Two Short Stories

Writing regularly has, for me, inadvertently, contributed to something. Well, to be honest, it has contributed to lots of things. But the biggest thing is, I have again gone back to short story as a very potent form as a reader. In the last few days, I have read two great short stories–one by an young African-American writer, ZZ Packer and another by a Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The first one, called “Brownie,” is a look into the intersections of race, disability, class and the ways in which these things contribute to a violent childhood. A lot of the work I have produced as a writer in the last one year is about childhood and violence. The violence of growing up in gendered familial spaces, the violence of the school system, the violence of the playground. I am so not a believer in the idea of an “innocent” child. I mean, kids, as I remember from my own days, are violent. And mean. And cruel. They understand things way more than the adults think they can, they are soaking up the norms of this unequal world very very fast, and because they don’t have the adult polish, they express those violences without any inhibition. So, for me, as a writer, it’s hard to write about kids not because they are innocent, but because they process language differently, they articulate things differently. That’s why, I loved Packer’s story “Brownie.” It addresses all these things, without ever losing track of the childish ways of linguistic and conceptual cognition. 

The second one, The Headstrong Historian, is a revision of sorts of Chinua Achebe’s phenomenal novel Things Fall Apart. You encounter the same characters, same set of colonial texts, but the treatment is very very different in certain ways. For one thing, women are more present in this story. Indeed, I will say, the story is primarily about exploring the ways in which colonialism changed an Igbo women’s psychic, social and cultural world. The references to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its impact on West Africa is much more pronounced. As a reader, I almost wish that Adichie develops this into a full-scale novel. Anyways, you can find it here:

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2008/06/23/080623fi_fiction_adichie?printable=true

And Packer’s story is included in her collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere.

Sea of Poppies

Just finished reading Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies. It was released this summer when I was still in Kolkata, and inspite of being in the vicinity couple of times he did the readings, I chose to stay away from them. Partly because until and unless they are stories meant to be performed orally, listening to novels and academic papers being read out loud bore me to death. The latter a lot of the times I am forced to listen to, being a small time academic and all, but the former, I mostly try to avoid at all costs. I am primarily a reader, and I prefer to read texts in the solitude of the cafes(not College Street Coffee House, thank you)or my own messy room. 

Now I guess I should provide a brief review of the book.

1. It’s the first symbolic novel celebrating the black-South Asian solidarity(shall I use the more academic “problematize”) to come out of the sub-continent, for which I am personally thankful to Ghosh. I mean, it would enable me to include that chapter on the trans-national dimensions, after-effects of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (read South Asian and trans-atlantic slave trade) etc. etc.– the much-needed segment of my diss, which I was looking frantically for in the last few months. In other words, the novel kind of legitimizes my rights to dabble authentically with the histories of the trans-atlantic slave trade as a South Asian.

2. In order to really understand the novel, and what he is trying to do in there, one needs to be damn erudite. Not only you should know a lot about the colonial history of Bengal and India, but you should also be familiar with three literary genres–the Bengali social realist novel of the late nineteenth and early to mid twentieth century, the African Diasporic ne0-slave narratives and the nineteenth slave narratives. Ghosh successfully engages with them,and surpasses them (how,for that you will have to read my yet-unwritten dissertation.)

3. It is obvious that Ghosh is familiar with a lot of the scholarly and literary writings which have in the recent past dealt with the relationship between the seas and the colonial modernities. Beginning from Derek Walcott’s famous “The Sea is History.”  Yet, unlike say, Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts, Sea of Poppies is not a history of rebellion in that sense. It’s more of a narrative of negotiations–negotiations with race, negotiations with modernity, negotiations with a colonial feudalism, even negotiations with religion and gender. But in a weird kind of way, the negotiations themselves become interesting forms of rebellions. 

4. Although the novel is built upon very interesting female characters, most notably Deeti and Paulette, there is something in the conclusion that is disturbing me in terms of its gender politics. I cannot talk about it very coherently yet, but there is a very weird connection between gender and space. The final flight is that of all the male marginalized– Neel, Ah Fatt, Jadu, Kalua. “Confederace of Maleness”, to use Ghosh’s own words. Zachary, the light skinned African-American man is a by-stander, for obvious reasons: colonialism and a global system thriving on colonialism makes the American understanding of race and racial inequality muddy and messy. But the women watch them too, from the hold of the ship. Captivated in space. Held in their place. And I am reminded of Stephanie Camp’s gorgeous work on enslaved women’s resistances in Southern US–the plantation economies interpellated women differently than they did men. So did the post-slave trade ship. Beyond that, I still need to think more.

 

Whatever it is, it’s a damn good novel. And it would take me days to unpack it fully. If you haven’t already, go get your own copy.

Happy New Year Post

So it’s 2009. Happy New Year to all the five readers of this blog. I am not too much into New Year resolutions. A year is too long. I try to take one day at a time. But generally speaking, I hope that I can keep growing as a writer, reader and scholar this year too. Improve my French. Write more regularly. Revise more regularly. Go thicker into the dissertation. 

One thing I am observing about myself, as I am trying to finish this non-fiction piece in Bengali, I am not too much of a memoirist. I am primarily a fiction writer. At this point in human history, one can well argue that the difference between “fiction” and “non-fiction” is really confusing, un-real and not at all productive. I would be one of those folks. But honestly, one thing I have learnt about myself, I am a compulsive liar. So it’s better that I write my fibs up on the page. That will keep me out of harm’s way big time. 

In terms of my academic life, I need to pull out the first versions of my exam lists by this week, and email them to my exam committee. I have sat on them for a long long time, and sitting on it further is not going to help anyone. Least of all, me. So, tomorrow, I am working on my lists. And finalizing the residues of Fall 2008.

Failed Love in the Time of SEZs

He said to her, after sixteen months of holding hands, promises to wake up every day next to each other and you-are-the-love-of-my-life s, “we are not compatible as lovers, but we can be highly compatible friends.” The decision wasn’t new to her, it wasn’t surprising. Hasn’t he, in the last one month or so, made it evident? He has lost his love, little by little. He has let his love go, consciously little by little. She hadn’t exactly stood apart. She has tried to put her arms around him, she has ripped apart her voice, she has demanded answers, she has shed many many tears. You see, she is not the bharatiya nari type. Years ago, he had taken her arms inside his, and had whispered, “whatever you ever grow up into, don’t ever be a bharatiya nari, ok, little one?” He was twenty-nine. She was fourteen. They were not lovers yet. She, I guess, had taken the advice a little too seriously and now that she tears him apart regularly, sees the holes in his quilt a little too much, he prefers to settle for a much demure conglomeration of quick wit, flash fiction and Brahmanical deathly white puritanism. Who, after knowing him only for a month, cleaned his room up, thoroughly, leaving intact the semen-stain that she had caused the weekend before. She knows it all. She knows it all too well. He hasn’t hidden it from her after all. But, she does not know the art of cleaning rooms. She does not know the art of making herself feel needed that way. She knows to put her arms around, she knows to point out the holes and she thought that’s going to be something. After all, you can want to fix the holes only after you have seen them. She wanted to fix them together.

“I want you to be my best friend till death,” he had told her exactly ten months ago. A sucker of obscure sentimental poetry, she had wiped her tears on reading those words. Now, as he puts forward the whole friend, but not lover thesis in front of her, she asks, “Are those two things mutually exclusive?” “Your question is valid, ” he responds. Knowing him a little bit, she knows he would never have an answer. Old revolutionaries, even when they go po-mo , rare all anti-vanguardism, rarely choose to challenge their own comfort zones. Or answer others’ questions. Especially female lovers fifteen years younger. Heck, little girl, I thought, you would be my acolyte. Like you always were. Instead, you have this big mouth. Shut up and learn to be skin-deep. Marriage was one of the greatest institutions of vanguardism, so was/is love. CPs came much later.  She tells herself, and bites her tongue. The tongue bleeds. She is not very good in this one. Sometimes, you need to learn use rhetoric even in front of lover, friends and comrades. She is learning, but sometimes forgets. So she asks him instead, “what is going to be the organic basis of our friendship?” She wants him to see himself. She wants him to find the holes now, himself. He vanishes. Silence is its own language. She doesn’t know if we he ever come back again. And if he does, she will read out to him a passage,

“They slept in the same room. They endured the same cravings–marzipan, jasmine-petals, pine-kernels, mud–at the same times; their metabolic rates altered in parallel. They began to weigh the same, to feel exhausted at the same moment, and to awake together, each morning, as if somebody had rung a bell. They felt identical pains” (Shame, Salman Rushdie)

A writer he likes. A book, she doesn’t know whether he has read or not. She will read it out, suppressing her twang, and ask, softly,

“A friendship, my love, is all about that. Will you be ever able to endure the labor pain for me? With me? Otherwise, fuck off and never talk about being a friend!”

Saturday Afternoon Rant

“Let’s go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table;”

These were the lines through which I was first introduced to T.S. Eliot. First day in Presidency, first day in college, these lines written in red upon white paper outside the college cafeteria. Our Pramod-da’s canteen. Where he sold crow-meat cutlets and used to pass them off as chicken. At least, that’s what the college legend said. So, like Camus, Kafka, Jibanananda, Moloy Roy Choudhuri’s rantish broken-form poetry, I was introducd to Eliot through his posthumous re-incarnations in many forms. Most notably, the Bengali male  college kids’ attempt to sound lover-like. Which, by default, sometimes also meant poet-like. I liked those lines, and in those pre-Google days, research was slightly harder. But I figured out where they come from. Got hold of a copy of the book and read it. I still do. Often. Whenever I feel lonely or need solace. I mean, the greatest thing about Eliot is that, he gets it right, ain’t it? I mean, almost! And what kind of cries out to me in his poems is that, I know I know I get it all all all. This sucks, but I am not going to be a Commie. No no no, it ain’t me, babe.

Of course, being a Commie meant a different thing altogether in his times than it does now. Being from a state in India, where the official Commies are leading a little economic genocide along with all the neo-libs, you have to re-think the term, but you know, it was a little bit different in the Anglophone world in those days.

Anyway, so today, I open my anthology, and the first lines on which my eyes fall are these:

“Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.”

Uncle Ted, why will they? I mean, throwing angry words at you I can understand. Sarcasm towards you, makes sense too. But singing? That’s a little too much! Come on! Maybe, you should bring together your palms, let their silence freeze in their and carry them back home as music.

Sometimes, music resides in silence. In angry words. In sarcasm.

And embracing them makes us better poets, writers, artists. Or just better human beings.

“got un-noticed”

United States of America has just elected its first black president…a phone call from a much younger friend, “hey, Obama has won…let’s celebrate”, peels of laughter flood the phone.

“oh really?” I cannot sound that enthusiastic. Born and brought up in a country which had a woman  Prime Minister, a woman President, a dalit President, I cannot be too optimistic. True, this country is too damn racist and hugely unprepared, till now (I emphasize, till now) of having anyone other than a white man in power, but fundamental change is something different. But, the thing is, Obama’s victory is symbolic:

1. For one thing, he somehow represents this success of American dream, being born of immigrant father and a welfare mother. Somehow, he got to represent for the empire its success story during a time when things are looking extremely bleak otherwise.

2. Obama is the ideal family man (note the way the family debate has gone through a shift with the whole Sarah Palin-Obama juxtaposition).

3. Most of the time I was amused with the middle-class white America’s support of Obama. I mean, the whole presidential campaign started with this big confusion, right? Who do we, as good liberals, go for? Or rather, what should we go for? Race or gender? A black man or a white woman? Too bad there was no woman of color in the equation. That would have made things so fucking more amusing, without changing anything fundamentally. But this eruption of collective white guilt in the succeeding months was amusing and plain hilarious.

So yeah, basically Obama is a hawk like all others and nothing is going to change….so, a cut to other stories…a morning coffee with two Pakistani friends…C is describing his work…a novel written in Sindhi about a peasant rebellion along the banks of Indus….a novel that didn’t generate any interest from anyone other than the people in the region, who almost made it into their folklore…and then, there was a novel on the same topic by an Englishman, a British administrator. C says, with his characteristic smile, “So you see, this Sindhi novel gets totally un-noticed.” M doesn’t correct him, “haan bhai haan…you are right, it got un-noticed.” I sat there, between them absorbing the information, taking mental notes. “GOT UNNOTICED”—grammarians would shout wrong English, but what a wonderful way to speak about the violence of being left out! And no, the sense this one expresses, the active tactility, that can never be communicated through the grammatically correct “remained un-noticed.” Never! Dear C, this is sure going to end up in some poem or story! And no, no matter how much my American colleagues point out its grammatical wrongness, it’s going to stay right there!

Anyway, to come back to Obama, I am just scared that with all this mainstream celebration of multi-culti US now, a lot will get un-noticed!

“Little Lady”

I had enrolled myself for this Poetry Workshop, because I had hoped I will be able to get some feedback for at least one of my poems. But I stopped going after the first class, for two reasons:

1. The class is too big. That means, no workshopping. Only some basic lectures on what constitutes poetry.

2. The Very Famous White Male Poet who teaches the class and thinks “universality” is one of the essential qualities of poetry, called me the “little lady” on the first day. While I know the experience can be extremely interesting and can eventually give birth to a write-up, or many, depending upon the circumstances, I don’t have time for this kind of shit at this point. Instead, I will devote those two hours to my own reading and writing.

During the Q&A session of her keynote address, where she read out segments of her memoir, Kathleen Cleaver made a comment–”I don’t go around knocking my head around sexist men. There are just too many of them.” I laughed. We laughed. That’s exactly the kind of attitude I adopted in this case vis-a-vis this guy. I chose my own solitary processes of reading and writing to  his class, but then is it possible to make that claim every time we come across one of those “sexist men,”or, er, women? I guess not.  By the way, the poet guy also said something like how women can be better poets then men, since they are innately “so sensitive.” Some of you might nod your head and say, yes, of course, and see, you are over-reacting, he is not really like that blah blah blah. But the t hing is, for me, that is eqully problematic too. I am a little tired of most kinds of essential claims, based on either culture or biology. Besides, the question of the relationship between women and writing, or for that matter, any marginalized group, is a lot more complicated, and it’s high time that the  creative writing classes take those issues up. No, not by giving up the craft, but by opening up the discussion to how “craft” itself is rooted in ideology and identity. And now that you have enough grand claims in here to digest, the “little lady” will go back to her own scribblings and readings, while  sipping her re-cycled jasmine tea.

Random Reflections

Since I am working on a bunch of dissertation-related stuff, with strict deadlines, blogging and all other forms of writing projects had to take a back seat. So here are some random stuff about my life:

1. If you are like me, you probably have checked out other female asses quite often and have wondered geez, how come my butt never looks like that. And the answer is, it has nothing to do with your butt, and probably, like me, you buy your jeans from Target and not stores like Anthropologie.

2. You know you are old when the old style Orientalists do not piss you off or annoy you anymore. Instead, you find them extra-ordinarily funny and you are even ready to go out for a drink with a bunch of them just so that you can laugh yourself to sleep that night.

3. If you have been a grduate student for as long as I have been, probably you know this already. But just in case! One of the greatest ways in which you can stretch your time in a cafe is by going for a tea. Instead of a coffee or all of those fancy sounding drinks. Don’t throw the tea-bag away. Save it, then ask for a refill of hot water. Of course, if your cafe asks for money for that too, you need to ditch them immediately.Dip the tea-bag in there for the second time and guess what, you have just earned a cup of re-cycled tea and another four hours to park your ass and pontificate.

Random Thoughts

Taking a break from studying French…and listening to Harry Belafonte. It’s strange how familiar music often cheers us up, calms us down…and Belafonte, for lots of reasons, does that for me. And no, not even knowing that he is not the most “authentic” calypso-singer can take that away from me. But, what does bother me these days, is the casual sexism of most of the songs…like this one called Brown-Skinned Girl

Ev’rything to keep me from sleepin’
A lot of sailor boys they were leavin’
And everybody there were jumpin’
To hear the sailor boys in our chorus singin’

Brown skin girl stay home and mind baby
Brown skin girl stay home and mind baby
I’m goin away, in a sailing boat
And if I don’t come back
Stay home and mind baby

Now de Americans made an invasion
We thought it was a help to the island
Until they left from here on vacation
They left de native boy home to mind their children

Brown skin girl stay home and mind baby
Brown skin girl stay home and mind baby
I’m goin away, in a sailing boat
And if I don’t come back
Stay home and mind baby

Now I tell you de story ’bout Millie
Well she made a nice blue-eyed baby
And dey say she fancy the mother
But the blue-eyed baby ain’t know she father

Brown skin girl stay home and mind baby
Brown skin girl stay home and mind baby
I’m goin away, in a sailing boat
And if I don’t come back
Stay home and mind baby

Now de Americans all have their pleasure
While the music played to their leisure
Everybody there they were jumpin’
To hear the sailor boys in our chorus singin’

Brown skin girl stay home and mind baby
Brown skin girl stay home and mind baby
I’m goin’ away, in a sailing boat
And if I don’t come back
Stay home and mind baby

If you really look carefully into the lyrics, there’s a lot in here–class, poverty,  tourist economy, US imperialism and the ways in which that feeds off a tourist economy etc. etc. etc.–things that define modern Caribbean life in a way. Or, one can even say, Black Atlantic life. There is irony within the lyrics, biting sarcasm, and I really want to sing along. I do! To be honest, I do catch myself singing often times, “Brown skin girl…” in the bathroom and somehow can never bring myself to say the succeeding words. So I hum the tune without the words. And wonder, how come anti-imperialism gets articulated through a kind of castration complex, which then, finds its articulation in aggressive masculinity. Which is almost always violent towards women and their autonomous, independent lives and entities…and I realize, I am doomed for life…there will never be any pure aesthetics for me…ever!

But is there really such a thing? For anyone?

Caffeine Art

She changed her shirt right there in front of me. Believe it or not. I stood there, papery dead white men in between the index finger and thumb of my right hand, watching her get rid of the “Let’s Make Tragedy Happen” to the ubiquitous red chef hat on black. Ordinarily, I hate this cafe and this is one of the reasons Not only have they gotten rid of the writings on the bathroom wall, the window sills and the mezzanine wall, they make their barishtas wear uniforms. And I hate that. To put it simply, I want my Uproot Shrubs on the bathroom wall back. I want my Fuck Yous on the window-sills back. I want my spray-painted mask-faces back. Honestly. A cafe is not a cafe until and unless you learn to code apart the scribblings on the walls. Literally and metaphorically. But then, there is her. The girl who wants to make tragedies happen. The girl whose over-sized olive green cotton obliterates all the femininity of her ass. I mean, I like women with over-sized clothes and short hair. Honestly. But the thing is, her close-cropped hair makes me want to dream. And you know, when you are dreaming about short hairs hugging the skull, you cannot fall back upon Jibanananda, Eliot or even Neruda. You need to invent your own metaphors, imageries and similes. And yes, that’s I like over-sized clothes and short-hair. They force me to think of new words.

My tragedy-goddess does not smile. I look into her perked up face and realize how my own looks like every morning at eight, as I walk out of my door to give my performative best to twenty-five white, black and brown Texas sahibs, a.k.a., my students. So, if you are lucky to be served by her, chances are you’d never or at least, rarely encounter a service-sector-Imperial-Sugar brand Can I Help You, Ma’am. Instead, she will throw at you a smile-less How are ya, revealing her reluctance to be there and serve you from head to foot. The gruffness, roughness and the bitterness of her voice would hang in the air for quite some time, making you forget what you really desired that morning–a cappuccino, vanilla latte, hot chocolate or just plain English Breakfast Tea. I, for one, always choose something that would need her to move the milk-pitcher over my cup. I watch her fingers sculpt out a twig, a rose petal or a leaf with milk foam, caffeine and dreams. We exchange stiffled smiles without looking at each other.

I would love to wax eloquent during one of those moments and rant about public art or how her propensity to create beauty amidst a back-breaking schedule of drab dead-end jobs is really all about modes of everyday forms of resistance. But she refuses to look at me as she pushes the coffee-cup away. Scoot, scholar-girl. Don’t you dare utter a word. I move away with the twig or the leaf or the rose petal warm  in my palm, knowing my lips would soon sip them away.

We are a world apart. My short-haired tragedy-girl creates twigs and petals to be sipped away. I create words to etch myself in.

But she pulls me out of the safety of familiar metaphors. And I cannot but feel helped.

At the end of the day, we are both trying to survive. She, through her milky-caffeine twigs. And I through my words.