered to mainstream political parties, the manner in which the crisis and its fallout were handled would have been quite different.’ Mahasweta Devi is one another prominent figure fighting for the rights of the tribal groups, trying to preserve and document a culture increasingly losing its identity.
Unfortunately, Janu never went to school and therefore the autobiography had to be written and translated and it is possible that certain crucial factors could have been lost in the process. However, a tribal voice has come to the centre of the circle restoring the credibility and dynamism of literature.
These autobiographies represent a literary activism of sorts both in their content and form and also in terms of the questions raised. The fact that these have all been translated into English, a language by and large considered mainstream highlights the growing interest towards gritty subaltern voices. To answer Spivak’s loaded question, ‘Can the Subaltern speak?’ Perhaps yes.
References:
http://openspaceindia.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=432&Itemid=112
Autobiography of a Sex Worker, Jameela Nalini, Westland 2005
Autobiography of a Sex Worker, Introduction, J.Devika, Westland 2005
Pedagogy of the Oppressed , Paulo Freire, 1970
Sangati, Bama, Introduction, Lakshmi Holmstrom, OUP, 2005
Mother Forest, Bhaskaran, translated by N.Ravi Shanker, Letter to Chief Minister of Kerala from Arundhati Roy, Women Unlimited, 2004
Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, Can the Subaltern speak?, Spivak, 1989
NIHARIKA MALLIMADUGULA is a final year student of Literature from Chennai, India heading to London to pursue her Masters in Cultural Studies at SOAS.
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This essay seeks to analyse the agency position asserted by the subaltern women in their autobiographies, the subaltern autobiography as a departure from conventional styles of writing; subversive use of language, preserving the aesthetics of an oral narrative in the written form and the politics of translation as seen in Jameela’s and C.K Janu’s autobiographies and Bama’s Sangati - which stands of particular importance because of its position as documenting the autobiography of a community, raising the question- can a woman’s agency be autonomous?
Nalini Jameela’s Autobiography of a Sex Worker has two main undercurrents: that Jameela took to sex work purely for socio-economic reasons is evident in her detailed account of the early years of her life and the second is her assertion to stand by this profession and treat it like any other. She certainly advocates for a feminism that recognises and accepts this agency; although there are several instances in the book where a better financial position leads her to quit the occupation. There is thus an inherent contradiction to the standpoint. Michael Foucault spoke of agency as arising from the “dialectic of freedom and constraint.” This essentially means that where there is struggle and oppression, an agency subverting that will most naturally arise. It is quite ambiguous if Jameela is standing for sex work as a profession to find salvation from stringent poverty or for sex work as a profession without poverty and other socio-economic reasons clouding the decision. It seems both. Many of the comparisons she makes in the book support the latter as she delves into the idea of sex, free sex and the social constraints when it comes to sex; by comparing sex with professions such as teaching and music, both of which are greatly valued, she is advocating for sex work by bringing in the concept of a Veshya, meaning ‘she who seduces’, deducing that it is the insulting connotations that have come to make all the difference. Does this mean then that we have a culture that is less “progressive” than what we had in the days of Veshyas and courtesans?
There is then a deconstruction of the fundamental ideals based on which sex and sexuality have been based and an honest dissection of ideological and cultural prejudices. This question is very valid: “If, by mutual consent, a man and woman decide to have sex, then what is wrong?” This agency leads us to question her subaltern position in the context of her profession; clearly she refuses to accept “victim” status as most people term it. But there is a growing necessity to understand victimisation as a step to survival power. ‘This 'survivor not victim' approach came to typify a new approach to women in such circumstances, that later reflected in policy and law. Believing women to be victims had led to protectionist, problematic policies but by seeing them as reflective individuals who had the capacity to negotiate and survive what life threw their way, there was an affirmation of their identities that brought into focus their rights.’
That makes it plain that Jameela’s survival capacity and a free mind converge to form an agency emphasising on the power of both a mind and body. This also necessitates the understanding that Jameela’s victim status (relative to her agency) comes from the social taboo of sex and sex workers more than their economic status and living conditions.
However, there is certainly a need to not undermine her fight for dignity and respect for the lives of sex workers, irrespective of the politics of choice.
Sangati captures Bama’s poignant feminist consciousness and assumes a significant place given that it is one of the first female voices to emerge from the Dalit community. She reveals a ‘social vision’; that is, the conviction that no matter how submerged a human being is in the ‘culture of silence’ they are capable of looking at the world critically in a dialogical encounter with others (Freire). Therefore, Bama’s socio-feminist stance comes from oppression as well as a constant investigation. The ambiguity of agency, as seen in Jameela’s doesn’t surface in comparable quality here. It is surprisingly evident that her life history and experiences has been rudimentary in shaping her agency, clearly conforming to Foucault’s theory of freedom and constraint. By detailing the daily lives of the Dalit women of which cold blooded violence forms an inherent part, she shocks with obscene language, the vulgarity and the oppression of the female body. And this is precisely what Dalit writing set out to do. The challenge and revolt therefore, extends to form and content as well, justifying its purpose. ‘Dalit literature describes the world differently, from a Dalit perspective. Therefore, it should outrage and even repel the guardians of caste and class. It should provoke them into asking if this is indeed literature.’ Lakshmi Holmstrom in her introduction to Sangati says that Tamil literature has been stringent in its distinction between the written and the colloquial form- Sen-tamil and Kodun-tamil. Despite gaps being bridged in modern times, Dalit literature is still a striking deviant. ‘If it brings to Tamil Literature subject matter hitherto considered inappropriate, it uses a language hitherto considered unprintable.’
This account could also be bracketed post-colonial where the trinity of religion, men and the upper castes form the coloniser, resulting in a triple marginalisation. Sometimes, women in their ignorance could also play this role; mothers and grandmothers who become the upholders of patriarchy.
Hence, in this ‘writing back’, Bama’s colloquial language could also seen as restoring forms of their oral culture, or as a means of embracing realism. There are multiple instances in Sangati where past events, take the song form and the Paati is the carrier of many stories, myths and legends. It is altogether another issue that these songs and stories themselves become instruments of oppression rather than a means of liberation. But paradoxically, they lead Bama to question the authenticity of these and a realisation that they were meant to suppress women and keep them in fear succeeds in the condemnation of these which becomes the first step to liberation. Apart from that, Bama does draws attention to the many cultural beliefs of the pariah community (the original and not the hybrid form that came to be because of the influx of Christianity) is surprisingly progressive and only a little more conventional than the Adivasi community. Therefore, she “others” the upper caste women in this sense and says that their confinement, financial dependence and a lack of identity without husbands makes them far inferior to the self-sufficient Dalit women.
C.K. Janu’s autobiography, Mother Forest falls under the personal-political categorisation of autobiographies. The agency here arises from continued state oppression of the Adivasi community although the personal voice is milder. Reiterating the theory of the state or government being the colonial power in the postcolonial context, this account authenticates colonial oppression, given the nature of the struggle in a postcolonial context. In fact, Arundhati Roy connects a particular incident of revolt by the Adivasi community to the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre: ‘For the Kerala Police to open fire on a group of hundreds of people including women, children, old people and infants is an act that has few parallels in recent history. The event that comes to mind is Jallianwalah Bagh. … Had they belonged to any other community that mattered to mainstream political parties, the manner in which the crisis and its fallout were handled would have been quite different.’ Mahasweta Devi is one another prominent figure fighting for the rights of the tribal groups, trying to preserve and document a culture increasingly losing its identity.
Unfortunately, Janu never went to school and therefore the autobiography had to be written and translated and it is possible that certain crucial factors could have been lost in the process. However, a tribal voice has come to the centre of the circle restoring the credibility and dynamism of literature.
These autobiographies represent a literary activism of sorts both in their content and form and also in terms of the questions raised. The fact that these have all been translated into English, a language by and large considered mainstream highlights the growing interest towards gritty subaltern voices. To answer Spivak’s loaded question, ‘Can the Subaltern speak?’ Perhaps yes.
References:
http://openspaceindia.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=432&Itemid=112
Autobiography of a Sex Worker, Jameela Nalini, Westland 2005
Autobiography of a Sex Worker, Introduction, J.Devika, Westland 2005
Pedagogy of the Oppressed , Paulo Freire, 1970
Sangati, Bama, Introduction, Lakshmi Holmstrom, OUP, 2005
Mother Forest, Bhaskaran, translated by N.Ravi Shanker, Letter to Chief Minister of Kerala from Arundhati Roy, Women Unlimited, 2004
Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, Can the Subaltern speak?, Spivak, 1989
NIHARIKA MALLIMADUGULA is a final year student of Literature from Chennai, India heading to London to pursue her Masters in Cultural Studies at SOAS.
01 January 2011
Featured Article: The Opportunity We Didn’t Ask For by Yahia Lababidi
John F. Kennedy once famously pronounced: “When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters — one represents ‘danger’ and one represents ‘opportunity’.” However, it might be more accurate to translate ‘opportunity’ in this sense as ‘crucial point.’ So rephrasing the crux of Kennedy’s message we can say that, in Chinese, ‘crisis’ is represented as danger at a crucial point which, if seized upon, might develop into an opportunity.
In other words, where danger exists, so too does opportunity (or its possibility, at least) of. This is ancient Chinese wisdom, as evident in the Tao Te Ching, a work rich in fruitful contradictions. Philosopher Lao Tzu, author of the Tao, reconciles these apparent tensions in this paradoxical truth: “Prosperity rests on disaster, disaster is hidden in prosperity. Who knows the line that separates them?”
In these cash-strapped days, ‘crisis’ is a word much-bandied about typically preceded by the word ‘economic,’ second only to the coupling ‘environmental crisis,’ and with ‘spiritual crisis’ perhaps a distant third in the collective imagination. It’s a pity that the book crisis (something people seem to speak little of and care less for) must be an early victim of the current financial one, since the values and culture that reading promotes – a respect for the classics, a historical gaze, free and sustained inquiry – might be precisely what is needed to sidestep this mess. But, in all fairness, the mindset of close reading and deep thinking was already hostage to a shift in technology towards television and internet, with the shortened attention spans they engender.
Yet, there is precious little mention of the inherent opportunities such crucial points present us with. And, while the current economic panic is material in nature, and arguably triggered by a combination of greed and irresponsibility, in fact there has never been a time or a people without some sort of crisis; just as there is hardly a crisis that is entirely without a spiritual dimension, that cannot also be addressed philosophically.
The situation JFK addressed, with its Cold War dangers, such as Soviet military expansion, as well as US space exploration opportunities, might have shifted in emphasis since then. But that is precisely the point: any position of strength or good fortune is always under some sort of real or imagined threat, and cannot endure forever. Still, no matter how we delude ourselves or are deluded into believing otherwise, “the only constant is change... all is flux” to borrow the immortal words of ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus.
This means that our positions of privilege, as individuals and as nations, are bound to shuffle from time to time. Nothing personal – that’s just the natural order of things. This Emerson refers to as “a kind of mechanical exactness, as of a loom or mill in what we call casual or fortuitous events.” To think otherwise is to build sky-high upon a fault line, and then to be astonished when the earth shakes beneath our feet. Which is precisely what we humans do…
Continuing to Live
Sages and prophets have long warned us: ‘Life is a bridge, build no home upon it,’ or else ‘die before you die.’ But, as a race, we’re generally short-sighted and death-denying. We are, therefore, not any more comfortable with that other inescapable aspect of life: loss. Along with change, loss of some sort also generally tends to precipitate crisis – whether it’s loss of our possessions, a job, a loved one, or even the inevitable subsiding of what we believe is our birthright: youth, health, beauty. Yet, as poet Philip Larkin bitterly sums it up, in ‘Continuing to Live,’ to live is a losing game:
This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise –
Ah, if the game were poker, yes,
You might discard them, draw a full house!
But it's chess.
Just as we must gracefully surrender the gifts of youth in old age (if we’re lucky enough to live that long), so must we be ready to relinquish all the other pieces along the way. There are no guarantees that our lucky streak will last: hearts will be broken, empires collapse, and all favorable circumstances alter at some point. So that, if we manage to avoid a collective crisis, we shall be confronted with personal ones along the way.
This is not within our control. What little say we have in the matter is how we choose to respond to the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.’ Attempts to take arms will only do us harm. We might cower in fear, grow bitter or rage and bemoan our plight until we exhaust ourselves, but to quote another great poet, Omar Khayyam:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it
That is to say, some form of acceptance is required as the only sane solution to an unalterable Fate. To phrase this in more spiritual terms: “When two great forces oppose each other the victory will go to the one that knows how to yield,” says Lao Tzu. Meaning, even if our initial response to calamity is not a serene and courageous acceptance, and we cringe, curse, and rebel, we must still eventually yield at some point if we are to survive. For, if it is life itself that we do battle with, it is foolhardly to think we could possibly win.
Appreciation of Tragedy
Different cultures at various historical moments are better at their appreciation of these hard truths than others. Cultures present or past that live with suffering or deprivation on a continuous basis, if not actually then at least by cultivating an appreciation through spiritual or philosophical practices, tend to fare better at accepting difficult circumstances. One such example of an ancient culture, whose heirs are no strangers to hardship, is to be found in Egypt.
Past masters at submitting to the dictates of fate, no matter how harsh, these natural-born fatalists typically make light of their burdens through acceptance. It is not uncommon for an average Egyptian, freshly struck by misfortune, to respond with utter resignation and the simple word, ‘maktoob’ (it is written). Not unusual either for this patient sufferer to point to their forehead (where it is believed their fate is written) and offer up a winsome smile as if to say, ‘What would be the point of struggling?’
Literary critic, classical scholar and cultural diagnostician Daniel Mendelsohn finds that what seems to be missing in contemporary American culture is just that: an appreciation of tragedy. In a discussion of his memoir, The Lost, the story of his five-year, world–wide search to discover the fates of relatives who were Holocaust victims, he suggests that “spending your life reading Greek tragedy is good preparation for confronting the Holocaust.” Elsewhere, in Mendelsohn’s introduction to his fine collection of essays, How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken, we find him carefully examining literature, arts and contemporary culture through the prism of his beloved ancient Greece:
The necessity, in the end, of yielding to hard and inexplicable realities that are beyond our control is a tragic truth…That so much of contemporary culture is characterized by this kind of sentimentality, by a seeming preference for false “closures” over a strong and meaningful confrontation with real and inalterable pain, is a cultural crisis.
Nearly two centuries earlier, an American giant and diagnostician of the spirit, Emerson, is seen reproaching his homeland along the same lines (in his essay, 'Fate') :
Our America has a bad name for superficialities. Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it…. The Greek Tragedy expressed the same sense. “Whatever is fated that will take place. The great immense mind of Jove is not to be transgressed.” … Nature is no sentimentalist, ----does not cosset or pamper us… Let us not deny it up and down. Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end.
Both critics understood that there is no bargaining with Fate and that what was required was to face the terrors of life. Indeed, only an outlook that is naïve and sentimental would be shocked by loss or change, two unavoidable aspects of life that the Ancients (and wiser contemporary cultures) understand all too well. This is precisely what a study of history or philosophy can do, tutor us in the tragic dimension of human existence if we have not experienced it first hand.
No Yoke So Tight
Insofar as classical philosophy is concerned, Stoicism provides an excellent prescription for the chronically optimistic or the full-blown idealistic, with their belief that everything can be fixed and their insistence on happy endings. Alive to the dangers and tyranny of unchecked emotions, Stoicism emphasized rational self-mastery. To attain the Stoic ideal of ‘moral and intellectual perfection’ one could not be at the mercy of their (negative or destructive) emotions and also be of sound judgment. One can already see how such equanimity might be useful in confronting a crisis, but the Stoics went one step further. Their world-view anticipated and braced against disaster, through specific practices such as contemplation of death and meditations on the dangers of existence and the misfortunes one might encounter any given day.
The Stoic trick was maintaining a will (prohairesis) that is in harmony with the natural world – namely, a sober self-control that yielded to fate. The great philosopher of Late Stoicism, Seneca, illustrated such a world view in this powerful metaphor:
An animal, struggling against the noose, tightens it ... there is no yoke so tight that it will not hurt the animal less if it pulls with it than if it fights against it. The best alleviation for overwhelming evils is to endure and bow to necessity.
Like the ancient Greeks, the spirited philosophy of Existentialism (recognized as a movement only in the 20th century) was also primarily concerned with how to live. As far as philosophies go, there is nothing bloodless or strictly academic about it. Instead, situated at the crossroads of religion, art, and psychology, Existentialism seems conceived by and for seekers with something of a (spiritual) crisis. Moreover, like the Stoics, Existentialists concerned themselves with will and freedom (as well as choice and authenticity) in their quest to lead a noble life.
Perhaps less predisposed to determinism than Stoicism (since its members held varying beliefs regarding fate and free will) Existentialism was itself a philosophy in a state of emergency - no longer content to unquestioningly accept previous givens, such as God, goodness or purpose. Rather, its world-view presents us, in Heidegger’s terms, as ‘thrown-into-being’ and quite possibly alone in an absurd world. To Existentialists, it was entirely up to us to negotiate how to get up, begin walking and give meaning to our existence.
The Thing of Value
What does all this have to do with the current financial crisis, for example? I think the ancients, Lao Tzu and the Stoics, as well as more contemporary philosophers have a great deal to say that is relevant to us now. Certainly, a degree of Stoic calm or temperance in the face of the crisis would not go amiss. Just as a baseline acceptance of life’s fickle nature, and perhaps a modicum of detachment and brave endurance, can also go a long way, at this time.
These philosophies recommend: self-examination, self-discipline and ultimately, self-reliance. And having collectedly evaluated the materialistic values that have contributed to this crisis, people might choose to follow the advice of another ancient philosopher, Diogenes, and “restamp the currency” - or come up with an alternate, more spiritual, set of values that are better-suited to these times and stand a chance of weathering the storm.
This advice is echoed in the words of proto-Existentialist philosopher, Nietzsche, who upon surveying the debris of old values littering the cultural landscape of Europe over a century ago, decided that nothing less than a “revaluation of all values” was needed. Yet, past practical advice for those seeking a way out of the panic of the current economic crisis, such philosophy–inspired, courage-in-the-midst-of-confusion should also resonate with all the other wrecks that we barely survive: existential, spiritual, romantic, familial, etc.
As Islamic thinker, Al Ghazali, instructs us: “You possess only whatever will not be lost in a shipwreck.” So, when surveying the scene after a crisis to assess the damage, be it a natural disaster or a private calamity, we might begin by taking stock of what remains intact before proceeding to reassemble our lives. Only then can our sense of disorientation or despair be replaced by true reorientation and renewed purpose.
To return to the ancients once more, the Greek word ‘crisis’ means a ‘judgment’ or a ‘trial.’ In testing our mettle, such trials rearrange our priorities. We are sternly reminded how little we actually need, and how much more we can in fact do without. In other words, a crisis can shock us out of the complacency of false comforts, habits and routine, and teach us instead hard lessons about life.
More pointedly, such trials reveal us to ourselves in a new light, without the least regard for our tenderly-incubated self-images. Thus times of crisis often offer us the opportunity we didn’t (consciously) ask for to do what we’d rather not: examine our lives more closely. By forcing us to refine our attention as well as deepen our appreciation we are granted the golden opportunity to rewrite our souls.
If you want to become full,
Let yourself be empty.
If you want to be reborn,
Let yourself die.
If you want to be given everything
give everything up.
- Tao Te Ching
Yahia Lababidi's latest book, Trial by Ink: From Nietzsche to Belly Dancing, is available for sale internationally. His first book, Signposts to Elsewhere (Jane Street Press) was selected for 'Books of the Year,' in 2008, by The Independent (UK). Otherwise, Lababidi's writing has been translated into Arabic, Slovak, Turkish, Swedish as well as Italian. http://www.pw.org/content/yahia_lababidi
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In other words, where danger exists, so too does opportunity (or its possibility, at least) of. This is ancient Chinese wisdom, as evident in the Tao Te Ching, a work rich in fruitful contradictions. Philosopher Lao Tzu, author of the Tao, reconciles these apparent tensions in this paradoxical truth: “Prosperity rests on disaster, disaster is hidden in prosperity. Who knows the line that separates them?”
In these cash-strapped days, ‘crisis’ is a word much-bandied about typically preceded by the word ‘economic,’ second only to the coupling ‘environmental crisis,’ and with ‘spiritual crisis’ perhaps a distant third in the collective imagination. It’s a pity that the book crisis (something people seem to speak little of and care less for) must be an early victim of the current financial one, since the values and culture that reading promotes – a respect for the classics, a historical gaze, free and sustained inquiry – might be precisely what is needed to sidestep this mess. But, in all fairness, the mindset of close reading and deep thinking was already hostage to a shift in technology towards television and internet, with the shortened attention spans they engender.
Yet, there is precious little mention of the inherent opportunities such crucial points present us with. And, while the current economic panic is material in nature, and arguably triggered by a combination of greed and irresponsibility, in fact there has never been a time or a people without some sort of crisis; just as there is hardly a crisis that is entirely without a spiritual dimension, that cannot also be addressed philosophically.
The situation JFK addressed, with its Cold War dangers, such as Soviet military expansion, as well as US space exploration opportunities, might have shifted in emphasis since then. But that is precisely the point: any position of strength or good fortune is always under some sort of real or imagined threat, and cannot endure forever. Still, no matter how we delude ourselves or are deluded into believing otherwise, “the only constant is change... all is flux” to borrow the immortal words of ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus.
This means that our positions of privilege, as individuals and as nations, are bound to shuffle from time to time. Nothing personal – that’s just the natural order of things. This Emerson refers to as “a kind of mechanical exactness, as of a loom or mill in what we call casual or fortuitous events.” To think otherwise is to build sky-high upon a fault line, and then to be astonished when the earth shakes beneath our feet. Which is precisely what we humans do…
Continuing to Live
Sages and prophets have long warned us: ‘Life is a bridge, build no home upon it,’ or else ‘die before you die.’ But, as a race, we’re generally short-sighted and death-denying. We are, therefore, not any more comfortable with that other inescapable aspect of life: loss. Along with change, loss of some sort also generally tends to precipitate crisis – whether it’s loss of our possessions, a job, a loved one, or even the inevitable subsiding of what we believe is our birthright: youth, health, beauty. Yet, as poet Philip Larkin bitterly sums it up, in ‘Continuing to Live,’ to live is a losing game:
This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise –
Ah, if the game were poker, yes,
You might discard them, draw a full house!
But it's chess.
Just as we must gracefully surrender the gifts of youth in old age (if we’re lucky enough to live that long), so must we be ready to relinquish all the other pieces along the way. There are no guarantees that our lucky streak will last: hearts will be broken, empires collapse, and all favorable circumstances alter at some point. So that, if we manage to avoid a collective crisis, we shall be confronted with personal ones along the way.
This is not within our control. What little say we have in the matter is how we choose to respond to the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.’ Attempts to take arms will only do us harm. We might cower in fear, grow bitter or rage and bemoan our plight until we exhaust ourselves, but to quote another great poet, Omar Khayyam:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it
That is to say, some form of acceptance is required as the only sane solution to an unalterable Fate. To phrase this in more spiritual terms: “When two great forces oppose each other the victory will go to the one that knows how to yield,” says Lao Tzu. Meaning, even if our initial response to calamity is not a serene and courageous acceptance, and we cringe, curse, and rebel, we must still eventually yield at some point if we are to survive. For, if it is life itself that we do battle with, it is foolhardly to think we could possibly win.
Appreciation of Tragedy
Different cultures at various historical moments are better at their appreciation of these hard truths than others. Cultures present or past that live with suffering or deprivation on a continuous basis, if not actually then at least by cultivating an appreciation through spiritual or philosophical practices, tend to fare better at accepting difficult circumstances. One such example of an ancient culture, whose heirs are no strangers to hardship, is to be found in Egypt.
Past masters at submitting to the dictates of fate, no matter how harsh, these natural-born fatalists typically make light of their burdens through acceptance. It is not uncommon for an average Egyptian, freshly struck by misfortune, to respond with utter resignation and the simple word, ‘maktoob’ (it is written). Not unusual either for this patient sufferer to point to their forehead (where it is believed their fate is written) and offer up a winsome smile as if to say, ‘What would be the point of struggling?’
Literary critic, classical scholar and cultural diagnostician Daniel Mendelsohn finds that what seems to be missing in contemporary American culture is just that: an appreciation of tragedy. In a discussion of his memoir, The Lost, the story of his five-year, world–wide search to discover the fates of relatives who were Holocaust victims, he suggests that “spending your life reading Greek tragedy is good preparation for confronting the Holocaust.” Elsewhere, in Mendelsohn’s introduction to his fine collection of essays, How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken, we find him carefully examining literature, arts and contemporary culture through the prism of his beloved ancient Greece:
The necessity, in the end, of yielding to hard and inexplicable realities that are beyond our control is a tragic truth…That so much of contemporary culture is characterized by this kind of sentimentality, by a seeming preference for false “closures” over a strong and meaningful confrontation with real and inalterable pain, is a cultural crisis.
Nearly two centuries earlier, an American giant and diagnostician of the spirit, Emerson, is seen reproaching his homeland along the same lines (in his essay, 'Fate') :
Our America has a bad name for superficialities. Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it…. The Greek Tragedy expressed the same sense. “Whatever is fated that will take place. The great immense mind of Jove is not to be transgressed.” … Nature is no sentimentalist, ----does not cosset or pamper us… Let us not deny it up and down. Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end.
Both critics understood that there is no bargaining with Fate and that what was required was to face the terrors of life. Indeed, only an outlook that is naïve and sentimental would be shocked by loss or change, two unavoidable aspects of life that the Ancients (and wiser contemporary cultures) understand all too well. This is precisely what a study of history or philosophy can do, tutor us in the tragic dimension of human existence if we have not experienced it first hand.
No Yoke So Tight
Insofar as classical philosophy is concerned, Stoicism provides an excellent prescription for the chronically optimistic or the full-blown idealistic, with their belief that everything can be fixed and their insistence on happy endings. Alive to the dangers and tyranny of unchecked emotions, Stoicism emphasized rational self-mastery. To attain the Stoic ideal of ‘moral and intellectual perfection’ one could not be at the mercy of their (negative or destructive) emotions and also be of sound judgment. One can already see how such equanimity might be useful in confronting a crisis, but the Stoics went one step further. Their world-view anticipated and braced against disaster, through specific practices such as contemplation of death and meditations on the dangers of existence and the misfortunes one might encounter any given day.
The Stoic trick was maintaining a will (prohairesis) that is in harmony with the natural world – namely, a sober self-control that yielded to fate. The great philosopher of Late Stoicism, Seneca, illustrated such a world view in this powerful metaphor:
An animal, struggling against the noose, tightens it ... there is no yoke so tight that it will not hurt the animal less if it pulls with it than if it fights against it. The best alleviation for overwhelming evils is to endure and bow to necessity.
Like the ancient Greeks, the spirited philosophy of Existentialism (recognized as a movement only in the 20th century) was also primarily concerned with how to live. As far as philosophies go, there is nothing bloodless or strictly academic about it. Instead, situated at the crossroads of religion, art, and psychology, Existentialism seems conceived by and for seekers with something of a (spiritual) crisis. Moreover, like the Stoics, Existentialists concerned themselves with will and freedom (as well as choice and authenticity) in their quest to lead a noble life.
Perhaps less predisposed to determinism than Stoicism (since its members held varying beliefs regarding fate and free will) Existentialism was itself a philosophy in a state of emergency - no longer content to unquestioningly accept previous givens, such as God, goodness or purpose. Rather, its world-view presents us, in Heidegger’s terms, as ‘thrown-into-being’ and quite possibly alone in an absurd world. To Existentialists, it was entirely up to us to negotiate how to get up, begin walking and give meaning to our existence.
The Thing of Value
What does all this have to do with the current financial crisis, for example? I think the ancients, Lao Tzu and the Stoics, as well as more contemporary philosophers have a great deal to say that is relevant to us now. Certainly, a degree of Stoic calm or temperance in the face of the crisis would not go amiss. Just as a baseline acceptance of life’s fickle nature, and perhaps a modicum of detachment and brave endurance, can also go a long way, at this time.
These philosophies recommend: self-examination, self-discipline and ultimately, self-reliance. And having collectedly evaluated the materialistic values that have contributed to this crisis, people might choose to follow the advice of another ancient philosopher, Diogenes, and “restamp the currency” - or come up with an alternate, more spiritual, set of values that are better-suited to these times and stand a chance of weathering the storm.
This advice is echoed in the words of proto-Existentialist philosopher, Nietzsche, who upon surveying the debris of old values littering the cultural landscape of Europe over a century ago, decided that nothing less than a “revaluation of all values” was needed. Yet, past practical advice for those seeking a way out of the panic of the current economic crisis, such philosophy–inspired, courage-in-the-midst-of-confusion should also resonate with all the other wrecks that we barely survive: existential, spiritual, romantic, familial, etc.
As Islamic thinker, Al Ghazali, instructs us: “You possess only whatever will not be lost in a shipwreck.” So, when surveying the scene after a crisis to assess the damage, be it a natural disaster or a private calamity, we might begin by taking stock of what remains intact before proceeding to reassemble our lives. Only then can our sense of disorientation or despair be replaced by true reorientation and renewed purpose.
To return to the ancients once more, the Greek word ‘crisis’ means a ‘judgment’ or a ‘trial.’ In testing our mettle, such trials rearrange our priorities. We are sternly reminded how little we actually need, and how much more we can in fact do without. In other words, a crisis can shock us out of the complacency of false comforts, habits and routine, and teach us instead hard lessons about life.
More pointedly, such trials reveal us to ourselves in a new light, without the least regard for our tenderly-incubated self-images. Thus times of crisis often offer us the opportunity we didn’t (consciously) ask for to do what we’d rather not: examine our lives more closely. By forcing us to refine our attention as well as deepen our appreciation we are granted the golden opportunity to rewrite our souls.
If you want to become full,
Let yourself be empty.
If you want to be reborn,
Let yourself die.
If you want to be given everything
give everything up.
- Tao Te Ching
Yahia Lababidi's latest book, Trial by Ink: From Nietzsche to Belly Dancing, is available for sale internationally. His first book, Signposts to Elsewhere (Jane Street Press) was selected for 'Books of the Year,' in 2008, by The Independent (UK). Otherwise, Lababidi's writing has been translated into Arabic, Slovak, Turkish, Swedish as well as Italian. http://www.pw.org/content/yahia_lababidi
29 December 2010
Featured Article: North East Indian Poetry - ‘Peace’ in Violence by Ananya S. Guha
North East Indian Poetry: ‘Peace’ in Violence
To discuss poetry written in North East India is an enormity of tasks. Firstly, to share commonalities from the different matrixes and cultures of the region; secondly, to pin point the major themes of the poets writing in different languages invested as they are with stark realities. However, if we posit a reductionist theory of their poetry, discovering only the violence that is prevalent in their poetry and the attendant brutalization of society we will be doing grave injustice to a body of work kneaded by cohesiveness, lyricism and a well ordered world of sanity. To complement this there also exist a group of English poets who share the Romanticism and mythopoeic vision of their vernacular counterparts.
These give to these poets a universal coherence, not an inchoate disorderliness, a world view where love matters; love in its many sided dimensions touching on immutable relationships. In many cases the love for the land and the love of intense relationship coalesce into vastness of images. These poets are imagistic, Romanticists; cannot forget their hills and valleys and the intrinsic beauties of their land now sullied and tarnished.
North East Indian poetry has a remarkable whole, and is marked by the kind of tension which generates all great poetry; it may be at one level the poetry of violence, of torpidity and fear but it is also the poetry of searching, soul searching for peace.
Among the poets who write in English there is the remarkable expression of mythology and folk-tales, whether in the poetry of Robin. S. Ngangom, Desmond. L. Kharmawphlang, Temsula Ao or Mamang Dai. The search for the past is no escapism; it is a hiatus, gripping and painful, between past and present. The myth of Nohkalikai for example pervades the bi-lingual poetry of the poets in Shillong. Even in Robin. S. Ngangom’s poetry there are such typical and mythological allusions- he has been living in Shillong for the last thirty years or so; but is originally of Manipuri descent.
There are two distinct categories of English poets in the region; some are domiciled there like Robin. S. Ngangom, Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, Mamang Dai, Mona Zote, Nini Lungalang, Janica Pariat and Temsula Ao, while others such as: Anjum Hasan Nabina Das, Nitoo Das, Trisha Bora and Aruni Kashyap live outside the region.
However, where does one begin in a discussion or poetry in North East India written in a wide spectrum of languages: Assamese, Manipuri, Khasi, Kokborok, Bodo etc.? How does one classify them into a genre of poetry, or is there an urgency to do so? Often considered a homogeneous unit, North East India spells ‘notoriety’ of heterogeneity. We have Manipuri poets, writing in the Bengali dominated Barak Valley of Assam, for example.
Where is the ‘peace’ then we talked about? Is it in the hills, rivers and lakes or in the mountainous terrain of this beautiful part of the country? Landscaping the past and the present is a recurrent theme of these poets; images embedded in the natural landscape, there is quiescence and peace there, an antidote for all ills, suffering and violence.
Yet fears, ghostly apparitions and shadows are omnipresent. Thangjam Ibopishak the Manipuri poet says:
“… Volcano… you cannot erupt
Volcano, stay asleep…
Lava remain slumbering…”
(“Volcano You Cannot Erupt”)
Similarly in his trenchant poem “I Want to Be Killed by an Indian Bullet” there is layered irony but also rejection of the ideology of violence.
When Mamang Dai breaks into rapturous delight, there is peace in bewilderment:
“I hear the bewildered
cry of a deer
floating on the
waves of moonlight.”
(“Moonlight”)
Desmond. L. Kharmawphlang makes the myth of folklore an archetypal and enduring vision:
“I became a folktale…
I became a proverb…
I became a riddle.”
(“Last Night I dreamed”)
Dreams, visions enter the mindscape like haunting motifs and recurrently, obsessively. This is evident in Chandrakanta Murasingh’s ‘ancient’ love narrative: “The Stone Speaks in the Forest”. There is a myth-making capacity in this poem of a “golden deer” and a “broken heart”.
In Saratchand Thiyam’s poem: “Sister” there is a frantic plea:
“This rain has not yet let up
Don’t go out yet, sister…
Haven’t you heard this
Sound…
Don’t you go at all.”
There is a predominating fear of violence, but at the end of the poem there is restoration of peace and equanimity. So long as ‘sister’ is safe; then there is peace.
The celebrated Assamese poet Harekrishna Deka, a former police officer, knows the story of violence and bullets only too well:
“… After dipping in
Blood the nightlong
How ruddy the
Morning she would
Be.”
(“Dawning”)
Yet, Kynpham. S. Nongkynrih who predominantly writes in English can envision the prophylactic of love in the midst of ethnic conflict:
“Beloved Sundori,
Yesterday one of my people
Killed one of your people…
Through a fearful breeze
Please let your window open...”
(“Sundori”)
When Temsula Ao speaks lyrically in her poem: “Stone-People From Lungterok” there is an animated discovery and re-definition of the past. Past is history:
“Lungterok, The six stones
Where the progenitors
And forebears
Of the stone-people
Were born
Out of the womb
Of the earth.”
Poetry written in North East India can be analysed against the backdrop of ethnic violence and militancy/militarism, but it transcends such immediacy into an ideal world bereft of suffering:
“… When you leave
Your native hills
I can only speak
of lost times,
and of sorrow and blood.”
(“When You Do Not Return”)
These “lost times” are the halcyon days of past. They are juxtaposed with “sorrow and blood” in almost a violent and forceful imagery. But the ‘lost times’ bring peace to the mind as a token of immutable love.
The North East Indian poets have an ambivalence, towards militarism, love for the land, ethnicity etc. but these are transcended into love: love for woman, love for the hills, ravines and deep gorges, precipitated by gushing waterfalls; in short love for the land. They are able to transmute the chaotic into the subliminal. That is, in the final analysis, the poetry of peace; out of disorderliness, an orderliness. Politics and love complement each other with lyrical utterances. The public and private voices mingle into rhapsody:
“You are very pretty,
Barak river!
… Barak river; when
your waters soothe
the fiery heat,
the desert smiles
quietly.”
(“Barak River You Are Beautiful”, Ilabanta Yumnam)
Disquiet transmuted into quiet. Beatific.
Note: All references in this article are to Dancing Earth; Penguin Books, New Delhi, 2009, ed; Robin S. Ngangom and Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih.
Ananya S. Guha lives in Shillong in North East India and works in the Indira Gandhi National Open University. He writes for newspapers and magazines on education and subjects of general interest.
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To discuss poetry written in North East India is an enormity of tasks. Firstly, to share commonalities from the different matrixes and cultures of the region; secondly, to pin point the major themes of the poets writing in different languages invested as they are with stark realities. However, if we posit a reductionist theory of their poetry, discovering only the violence that is prevalent in their poetry and the attendant brutalization of society we will be doing grave injustice to a body of work kneaded by cohesiveness, lyricism and a well ordered world of sanity. To complement this there also exist a group of English poets who share the Romanticism and mythopoeic vision of their vernacular counterparts.
These give to these poets a universal coherence, not an inchoate disorderliness, a world view where love matters; love in its many sided dimensions touching on immutable relationships. In many cases the love for the land and the love of intense relationship coalesce into vastness of images. These poets are imagistic, Romanticists; cannot forget their hills and valleys and the intrinsic beauties of their land now sullied and tarnished.
North East Indian poetry has a remarkable whole, and is marked by the kind of tension which generates all great poetry; it may be at one level the poetry of violence, of torpidity and fear but it is also the poetry of searching, soul searching for peace.
Among the poets who write in English there is the remarkable expression of mythology and folk-tales, whether in the poetry of Robin. S. Ngangom, Desmond. L. Kharmawphlang, Temsula Ao or Mamang Dai. The search for the past is no escapism; it is a hiatus, gripping and painful, between past and present. The myth of Nohkalikai for example pervades the bi-lingual poetry of the poets in Shillong. Even in Robin. S. Ngangom’s poetry there are such typical and mythological allusions- he has been living in Shillong for the last thirty years or so; but is originally of Manipuri descent.
There are two distinct categories of English poets in the region; some are domiciled there like Robin. S. Ngangom, Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, Mamang Dai, Mona Zote, Nini Lungalang, Janica Pariat and Temsula Ao, while others such as: Anjum Hasan Nabina Das, Nitoo Das, Trisha Bora and Aruni Kashyap live outside the region.
However, where does one begin in a discussion or poetry in North East India written in a wide spectrum of languages: Assamese, Manipuri, Khasi, Kokborok, Bodo etc.? How does one classify them into a genre of poetry, or is there an urgency to do so? Often considered a homogeneous unit, North East India spells ‘notoriety’ of heterogeneity. We have Manipuri poets, writing in the Bengali dominated Barak Valley of Assam, for example.
Where is the ‘peace’ then we talked about? Is it in the hills, rivers and lakes or in the mountainous terrain of this beautiful part of the country? Landscaping the past and the present is a recurrent theme of these poets; images embedded in the natural landscape, there is quiescence and peace there, an antidote for all ills, suffering and violence.
Yet fears, ghostly apparitions and shadows are omnipresent. Thangjam Ibopishak the Manipuri poet says:
“… Volcano… you cannot erupt
Volcano, stay asleep…
Lava remain slumbering…”
(“Volcano You Cannot Erupt”)
Similarly in his trenchant poem “I Want to Be Killed by an Indian Bullet” there is layered irony but also rejection of the ideology of violence.
When Mamang Dai breaks into rapturous delight, there is peace in bewilderment:
“I hear the bewildered
cry of a deer
floating on the
waves of moonlight.”
(“Moonlight”)
Desmond. L. Kharmawphlang makes the myth of folklore an archetypal and enduring vision:
“I became a folktale…
I became a proverb…
I became a riddle.”
(“Last Night I dreamed”)
Dreams, visions enter the mindscape like haunting motifs and recurrently, obsessively. This is evident in Chandrakanta Murasingh’s ‘ancient’ love narrative: “The Stone Speaks in the Forest”. There is a myth-making capacity in this poem of a “golden deer” and a “broken heart”.
In Saratchand Thiyam’s poem: “Sister” there is a frantic plea:
“This rain has not yet let up
Don’t go out yet, sister…
Haven’t you heard this
Sound…
Don’t you go at all.”
There is a predominating fear of violence, but at the end of the poem there is restoration of peace and equanimity. So long as ‘sister’ is safe; then there is peace.
The celebrated Assamese poet Harekrishna Deka, a former police officer, knows the story of violence and bullets only too well:
“… After dipping in
Blood the nightlong
How ruddy the
Morning she would
Be.”
(“Dawning”)
Yet, Kynpham. S. Nongkynrih who predominantly writes in English can envision the prophylactic of love in the midst of ethnic conflict:
“Beloved Sundori,
Yesterday one of my people
Killed one of your people…
Through a fearful breeze
Please let your window open...”
(“Sundori”)
When Temsula Ao speaks lyrically in her poem: “Stone-People From Lungterok” there is an animated discovery and re-definition of the past. Past is history:
“Lungterok, The six stones
Where the progenitors
And forebears
Of the stone-people
Were born
Out of the womb
Of the earth.”
Poetry written in North East India can be analysed against the backdrop of ethnic violence and militancy/militarism, but it transcends such immediacy into an ideal world bereft of suffering:
“… When you leave
Your native hills
I can only speak
of lost times,
and of sorrow and blood.”
(“When You Do Not Return”)
These “lost times” are the halcyon days of past. They are juxtaposed with “sorrow and blood” in almost a violent and forceful imagery. But the ‘lost times’ bring peace to the mind as a token of immutable love.
The North East Indian poets have an ambivalence, towards militarism, love for the land, ethnicity etc. but these are transcended into love: love for woman, love for the hills, ravines and deep gorges, precipitated by gushing waterfalls; in short love for the land. They are able to transmute the chaotic into the subliminal. That is, in the final analysis, the poetry of peace; out of disorderliness, an orderliness. Politics and love complement each other with lyrical utterances. The public and private voices mingle into rhapsody:
“You are very pretty,
Barak river!
… Barak river; when
your waters soothe
the fiery heat,
the desert smiles
quietly.”
(“Barak River You Are Beautiful”, Ilabanta Yumnam)
Disquiet transmuted into quiet. Beatific.
Note: All references in this article are to Dancing Earth; Penguin Books, New Delhi, 2009, ed; Robin S. Ngangom and Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih.
Ananya S. Guha lives in Shillong in North East India and works in the Indira Gandhi National Open University. He writes for newspapers and magazines on education and subjects of general interest.
09 December 2010
Featured Article: Destroyed in a Flash by Atul Kapoor
In Leh there is a popular saying: ‘Only truest of friends and fiercest of enemies come to Leh’. When I went for an adventurous biking trip to Leh five years back, I could establish the raison d'être of the saying. At first glance Leh is like any other hill-station of India; it has its Mall Road, Tibetan Market, food-joints, hotels and chaos, so familiar to any other tourist destination in India. Its disparity lies in its remoteness. It’s no breeze to reach Leh. After all it takes one to surmount the road of world’s highest passes and deadliest traps to reach here.
It’s one of those regions on earth where nature still reigns supreme and its blatant authority holds strong against man’s inherent capacity to control. Some place where a person can die of hypothermia and heat-stroke at the same time Leh is an out and out case of nature’s dark sarcasm. Sitting at about 475 Kilometres from Manali, it takes one through a heroic journey to finally reach at Leh. The road is glutted with mountain chippings and streams replenished with icy water from the melting glaciers. As one advances through the rigours of serpentine turns of the hair pin curves trumping one pass after another, a sense of pride and ecstasy seeps in.
Road to Leh, with its stock of nerve-racking stretches and unfettered dynamics, tests one’s ability to stay poised in apparently precarious situations and persevere against all the odds. There would be many occasions when a first-timer would be tempted to return, assuming the staring pitfall to be his nemesis, but if one can keep his nerve and muster self-belief he can emerge as a winner. Paucity of oxygen in the barren landscape at impossible altitude is another major deterrent that takes the ‘survival of the fittest’ phrase to another level. It takes time to acclimatise to the savagery of the land and often taking medication at the army camps for the feeling of nausea and breathlessness becomes absolute necessary. It takes two days to reach Leh by bike but an extra cautious rider or the one enthralled by the cocktail of fearsome and panoramic marvels of the journey might take three days.
There are very few stopovers in the entire stretch to break the journey which makes planning for the journey extremely important. It is not advisable to ride after the sunset so it’s necessary to reach the stopover within the time constraint. The stopovers are the only places of inhabitation on the road, just few camps raised by the distant villagers during the tourist season. Darcha, Sarchu and Pang are notable among the stopovers. Another striking feature of the journey is the lack of modern-day sanitation structure and unless one is a control-freak he will have to take the nature’s call in the open devoid of the amenities he has grown up on assuming them to be customary and thankless framework. No other renowned hill-station in India is as difficult to reach by road, the fact that gives one an immense sense of achievement and fulfilment to be there.
Leh’s other special feature is its sang-froid. Juxtaposed with Kashmir, a violent hill-station in J&K, Leh’s calmness provides solace; a sense of semblance that not everything is lost. Its social fabric has always been intact, never provoked by the perennial tension in its neighbourhood. The people here seem to be at peace with themselves and complacent with their positioning. Having made to Leh once, one is always inspired to return. So, when an unprecedented cloud-burst struck Leh on that woebegone night and instigated the competitive frenzy among our soi-distant media to be the first to break the news of resultant destruction in an otherwise inconspicuous land nestled unpretentiously by mighty Himalayas, cloaked conveniently from the in-your-face media glare, the memories of my daredevil journey resurfaced.
In a span of few crazy minutes Leh was lost, its once vibrant elements flummoxed by the maddening intensity of slimy torrent that engulfed everything that came its way. Death toll has been on the rise ever since and rescue operations are at par with war. It would take weeks to evacuate the trapped people and might take years to rebuild Leh. The magnitude of disruption that nature has evoked within a blink is far greater than what Kashmir had to sustain in decades. And perhaps in nature’s fury lies our lesson.
We don’t need to foster enmity and hostility against each other to gain control on Kashmir, for nature could do so quite easily with its masterstroke. Who knows that while we kept baying for each others’ blood to lay claim on Kashmir, nature’s evil eye befell on it and by the time we woke up from our inordinate sleep, we realise that Kashmir now belongs to neither India nor Pakistan. Kashmir belongs to dead all around. Nature is our common enemy and we have reasons to fight as long as it lies dormant. We might lose those reasons tomorrow. Nature is our provider, but once in her elements, she can wreak havoc in a flash. So, let’s come together for once and pray to God to keep its forces in check. We have already got enough problems, self-induced though, to take care of.
Atul Kapoor is a debutant author of a novel ‘Incredible High’. His book is about an adventurous road trip of five friends to Ladakh on bike. Ladakh, the land of high passes, boasts of world’s highest traversable road and is inundated with deadly traps and vicious curves. He is an avid traveler who has trekked to places as far-off as ‘Gangotri’ and been to a biking expedition all the way to ‘Ladakh’ (core of his novel). Read about his book here.
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It’s one of those regions on earth where nature still reigns supreme and its blatant authority holds strong against man’s inherent capacity to control. Some place where a person can die of hypothermia and heat-stroke at the same time Leh is an out and out case of nature’s dark sarcasm. Sitting at about 475 Kilometres from Manali, it takes one through a heroic journey to finally reach at Leh. The road is glutted with mountain chippings and streams replenished with icy water from the melting glaciers. As one advances through the rigours of serpentine turns of the hair pin curves trumping one pass after another, a sense of pride and ecstasy seeps in.
Road to Leh, with its stock of nerve-racking stretches and unfettered dynamics, tests one’s ability to stay poised in apparently precarious situations and persevere against all the odds. There would be many occasions when a first-timer would be tempted to return, assuming the staring pitfall to be his nemesis, but if one can keep his nerve and muster self-belief he can emerge as a winner. Paucity of oxygen in the barren landscape at impossible altitude is another major deterrent that takes the ‘survival of the fittest’ phrase to another level. It takes time to acclimatise to the savagery of the land and often taking medication at the army camps for the feeling of nausea and breathlessness becomes absolute necessary. It takes two days to reach Leh by bike but an extra cautious rider or the one enthralled by the cocktail of fearsome and panoramic marvels of the journey might take three days.
There are very few stopovers in the entire stretch to break the journey which makes planning for the journey extremely important. It is not advisable to ride after the sunset so it’s necessary to reach the stopover within the time constraint. The stopovers are the only places of inhabitation on the road, just few camps raised by the distant villagers during the tourist season. Darcha, Sarchu and Pang are notable among the stopovers. Another striking feature of the journey is the lack of modern-day sanitation structure and unless one is a control-freak he will have to take the nature’s call in the open devoid of the amenities he has grown up on assuming them to be customary and thankless framework. No other renowned hill-station in India is as difficult to reach by road, the fact that gives one an immense sense of achievement and fulfilment to be there.
Leh’s other special feature is its sang-froid. Juxtaposed with Kashmir, a violent hill-station in J&K, Leh’s calmness provides solace; a sense of semblance that not everything is lost. Its social fabric has always been intact, never provoked by the perennial tension in its neighbourhood. The people here seem to be at peace with themselves and complacent with their positioning. Having made to Leh once, one is always inspired to return. So, when an unprecedented cloud-burst struck Leh on that woebegone night and instigated the competitive frenzy among our soi-distant media to be the first to break the news of resultant destruction in an otherwise inconspicuous land nestled unpretentiously by mighty Himalayas, cloaked conveniently from the in-your-face media glare, the memories of my daredevil journey resurfaced.
In a span of few crazy minutes Leh was lost, its once vibrant elements flummoxed by the maddening intensity of slimy torrent that engulfed everything that came its way. Death toll has been on the rise ever since and rescue operations are at par with war. It would take weeks to evacuate the trapped people and might take years to rebuild Leh. The magnitude of disruption that nature has evoked within a blink is far greater than what Kashmir had to sustain in decades. And perhaps in nature’s fury lies our lesson.
We don’t need to foster enmity and hostility against each other to gain control on Kashmir, for nature could do so quite easily with its masterstroke. Who knows that while we kept baying for each others’ blood to lay claim on Kashmir, nature’s evil eye befell on it and by the time we woke up from our inordinate sleep, we realise that Kashmir now belongs to neither India nor Pakistan. Kashmir belongs to dead all around. Nature is our common enemy and we have reasons to fight as long as it lies dormant. We might lose those reasons tomorrow. Nature is our provider, but once in her elements, she can wreak havoc in a flash. So, let’s come together for once and pray to God to keep its forces in check. We have already got enough problems, self-induced though, to take care of.
Atul Kapoor is a debutant author of a novel ‘Incredible High’. His book is about an adventurous road trip of five friends to Ladakh on bike. Ladakh, the land of high passes, boasts of world’s highest traversable road and is inundated with deadly traps and vicious curves. He is an avid traveler who has trekked to places as far-off as ‘Gangotri’ and been to a biking expedition all the way to ‘Ladakh’ (core of his novel). Read about his book here.
18 November 2010
Rita Malhotra's Review of Hadaa Sendoo's Poetry: The Rapturous World of Words
The Rapturous World of Words
On Hadaa Sendoo’s poetry
Rita Malhotra (India)
Hadaa Sendoo’s poetic oeuvre is not merely an artistic and aesthetic manifestation of his sensibilities but also expresses human concerns and moral consciousness in response to his immediate surroundings. He depicts a passionately lived connection to the natural world and also accesses the latent world beyond the obvious in true fidelity to poetic sensitivity. The sensitive and thought-provoking themes are intensely varied. Many of Hadaa’s poetic creations are interspersed with nostalgic memories of his native homeland like Karakorum Mongolian Words, New Years Eve, The Mongolian Yurt and are deeply rooted in the sensitivity of the culture and tradition of his homeland. A kind of beautiful nostalgia is expressed in the poem called To paz wherein he speaks of the primitive dwelling place of Mongols namely Karakorum and sails upto its gates along his poetic journey. The poet’s expression is serenely lucid. He writes:
On the blue sea surface of the Pacific Ocean my boat drifted about
During this poetry trip when I passed by the solar calendar stele of the Astec race
I felt as if the Sun God was calling my name
…………………………………………………..
I passed through the transparent stone arches one after another
Just like having my body leaning against the city gate of Karakorum
He concludes by saying:
Inspired by the sun stones my lost charm began to shine again
The birds flying in the sky above Gulf of Mexico
They soared freely in the vast blue sky
The verse-flow maintains its continuity of emotions as his thoughts remain rooted in his country but simultaneously have a universal appeal. In the poem First Dream of Spring he expresses an infinite love for his homeland and sets the tone and tenor of the poem even as he articulates:
On bituun’s night
I decided not to miss you
But in the very first night of this year of rooster
Why should it be that I dreamt of you again
Combined with the nostalgia for his homeland his childhood memories also haunt.
He traverses backwards through corridors of time to pen poems like Sangiin Dalai, Huiten Shil and Childhood wherein his emotional honesty comes to the fore.
Huiten Shil, the paradise in my childhood
The most beautiful scenery is the whirling smoke from the yurt
And in Sangiin Dalai the poet laments:
Why do I suddenly feel sad
The Mongolian yurt in which I once lived has disappeared
A camel has lost his way home
Coming to tradition, the beautifully evocative poem New Year's Eve depicts how the poet delves into the imaginative domain and as he describes the traditional way of celebrating the spring festival in Mongolia, the connect between the conscious physical and unconscious thoughts of the mind is pleasantly harmonious:
This moment, I wonder
If times can flow backwards
If love will die
If the tramps feel sad
In Root the sensitive poet speaks of the fountainhead of poetry as he traverses along rivers, grasslands, rocks and the sky. There is a tenderness in his sad tone as he pens that in death, all these would metamorphose into a mere dream. He says:
I am alive and I can see
The root of rivers, the root of grass
…………………………………
The root of poetry
When I pass away.
I shall dream
The poetry of the root, the rocks of the root
……………………………………………
the rivers of the root
Hadaa’s consummate artistry and use of vivid images can be seen even in his expression of disillusionment. The extreme sentiment of hurt in betrayal comes across n a very touching manner in the poem called The Moon above Bogda Mount.
But tonight where have stars hidden
Heaven bears hollowness’ torment now
Snow mountain bears loneliness’ torment
Eyes bear betrayal’s torment now
The economy of words and timeless lines are very appealing in the poet’s short poems.They manifest an intellectual control on his writing. The strong sense of impact of the finality of death comes across in Spring Rain where the poet is prepared to confront his own mortality. The poet concludes the poem with the following lines:
But white hair can’t turn green
And staring up at the stars
The old well dies.
The poem Snow Scene on the other hand refers to death with the use of symbolism and is an entirely different perception. The poet says that he would pen verse until his dying day like Van Gogh, to sow seeds of sunflowers across the world. The portrayal of a happy universe is very elegant here The thought too is very creative.
In the poem The Sunny High Plateau the poet touches a cord in remembrance of his forefathers on the sun-worshipped slopes. His latent emotional pattern comes to the surface as he expresses gratefulness to them for helping him cultivate his inborn strength and making him what he is today. He says:
My forefathers began to hunt and fish here
From rivers to forests, from grasslands to Gobi
The endless fresh flowers and milk
The legacy as kind hearted as stars
Have made up my life and my future
The poet is also ridden with sadness as he gets immensely nostalgic in the poem Shandu Sad Song that takes him to the 13th century Yuan Dynasty Empire and the world famous grassland city Shandu built by Genghis Khan which is in ruins today. His usage of the metaphor purple chrysanthemums to express his sadness at its bereft-of civilization state and cultural decay shows his skills with poetic craft. Even though the style is a direct expression of dramatic history, it kind of provides a meditative insight into a profound loss of a once rich city:
I have arrived at the ruins of human civilization
I am a tree which survived for you
Standing for your brilliant sufferings
The poet’s consciousness of a world inflicted with plural wrongs like war etc manifests itself in his poem called Ode To Peace another evocative poem with vivid images.It is resonant with universal appeal and the concluding lines continue to linger in the reader’s mind:
Peace in the morning when you come back
Migratory birds can be seeing flying over the city
Hands can be seen waving and dancing in the sky.
A quest for an elsewhere land of serenity and quiet away from the vortex of an evil-laden diurnal existence is expressed in lucid language in Crossing the Sea. The sensitive poet’s despair and his loss of faith in man results in a moving emotional tone:
Leaving the sea
Many trees and many birds
Part from the unfairness of human
Part from my own wound
Crossing the sea
Someone will stroke my heart
Hadaa leads you to the fragrance of love and of nature with its accompanying vibrance through poems like A Dream, The White Night, Kiss and others and traverses across seasons of love, its different hues and images and its aesthetic construct. His exploration of one of the truest perceptions of the human mind is indeed commendable. His intimate understanding of this emotion surfaces beautifully even as his love poems have a delicacy of touch.
It is said that writing poetry is an exploration. It is a way of struggling with the excitements and tensions of words that associate with and are relevant to the poet’s subject. That is exactly what Hadaa does. Moreover the diversity of themes in Hadaa’s compositions never ceases to amaze the reader. It would be justified to say that Hadaa is a poet of introspection and his deep engagement with the world of words is admirable.
Read more
On Hadaa Sendoo’s poetry
Rita Malhotra (India)
Hadaa Sendoo’s poetic oeuvre is not merely an artistic and aesthetic manifestation of his sensibilities but also expresses human concerns and moral consciousness in response to his immediate surroundings. He depicts a passionately lived connection to the natural world and also accesses the latent world beyond the obvious in true fidelity to poetic sensitivity. The sensitive and thought-provoking themes are intensely varied. Many of Hadaa’s poetic creations are interspersed with nostalgic memories of his native homeland like Karakorum Mongolian Words, New Years Eve, The Mongolian Yurt and are deeply rooted in the sensitivity of the culture and tradition of his homeland. A kind of beautiful nostalgia is expressed in the poem called To paz wherein he speaks of the primitive dwelling place of Mongols namely Karakorum and sails upto its gates along his poetic journey. The poet’s expression is serenely lucid. He writes:On the blue sea surface of the Pacific Ocean my boat drifted about
During this poetry trip when I passed by the solar calendar stele of the Astec race
I felt as if the Sun God was calling my name
…………………………………………………..
I passed through the transparent stone arches one after another
Just like having my body leaning against the city gate of Karakorum
He concludes by saying:
Inspired by the sun stones my lost charm began to shine again
The birds flying in the sky above Gulf of Mexico
They soared freely in the vast blue sky
The verse-flow maintains its continuity of emotions as his thoughts remain rooted in his country but simultaneously have a universal appeal. In the poem First Dream of Spring he expresses an infinite love for his homeland and sets the tone and tenor of the poem even as he articulates:
On bituun’s night
I decided not to miss you
But in the very first night of this year of rooster
Why should it be that I dreamt of you again
Combined with the nostalgia for his homeland his childhood memories also haunt.
He traverses backwards through corridors of time to pen poems like Sangiin Dalai, Huiten Shil and Childhood wherein his emotional honesty comes to the fore.
Huiten Shil, the paradise in my childhood
The most beautiful scenery is the whirling smoke from the yurt
And in Sangiin Dalai the poet laments:
Why do I suddenly feel sad
The Mongolian yurt in which I once lived has disappeared
A camel has lost his way home
Coming to tradition, the beautifully evocative poem New Year's Eve depicts how the poet delves into the imaginative domain and as he describes the traditional way of celebrating the spring festival in Mongolia, the connect between the conscious physical and unconscious thoughts of the mind is pleasantly harmonious:
This moment, I wonder
If times can flow backwards
If love will die
If the tramps feel sad
In Root the sensitive poet speaks of the fountainhead of poetry as he traverses along rivers, grasslands, rocks and the sky. There is a tenderness in his sad tone as he pens that in death, all these would metamorphose into a mere dream. He says:
I am alive and I can see
The root of rivers, the root of grass
…………………………………
The root of poetry
When I pass away.
I shall dream
The poetry of the root, the rocks of the root
……………………………………………
the rivers of the root
Hadaa’s consummate artistry and use of vivid images can be seen even in his expression of disillusionment. The extreme sentiment of hurt in betrayal comes across n a very touching manner in the poem called The Moon above Bogda Mount.
But tonight where have stars hidden
Heaven bears hollowness’ torment now
Snow mountain bears loneliness’ torment
Eyes bear betrayal’s torment now
The economy of words and timeless lines are very appealing in the poet’s short poems.They manifest an intellectual control on his writing. The strong sense of impact of the finality of death comes across in Spring Rain where the poet is prepared to confront his own mortality. The poet concludes the poem with the following lines:
But white hair can’t turn green
And staring up at the stars
The old well dies.
The poem Snow Scene on the other hand refers to death with the use of symbolism and is an entirely different perception. The poet says that he would pen verse until his dying day like Van Gogh, to sow seeds of sunflowers across the world. The portrayal of a happy universe is very elegant here The thought too is very creative.
In the poem The Sunny High Plateau the poet touches a cord in remembrance of his forefathers on the sun-worshipped slopes. His latent emotional pattern comes to the surface as he expresses gratefulness to them for helping him cultivate his inborn strength and making him what he is today. He says:
My forefathers began to hunt and fish here
From rivers to forests, from grasslands to Gobi
The endless fresh flowers and milk
The legacy as kind hearted as stars
Have made up my life and my future
The poet is also ridden with sadness as he gets immensely nostalgic in the poem Shandu Sad Song that takes him to the 13th century Yuan Dynasty Empire and the world famous grassland city Shandu built by Genghis Khan which is in ruins today. His usage of the metaphor purple chrysanthemums to express his sadness at its bereft-of civilization state and cultural decay shows his skills with poetic craft. Even though the style is a direct expression of dramatic history, it kind of provides a meditative insight into a profound loss of a once rich city:
I have arrived at the ruins of human civilization
I am a tree which survived for you
Standing for your brilliant sufferings
The poet’s consciousness of a world inflicted with plural wrongs like war etc manifests itself in his poem called Ode To Peace another evocative poem with vivid images.It is resonant with universal appeal and the concluding lines continue to linger in the reader’s mind:
Peace in the morning when you come back
Migratory birds can be seeing flying over the city
Hands can be seen waving and dancing in the sky.
A quest for an elsewhere land of serenity and quiet away from the vortex of an evil-laden diurnal existence is expressed in lucid language in Crossing the Sea. The sensitive poet’s despair and his loss of faith in man results in a moving emotional tone:
Leaving the sea
Many trees and many birds
Part from the unfairness of human
Part from my own wound
Crossing the sea
Someone will stroke my heart
Hadaa leads you to the fragrance of love and of nature with its accompanying vibrance through poems like A Dream, The White Night, Kiss and others and traverses across seasons of love, its different hues and images and its aesthetic construct. His exploration of one of the truest perceptions of the human mind is indeed commendable. His intimate understanding of this emotion surfaces beautifully even as his love poems have a delicacy of touch.
It is said that writing poetry is an exploration. It is a way of struggling with the excitements and tensions of words that associate with and are relevant to the poet’s subject. That is exactly what Hadaa does. Moreover the diversity of themes in Hadaa’s compositions never ceases to amaze the reader. It would be justified to say that Hadaa is a poet of introspection and his deep engagement with the world of words is admirable.
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