Love Letter to the Body Project "And with cellulite on your mind, you can hardly trigger a revolution. "
To my Body,
I would have addressed you as ‘Dear’ but perhaps we both know how complicated that would be.
***
I always believed that you were wrong with me, I needed a different body – more feminine, ‘womanly’, ‘approved body’ but all you looked like was a hung up YouTube video frame.
***
My breasts have this immense capability to withstand pain. When I feel like my emotional intelligence can’t endure this pain, I beat my breasts. Like a cloth-washing bat.
You say, that my size is XS for every brand and how hypocritical of me, a feminist, to base my standards on Vogue. That train of thought is just the corner of my intellectual brain where gender studies is stored. My hatred is from the more primal, the more desperate need to be loved.
***
I have accepted these bits of me because Madonna says ‘poor is the man (woman), whose pleasure depends on the permission of another’ and I see her point now. I don’t need any stamps of my gender conformity.
Over the years I’ve heard about 10 million ways of losing weight. From teachers, colleagues, friends, parents to uncles and aunties I hadn’t met in a decade, to auto wallahs who drop me to college. Some of them would say ‘Madam daud lagaya karo warna shaadi nahi hogi’. (Madam, you need to run a lot or you can’t get married)
***
Till I remove all this invasive hair, I could never be loved or so I believed at 15 – with thick glasses, hips the size of a South American country, a belly pouch, thick thighs, a gentle moustache.
After all, I couldn’t see anything without glasses. My lover could. And since then, I’ve had many.
They’ve cupped parts of you in their hands and sipped, sucked, stroked, entered. They’ve written poems to your smell, and popped up as g-chat window fantasies of seeing you undressed. I never believe a word. When I have my own fantasies, I superimpose on you a 15 year old Thai porn star with soap on her body.
***
Yesterday, I masturbated you for the first time in your 34 years on earth. I felt awfully guilty.
When Bhamati and I received the first letters for the Love Letter to the Body Campaign, many of them were from our closest friends. We had known them for years, and yet suddenly, we felt like we violently entered a deep, secret wounded place we had never seen or imagined before. This experience is not uniquely ours. Many women, we quickly realised, have extremely complex and difficult relationships with their bodies. And many of us believe deep inside that it is objectively true that we are objectively flawed.
We are women who seemingly asked all the right questions at the right ages. At 18, I stood on the streets of Bangalore in hot pants with a group of other women determined to ‘reverse the male gaze’. I pretended to have finished The Second Sex. We are gender trainers. We’ve wondered how our mothers managed. (They never wax.) And what it’s like for straight men.
And yet, when it comes to our bodies, vaginas, breasts, we have a disconcerting sense.
Bhamati still doesn’t like being photographed. She doesn’t like to ‘be herself’ and is not comfortable with posing. She has internalised the idea that one has to ‘pose’ for a photograph for it to turn right.
Is it shame? Self-hatred, love-hatred, guilt, denial, longing? Some of all this, I think.
For me, it has been ten years of peeling open the layers of inherited shame and the involuntary adoption of photo-shopped standards. A mild embracing of the audacity of self-esteem that has become increasingly daring but remains fragile, subject to doubt and insecurities that keep creeping in from some dark and unknown abyss of my psyche.
As the letters kept piling up, we noticed that the relationship our friends have with their bodies has little to do with their looks, their fierce independence, liberal politics, education, whether they are virgins or not, how many lovers they have had. The cause of our troubles is deeper.
So-called ‘Body Image Issues’ are also not restricted only to elite women who read fashion magazines in beauty salons. ‘Body Image Issues’ are all pervasive across class, caste, culture, age, gender identity and constitute various shades of self-hatred that at its worst can result in anorexia, bulimia or even suicide. At its most benign and familiar, it’s the nagging low drone of internal voices telling you every day, how to be. Be fair. Be tan. Be hairless. Be skinny. Be voluptuous. Be busty. Be less busty. Be smooth skinned. Be young. Be sexy. Keep your virginity. Lose your virginity. Be pure. Be Perfect.
While women in India and around the world are certainly faced with more severe and overt violence like sexual harassment and rape, the impact of body insecurity is deeper than just being a little self-conscious about the way one looks.
Often, it leads us to become disembodied. It creates a disconnection from the body. Shame about our body causes us to walk, think, and be apologetic. Fear about weight gives us a distorted relationship with the food we eat. It takes up psychological space. It inhibits our sexuality. And with cellulite on your mind, you can hardly trigger a revolution. Eve Ensler, says ‘there’s this tyranny that’s not accidental or incidental’, to make women aspire to look like someone they are not to take our time and attention from important political issues.
The feminine form, in women and in men has been feared, loathed and obsessed about since the beginning of memory, controlled through countless methods and traditions such as cutting the clitoris, covering up or uncovering the body for religion, caste or culture, through rape as a weapon of war or to enforce social dominance. While these are very overt examples of the ways in which the female body is dominated, it could be argued that this constant distortion of our natural relationship with our bodies by popular culture images is a very advanced and contemporary weapon in the age old war on the female body. A weapon that is - precisely because of its subtlelty – most effective and destructive.
Virginia Woolf believed that no woman had succeeded in writing the truth of the experience of her own body – and that women and language had to change considerably before that could happen. That may not be true anymore for any gender even as our internal voice renders us objectively flawed. You, reading this, may be someone who has a great relationship with your body. Or not. Imagine, anyway, for a moment that you don’t judge yourself because of the way your body naturally is. Discard your intellect momentarily. Discard political correctness. Imagine embracing yourself -‘flaws’ and all. Our love letter is an initiation to healing and a reclaiming of our strength. To me, writing about my body was un-photoshopping parts I simply denied, it was a loving verbal photographing of her curves, bruises and beauty. It was an initiation to healing and acceptance.
Let us write a letter and set ourselves free on paper. A love letter to make peace with our body and embrace our many ways of being beautiful.
The letters are exhibited as Love Letter to the Body installations. We are also seeking to compile diverse voices on our relationship to our bodies into a book.
About the Campaign :
The Love Letter to the Body campaign is an independent initiative by Bhamati Sivapalan and Yamini Deenadayalan. Bhamati and Yamini have been part of Blank Noise for several years and lead experiential gender workshops in schools, colleges and organizations. To get in touch or volunteer, please email at [email protected], [email protected]
*There are no rules. Write in whatever language that you want. Express yourself freely. Be personal, irreverent, angsty, angry, sad, happy, explicit, accepting - whatever you are feeling at the moment and send your letters to [email protected] or [email protected]. Although this project has been conceived from our personal experiences as urban Indian women, The Letter to the Body Project welcomes voices from all genders, nationalities and languages. Your letters will be displayed in Love Letter to the Body Installations, and may be published.
PS: You can leave your letters anonymous or choose to write your name. Once you have submitted it to us, we reserve the right to use them in our exhibitions, blog or publications.
"I tried to subvert the way sex is used in Indian writing"
The Last Song Of Savio De Souza Binoo K John HarperCollins 280 pp; Rs 399
Journalist Binoo K John, 53, has set his debut novel The Last Song of Savio de Souza in the fictional Kerala town of Puram where ladies carry ‘Louis Vettam’ handbags and nuns sneakily smoke cigarettes. A family saga unfolds even as Christianity, Islam and science compete for the best miracles. Singer Savio de Souza’s life feels like a preparation for his last song on the fated tsunami morning of 26 December 2004. John spoke to Yamini Deenadayalan about our obsession with miracles and why there’s no sex in Indian writing.
Was it hard to switch from non-fiction to fiction?
You need confidence to confront a market as lethargic and cynical as the Indian book – reading one. English-speaking Indians only talk about books, they don’t buy them. Indian novels sell 2,000 copies on average but the novelists use this to get into Page 3 and a trip to Bhutan for a lit fest. I also hope to get into Page 3!
The book has a cauldron of faiths competing with each other — why are you so fascinated with miracles?
My fascination with the faith business emanates from Kerala. I wanted to attempt to map faith and its link to humans. What draws us to miracles so mightily? Kerala may be the most literate state but evangelists and godmen survive and grow there. Amma is as big as Sathya Sai Baba. Christian, Muslim and Hindu fundamentalism thrive; Marxism, Maoism, everything mingles there. The novel is a cry for the return of rational thinking. Hence the juxtaposition with the rocket centre [in the novel] — India’s space dream started there. If the novel works, it will be because this magical, mad, mantra and Mao-spewing place will amaze readers.
You paint a sordid, lecherous picture of the Indian male. Why does all the sex revolve around violation and power?
I tried to subvert the way sex is used in Indian writing in English (if at all there is any sex!) Most of the English novel writing is done by moral brahminical matrons who have a vice-like grip on the publishing industry and disallow any sex. I was daring them. Fiction has origins in truth and most incidents in the novel, however surreal, are based on real incidents. Including the monkey elixir [a potion that enhances virility]. I wanted to revive the family saga.
Look at Manju Kapur, Ira Pande and all. They are my friends but so many novels now have mother- daughter type of titles. Indian writing is confined to the South Delhi living room and one journey to California. You rarely find a Muslim character. Regional writers are more rooted to the reality of India. The real India is forgotten amidst moral family fables. Sex is mushy or absent.
Elizabeth Kostova, bestselling author of The Historian and now, The Swan Thieves in an email interview talks to First City about the “parallels (in)the way past and present can echo each other in real life". Kostova explores why the loved ones of geniuses make the choices they do and how most artists, especially women never resolve the conflict between responsibility and art.
The crossing of boundaries, of youth and old age, of professional and personal, of real life as we know it and of being drawn to impossible geniuses. The ones who we know will never settle into the sober atmosphere of domesticity and then the obsession of those who want to create art; this is the core of Elizabeth Kostova’s second novel The Swan Thieves.
Kostova who has a degree in creative writing from the University of Michigan says “As a child and teenager I loved to paint and draw, but that was a very long time ago; for The Swan Thieves I was careful to interview and observe several painters at their work. Their knowledge and perspectives were incredibly helpful to me.” Robert Oliver is the brilliant artist who attacks a painting Leda by French artist Gilbert Thomas at the National Gallery. Dr. Marlow, also an amateur painter is on his case. Robert himself has stopped talking except to tell Marlow that (he) did it for her..the woman (he) loved. Dr. Marlow’s need to understand his patient leads him bang into the intimate space of Robert’s life-his women, his contemporaries in the art world and the men who hold the secrets of History and also across continents , picking up fragments from the past to piece together coherently. The most fascinating of Roberts’s works is a series of paintings featuring an intense dark haired woman. Mystery surrounds the exchange of letters between French Impressionists Beatrice De Clerval and her uncle, artist Olivier Vignot both fictional characters created by Kostova. Robert possesses these letters which are given to us as snippets of their life in nineteenth century France and the stories they tell emerge, stark and disturbing, in Robert’s paintings.
Kostova’s debut novel, The Historian was a spooky historical thriller where a young girl gets drawn into the story of Vlad the Impaler, Wallachia’s dreaded ruler who later became associated with the legend of Dracula. Kostova’s characters in this novel dig out evidence of the real life inspiration of the Dracula myth traveling across Europe. In Swan Thieves, you have these nineteenth century artists and the substance of their life finds resonance in the life of Robert and those associated with him in America of the eighties. “Yes, those situations are all deliberately constructed parallels for the structure of the novel, but I also wanted to show in those parallels the way past and present can echo each other in real life, or the way history holds information we can use somehow in the present.”
Does she view her books as Historical fiction then? “I think my novels are literary fiction that deals with history, but I’m much more interested in writing about the way we modern people interact with the past than in producing classic standard historical fiction. For me, the voice, style, and structure of a book are as important as its historical subjects, although I also work very hard to make my presentation of history as factually accurate as possible.” The novel takes us through America, to Normandy in France and to Paris and shifts seamlessly between the nineteenth and twentieth century as though everything really belonged together and the core of the past cannot be separated from that of the present as one can’t separate the sound from the echo. “I’ve always loved the study of history, myself—I see it as simply the greatest human story we tell and retell—and so I find it natural to write about characters who have the same obsession! For The Swan Thieves, I had the various pleasures of reading about French art history, looking at great Impressionist paintings in person in every museum I could reach, and of visiting some of the French locations in which my characters De Clerval and Vignot find themselves. It was a wonderful experience.”
In this novel, we learn the story of Robert through first person narratives from Kate - his former wife, lover Mary and Dr. Marlow. Many voices make a story but at times one wishes, one could really get into the mind of Robert’s tormented genius which somehow can be only through him but Kostova has her reasons. “I love all those nineteenth-century novels in which voices from various perspectives of a story reach the reader through letters, journals, oral histories, even police reports. To me, history is a collection of voices—we don’t have much more to go on for the truth than those voices, in the end—that often tell different versions of one event. I also love the art of storytelling, and for storytelling in the classic sense you need a storyteller (or two, or five).”
All the female characters, as far as the practice of art is concerned are somehow overshadowed by their need to conform to social norms or simply to domestic responsibility. Robert on the other hand is let loose; he retreats into his own sphere of obsession and art. Nineteenth century Beatrice De Clerval for instance is told by her husband the he wouldn’t want her to know too much about life-nature is a fine subject but life is grimmer than she can understand. Is the conflict ever really resolved? “I’m not sure anyone with any sense of responsibility ever resolves that conflict! It’s an especially difficult one for many female artists, and I wrestle with it daily myself. I do think each of those spheres of life can enrich the others and that no artist really lives and works in a personal or societal void. What would be the point?”
To write a dense paced historical thriller needs discipline and much more than mulling over yellowed pages in old libraries. “I simply try to write as much as I can in whatever part of each day I can carve out for that. I’m wary of developing habits and rituals, since life always interrupts them! Writing takes discipline but it also takes a kind of habit of going at it again and again. A dose of joy in the work helps, too. I wrote The Historian over 10 very busy years, working much more than full time at other jobs and domestic; I often wrote in 20 minute bursts because I had so little time. It was an escape from daily life, among other things.”
Talking about her influences, Kostova says she is really influenced by nineteenth century and early twentieth century Literature. “I’ve been deeply influenced by some of the important writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, especially Henry James, Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, and E. M. Forster. For The Historian, I learned a great deal from early mystery writer Wilkie Collins and from the ghost stories of Henry James—and of course from Bram Stoker’s Dracula.”The books and authors she admires are “too numerous to put down here in any adequate way!” She continues to write that she likes the work of her American contemporaries. “I admire such British writers as A. S. Byatt and John Banville, I read widely in the “classics,” and I try to become acquainted with the rest of the world by reading plenty of translations. At the moment, I’m reading all the translated work of poet Czeslaw Milosz, as well as a fantastic novel, Solo, by Rana Dasgupta.”
"Why is Husain India’s Picasso and somebody else India’s Rembrandt?"
Photo: Shailendra Pande
Manjunath Kamath, 40, created a series of animated water colour images from day to day life titled, well, Common Things. The artist who trained in Mysore before moving to Delhi over a decade ago, speaks to Yamini Deenadayalan about his quirky titles, the odd rabbits in art parties and why we should get rid of our postcolonial hangover.
Why animated water colours?
I work with all kinds of media. Common Things is just an extension of my previous work. I wanted to make water colours move. Each frame out of three hundred is hand painted water colours. The subject of each is very simple—objects from day to day life. In art, I don’t feel the need to use ‘issues’. They all tell a story. I use images like that of an iron box. Whoever looks at it can connect to it easily. Art is not something so big. It’s in the everyday.
Common Things, Marriage in May—your titles are often quirky and humorous. Is this how your friends describe you?
If you ask my friends they would say that when I am around, there is always laughter. I guess that’s where it comes from. All my titles are a comment on society. I often start with my titles. For example, you must have seen the rabbit in the party image. When I go to art openings, I always found that one person who stands in a corner. He doesn’t behave in his element. It’s almost like he feels like a rabbit. I derive these images from my observation of people. One of my past works was titled Someone who quoted more than 100 books in his talk. You talk to a friend and they refer to so many books. I want to ask them what they have got from their own experience. To me, what comes from my own experience is what is important.
Are you making a comment on Delhi’s art circle?
For me art is a kind of a comment. That is my expression. I am not making any statements. I am merely holding up a mirror to the viewer. I enjoy the way children respond to art. My first critic is my daughter. If I show children an absurdist image, they enjoy it for what it is. Grown ups want logic.
"She (Sarah Palin) doesn’t deny her sexiness or her femininity either."
Iconic feminist and existentialist philosopher Simone De Beauvoir's The Second Sex has been on the reading list or, at least, occupying aspirational space on many a humanities student’s bookshelf. Turns out that the version we know—the one that was translated in 1953 into English by Howard M Parshley, a male zoologist in his fifties, didn’t have 15% of the text. The American publisher Knopf told Parshley that the original was too “verbose”. After several decades in 2006, Knopf once again commissioned Sheila Malovany Chevallier and Constance Borde, American professors who have lived in France for 40 years, to put the ‘philosopher’ back into Beauvoir’s iconic contribution to feminist thought. The new translation of The Second Sex, published in 2009, has thoughts about feminist history and additions in the chapter “The Married Woman” that were left out of the first translated edition. In conversation with Yamini Deenadayalan and Bhamati Sivapalan in Delhi, the duo spoke about the attempts to gender sensitise language, why Sarah Palin is allowed to call herself a feminist and why Beauvoir is ever so relevant in 2012.
Photo : Bhamati Sivapalan
What did The Second Sex mean to you as someone growing up in the 60s?
We came to France in 1964 and were thrust into the political mode by the fact that Kennedy was killed, the civil rights movement and all the violence in the USA. We were proto feminist, so to speak. Growing up, we were all very impressed and read parts of the book. At this time, people didn’t always read the whole book. It was and is important to us personally, for feminism and for women’s studies. We had come to realise in the 1960's that we were living what she had written about. We also learnt how much women had advanced by then. On our tours to many countries, we met women who had read her under difficult circumstances. They didn’t understand why their lives were so difficult. They read her and realised they could study, work, and not necessarily get married. Women across class, nationality and race told us Simone De Beauvoir had changed their entire lives. [When Beauvoir was published in France she was read not just by scholars but also ordinary women such as working class women and housewives.
The first translation in English was by Howard Parshley— a zoologist in his 50s. How much of its language was gendered, and what portions were edited?
Ironically, it was the history chapter where the book was edited most. Beauvoir was looking at feminist ways to approach history. It is true that women were left out of history books. We’ve now discovered incredible women writers who wrote during the slavery era in the US, for example. It was so interesting to go back to the original texts De Beauvoir cited from. Historically, women played roles as generals of armies. They did so many amazing things in society. I don’t think that the publishers oversaw every single cut. However, the hypothesis looks to be that it was not only Parshley’s decision to cut out these parts but also the editors. Also, it was the intellectual parts that were cut out. There was too much philosophy and maybe the American public couldn’t deal with the complexities. There was a toning down and simplification.
Forty-nine-year-old Anjum Zamarud Habib, founding member of the Hurriyat Conference, was falsely implicated under POTA. Habib’s memoir Prisoner No 100 is a rare and shocking account of a tortured five years in Tihar jail and a critique of the judicial system. She talks to Yamini Deenadayalan on a visit to Delhi (a place she “never feels free in and fears”). Edited excerpts.
You talk about how jail mirrors the outside reality of alienation and discrimination in Kashmir. How?
Most Kashmiris don’t consider Kashmir a part of India. We are not against Indian people. All the prisoners called me a terrorist — a deshdrohi even though they didn’t know me. How do you react to that? In today’s Kashmir, if a child sees his mother getting raped, how can he grow up to be normal?
What about the prejudice against Kashmiris and Muslims in jail?
Spiritual leaders from other faiths often came for interactions. In my five years there, not a single Muslim came. I was forbidden from receiving religious books.
Did you consciously reveal your biases — you ask why Muslim men marry non-Muslim women, for instance?
I wrote what I felt. Navjot [the Sikh wife of Shaukat Guru, who was accused in the Parliament attack case] was relieved to be released, even though her husband wasn’t [then]. I truly believe she shouldn’t have married him. If one is not honest, books like mine have no credibility.
Your writing on Vipassana classes in jail appeared in a newspaper as the story of a ‘reformed terrorist’. Did you feel lost in the propaganda around your arrest?
You only have to prove yourself against your allegations. If you are accused of wearing a black burqa, you have to prove that you weren’t. You don’t need to say you wore a black sari or continously prove yourself. Syed Maqbool Shah [a Kashmiri youth falsely accused in the 1996 Delhi bombing case] entered jail at the age of 17 and spent 14 years there. Can anyone return the years?
Did you deliberately skip details about your interrogation?
When I was writing about the policewomen coming with me into the bathroom (during my arrest), I just couldn’t continue writing. It was too painful. The blessings of Allah helped me finish this. I wrote only one draft. It is not a work of literature. I wanted the hardness of it to reach you directly.
Writer and photographer Siddharth Dhanwant Shanghvi exchanged the consuming chaos of Mumbai for the neighbouring lush automobile-less Matheran. The author of the hugely successful The Last Song of Dusk and The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay is now romancing the camera and has taken a series of images examining memory, absence and love—all shot in Matheran. The 35-year-old writer began photographing after the end of a relationship hoping his friend will “swing by”. In Delhi to inaugurate his month-long exhibition Postcards from the Forest, Sanghvi tells Yamini Deenadayalan why Mumbai ceased to be a city for him and why photographic narratives are also a kind of novel.
The end of a relationship with a friend worked as an emotional trigger to this series of images. Tell us about the concept.
The idea of a witness is very important to me, a sakshi. You know it’s to have somebody who can look at life with you in order to make it real for you. The memory of a sunset is a memory because you share it. And hence the idea of the postcard, which is the most familiar cursor of sharing memories. It’s a note that says “I wish you were here.” That’s what I wanted to say to my friend. I was trying to answer the question of how we remember the people we love. What’s the role of memory in our lives and the force of nostalgia? All of these questions were underneath this emotional trigger as you point out. To be able to build a collage of both visuals and words is an extraordinary gift from fate. Language was like my clay. To be able to open that up and bring images into it seemed to broaden the conversation.
Bombay is a city that consumes you. Matheran is so silent. Cars are not allowed there. How different is it to work there?
My writing was done all over the world. I wrote in Rome, in an ashram and in Bombay. I think we need to question the role of cities. To me, Mumbai ceased to be a city when we got the MNS and the Shiv Sena to power. The builder-government-babu nexus is eating up all the open spaces. The point of living in a big city is so that we can consume culture and the other lures of big city life are available to you. In Bombay there is limited cultural consumption because Bollywood is the currency of the day.
How do you think the place that you work in changes the tone of your work?
It's a form of clarification. You look at your own work with a degree of precision and clarity without the junk of noise, the junk of talk that masquerades as conversation. In a city, you are bombarded with excessive information. In Matheran, it feels like you are with the essence in a quiet place. A city doesn’t allow you that clarity. Of course, Delhi has this extraordinary cultural life that Bombay doesn’t. My friends in Bombay live a different life from my friends in Delhi. Just an example is the way books are launched in Bombay, there has to be a Bollywood star. Otherwise nobody is going to be there. There is this disconnect you know. What does this man who dances around trees have anything to do with literature? I am sure they have a great mind lurking in there somewhere but I haven’t found it yet. Delhi has some integrity in the craft it is trying to sell.
When you are in a vulnerable state, everything feels like a reflection of your own condition. Talk about how you zoom in on the images you have chosen. There are recurring images of top angle shots of trees, children etc.
God, I feel self-conscious doing that! Let me tell you why I chose to keep the work so small. I explored the idea of the miniature. I explored the idea of the magnifying glasses lying around. I see sometimes that contemporary photography these days looks like billboard hoardings—almost as if it were an advertisement for itself. I wanted to diminish my works so that people can engage with it at an intimate level. In fact, when you relook at the work through a magnifying glass, what you discover is so much more. As for the angles, it was just a way of looking at things. People have asked me why my photos are so posed. In fact, I didn’t ask the children to pose. I just asked them if I could take a photograph. And that’s another counterpoint to life in Mumbai. If I did that there, parents would be calling me up frantically, labeling me a paedophile (laughs). Here, [in Matheran] I can hang out with the kids without the subtext of self consciousness.
If a work is set off by a certain emotional trigger, how do you feel about it years later when the said trigger no longer holds?
I think the work itself has to hold. I think that you need to have a work behold itself no matter what the emotional climate it comes out of. The thing has to be whole and complete. It can be the impulse that propels it into existence but the work has to stand on its own feet.
Does photography inspire you more than fiction?
Yes. I studied photography as a student in London. We were taught to look. One of my tutors would say that my job is to just look at photography books. So we would sit for hours looking at composition. What makes an image striking? These experiences went into the writing of these two books. I feel oddly enough that I had to write those books to be able to make these photographs. I think the attempt as an artist is to incrementally try something that is less worse than what you did before.
How dependent are your photographs on your narrative?
These photographs are a different kind of novel, a kind of storytelling really. You look at it as a lake and then you go close and unravel a narrative through text. I am lucky that I can bring language into a photograph. I am interested in bringing texture and layers. I wanted to tell my friend these stories. Life and love is about storytelling. It is about sharing narrative lives.
‘There is a problem with our English. Indians write muddled prose.'
After Ezra Pound, Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Bly, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra has energetically tried his hand at translating Kabir’s poetry into English. His Songs of Kabir, published by New York Review of Books, carries a preface by Wendy Doniger. He spoke to Yamini Deenadayalan about why Kabir should be allowed to understand chromosomes, the Indian poetry scene and why Indians have attention deficit disorder.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, 64
Poet
Excerpts from an interview
Is there an ‘authentic’ Kabir poem?
The idea of Kabir is a constructed one and it is still under construction. A few thousand ‘Kabir’ poems have been written from the 1400s to today, and people are still writing them. Poems can come in more than one version, sometimes in as many as six or eight. Like the blues in music, the singers would change the songs, as it pleased them. We don’t know anything about the historical figure Kabir, except that he was born in Benares and was a weaver by profession. We don’t know if he travelled to Punjab and Rajasthan, where some manuscripts with his poems are found.
You have said that words like ‘train’ and ‘engine’ are used in some folk versions of Kabir. How have you approached your own translation?
In tone and choice of words, I try and stick to a conversational tone and to everyday language. I have Kabir say in one poem that though people consider him to be mad, it’s not that he was born “With an extra chromosome”. The historical Kabir, and the Kabir of the manuscripts, obviously did not know about chromosomes, but the Kabir of the folk tradition might have. He certainly knew about ‘train’ and ‘engine’, as a researcher in Rajasthan discovered while collecting Kabir songs in the 1990s. The folk tradition, whether in art or literature, is not pure, never has been, which is what keeps it alive and interesting.
Do you read other contemporary poets? For example, this week we’re reviewing K Satchidanandan, Sampurna Chattarji and Meena Kandasamy.
To be honest, I have of late read little contemporary poetry, or little of anything else. This is partly because when you’re working on something, you read in that area and other kinds of reading get neglected. But I hope this will soon change, now that the Kabir book is done.
Do you think Indians still read poetry today?
There is a readership, certainly, but the problem is of getting the word around, in a literal sense. There should be a ‘listenership’ as well as a readership, with one feeding into the other. When was the last time that an Indian college or university had a poet over for a reading? How do we expect more people to read poetry when they might not even know what books exist, let alone what is inside them.
Bookstores say there’s no demand for it; and readers say that they don’t buy poetry because it’s so hard to find. It’s a Catch-22 situation. Bookstores need to get more adventurous. There are extraordinary poets around. For instance, Arun Kolatkar’s works are available individually but not in a collected form. Manohar Shetty’s wonderful new book, Personal Effects, came out recently, but it’s published by a small press in Goa and not easily available. We probably need more anthologies — more poets together. Individual volumes rarely get noticed these days. I don’t know when I last saw a poetry book being reviewed.
Why don’t Indian critics step up? What is the state of reviewing and criticism in India?
Shoddy to say the least. Whether it’s reviewing poetry or fiction, we have a low threshold. There’s a problem with our use of English. Indians don’t know how to write. The problem is of writing muddled prose. We use it for decorative purposes. Words are used as ornaments, to adorn sentences. But words are primarily meant to communicate, we seem to lose sight of this fact. The English in The Hindu’s literary section, the sentences make little sense, either on their own or in context. This used to be called babu English. If editors knew better, they’d toss the piece back at the reviewer and ask for a rewrite, but it never happens.
The other problem is that editors want a 400-page novel reviewed in 48 hours. [And] there are no specialist poetry reviewers — just like you wouldn’t send an academic history book to a nonacademic, you can’t send a poetry book to someone who doesn’t understand poetry. We muddle along, but we’re always beaming at each other because we’re all so successful. Or at least we appear to be so. This is a peculiarity in India, a situation of extreme literary poverty. We need 2,000-3,000 word reviews.
Do you think there’s a readership for longer pieces?
I haven’t seen the 4,000-word essay yet and am told Indians can’t concentrate on longer pieces. Are we are a semiintelligent breed if we can’t read more than 600 words? In the US and UK, the broadsheets carry 2,000 word interviews and profiles of authors,at least.
So what’s the point of a publishing boom if there’s no critical culture?
No point at all, if you ask me. So long as you are alive, you can promote yourself — have a book launch and go to the Jaipur, Kovalam or Gangtok literary festival. It’s the critical culture that keeps a book alive, long after you’re dead and gone, when you are no longer seen at lit fests and launches. If you’re not there to flog the book, no one else will flog it for you. It’s happened in the past and it’ll happen again.
Nadeem Aslam, Interview "It's not up to writers to do PR for Pakistan or Islam, or America, or India. "
I was drawn to the title of Aslam's book "Maps for Lost Lovers" long before I read it. Dense, written with a fierce attention to beauty. Aslam goes into the shadowy subconscious of his characters unearthing startling contradictions that suddenly arise to them about religion, love, and what we've been told we ought to do. In this interview he speaks about his "immense homeland of heartbreaking beauty" and how he wrote Leila in the Wilderness for 60 days straight, missing Christmas and New Year and not seeing anyone. Granta 112 accepted it without any editorial cuts.
In your story, many ideas come together. There is an almost medieval brutality, there is magic, there is contemporary Pakistan- the references to Guantanamo Bay and Jihad. One is unable to separate the magical fable from the Aishwarya Rai scrap book and the nuclear bombs, the conflict in this “immense homeland of heartbreaking beauty”. Inevitably, many worlds exist and mix in Pakistan. Most stories seem to have only one or at best two layers of reality. However in your story, multiple worlds mix with such ease. Please talk about this.
Reality is like that – it is made up of many layers, and our mind is quite capable of perceiving them simultaneously. We try to keep this aspect of existence out of art, out of stories, because we wish to see order in art, not chaos; we wish to sense rhythm and pattern, as opposed to confusion.
In a way it would be easy to let go and talk about everything, write down whatever comes to mind. I talk about Aishwarya Rai and nuclear bombs and Guantanamo Bay in the same breath. But the details are very carefully arranged. My hope is that the reader will feel pattern within the story, an orderly progression.
And, really, the story has just one main strand. Leila is the star around which everyone and everything orbits. Politics, geopolitics, jihad etc appear quickly in the narrative and then disappear. If you wish to concentrate on them, you can; but I am sure that the reader’s chief concern will be ‘What will happen to this girl?’
The other strands are important – and I hope the reader will be rewarded by concentrating on them too. For example: one of the two brothers in the story – Wamaq – is named after a Socialist poet. I mention it in passing. But through him I wanted to comment on how revolutions go wrong. Wamaq has no understanding of what Socialism is but he defends his father who had given him a Socialist name: so his attachment to politics is merely a sentimental one. Later, he doesn’t tell anyone that ‘the mosque of angels’ is a sham, that in fact he helped build it in secret two or so years ago. It doesn’t concern him. Only when he realizes that someone he personally cares for – Leila – is in trouble with the people who own the mosque does he decide to act. He and his brother then make the mistake of acting on their own – they don’t involve other people. That is inherently apolitical. They attempt a revolution – but they haven’t prepared the groundwork. The support that should be in place before they act is not there. Therefore they pay very dearly for their attempted 'coup'.
Now: all this is on a hidden level in the story – the reader can (and probably will) miss it, and still follow what is happening in the story.
2) Co-existing with this immense beauty is also a very bleak/brutal picture of rituals, of religion, superstition. What is your personal take on the topic? Are you a spiritual person? Are you religious?
I am an atheist. I trained as a scientist, and science calls for a dispassionate exercising of one’s intellect. (I would have become a marine biologist but began writing my first novel instead.) So I believe in cells, not souls. As far as I am concerned there is no Afterlife. Someone in my last novel The Wasted Vigil says, ‘When you are dead you decay and become part of the earth. It is no disrespect to the dead to say that their bodies have been consumed by creatures in the soil. It makes us cherish this life and this world more. That is much better than the false talk about eternity and the hereafter. Death is not greater than life.’
But I do love thinking about religion and how it attempts to put something other than money and sex at the centre of human discourse – it puts love there. As Borges said: I give thanks…for love, which lets us see others as God sees them.
3) How did you start writing this piece? You worked on it for fifteen years. Tell me about the process.
I began writing it almost 15 years ago. The novella is about one family’s prejudice against female births. We all know this happens – in India as well as Pakistan. But no one had written about it in a direct manner. I am not sure why that is. Perhaps there are some topics that are so obvious that no one seems to notice them. I kept postponing the concentrated work on the novella, saying to myself, ‘Tomorrow someone will write about this…The day after tomorrow someone will write about it, there’s no need for you to do it…’ But it didn’t happen. On the very first day of my visit to Pakistan a few years ago, I picked up the newspaper and saw an article about a woman who claimed soon after giving birth that the doctors and nurses had exchanged her male baby for a female one. When the exasperated doctors threatened to carry out a DNA test, she relented and said that, yes, the girl baby was hers. Her husband had threatened to throw her out if she gave birth to a girl again. (The incident appears in the novella.) On the second day of that visit, I was introduced to a man – an educated man – who asked me whether I was married and had children. When I told him that I had no children and that I thought of my books as my children, he said, in utter seriousness, ‘Yes. Your successful novels will be your sons, and your unsuccessful ones your daughters.’ That was when I began to think seriously about writing the novella. I reminded myself that I personally know women who have had foetuses aborted because the ultrasound scan showed them to be female. It is my understanding that Pakistan is among those countries where the ratio of men and women is inconsistent with the rest of the world. In the rest of the world there are more women than men. In Pakistan, more men than women. Millions of women are not there. Once I had made up my mind to write about it, it took 2 months: December 2009 and January 2010. Using notes and ideas accumulated over the course of a decade and a half, I wrote every day for 12 or 13 hours – I did not celebrate Christmas, I do not remember the new year. I wrote for 60 days without leaving my house or seeing anyone. My only communication was with this story. Sleep, wake, write. Sleep wake, write. Sleep, wake, write. Repeat that 60 times, and the novella was done. Granta accepted it immediately, without any editorial cuts or rearrangements.
You say you never have a reader in mind while writing? Has this always been the case or did you consciously work on erasing the imaginary audience in order to be able to delve into yourself, to the truth of your life and experience? Do you have a reader in mind for Granta 112.
It has always been the case. I remember being a student and buying Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles for 50 pence in a secondhand bookshop after reading the first paragraph. No one told me it was a great book, that he was a great writer. I knew it instinctively. It connected with me and that was enough – I didn’t need to know what the others thought of it. It is the same with films, with paintings, with music, and also with friendship and with love. When the real thing comes along you don’t need anyone to tell you: something inside you tells you. That is how I wish the readers to come to my work.
You say that Literature is a ‘public act’. Did you feel a particular sense of responsibility with this contribution to Granta 112? Towards those readers who would find it in a book titled Pakistan and would look for an explanation about/a theory about the country? You said in a previous interview to First City Magazine that “you are a deeply political creature” ..is all the brutality you portray a deliberate critique of all the power structures ?
Pakistani writing is more political than Indian writing. The political corruptions of Pakistan, and how they affect the the lives of ordinary Pakistanis, are much clearer to Pakistani writers than is the case with Indian writers and India. (Someone at Granta offices said the other day that even the art - the paintings and the photogrpahs - featured in the magazine is political.)
Yes, I feel political. I am saying something about Pakistani society by having my character Razia feel, in one paragraph, a deep kinship with the faraway Kashmiris and Palestinians but – in the very next paragraph – treat the members of Pakistan’s Christian minority in a prejudiced way. She does not see the contradiction. On one page of the novella there is an SMS message exhorting people to fight for the Mulsims imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, but on another page a Pakistani policeman tortures a Pakistani child to make him confess to the theft of a wristwatch. And all of it is the background to the monstrous treatment meted out to Leila. There are many other such incidents in the story.
As to whether Granta's Pakistan issue will leave a favourable or unfavourable impression on the reader: I don't know. I don't think it is my concern. Pakistan is a country with immense problems and huge moral dilemmas - so it calls for minds that have to be sharp. It's not up to writers to do PR for Pakistan or Islam, or America, or India.
Pakistan often comes up in mainstream media (Indian and western), associated witnegatives (terrorism, fundamentalism, political instability), often, that’s the only impression you’re left with; were you hoping to counter any of that, with your piece? Also, in your one long sentence, did you seek to represent Pakistan in its many faceted ways, unbroken by media headlines? Or was that unconscious?
Yes I wanted to fit everything into that long sentence, good and bad. One thing I feel I must not overlook in my writing – and must not fail to celebrate – is the amount of resistance that is offered in Pakistan to the various corruptions of the society. In the novella any number of people refuse to go along with the family that wants Leila to produce a baby boy. Whoever hears about the injustice tries to put an end to it: the servant girls (Muslim and Christian), Qes who is Leila’s lover, Wamaq who is named after the Socialist poet, the midwife, the schoolteacher, the NGO worker, the journalist at the end who witnesses the amputation of Leila’s wings. They are shot, beaten, abused, ignored – but they oppose the unjust. As one of them says, ‘There was nothing I could have done back then, but I should have done something. That sentence is the only occasion in the story when I let my subconscious speak and did not censor – I wrote it after going for a run, sitting down to write when still out of breath, and it all poured out in one go, remaining in the raw, unedited form in the final version. It was like a word-association game – I asked myself: “What do you think of when you think of Pakistan? Give me the answer as fast as you can.” I took less than ten minutes to write, one thought led to another – and it all feels like a train journey, sometimes the rhythm is uniform, sometimes broken, sometimes a wide and deep vista is seen out of the window, sometimes the back of a building looms up just two yards away. And all the while the wheels on the track keep up a steady beat – ‘past the…past the…past the…past the…’
'Osama was an intelligent boy with deep thoughts', Interview with Jean Sasson
Jean Sasson is 64 and bestselling author of Growing up Bin Laden, Princess, and other books about the lives of Arab women. In her biography of Osama Bin Laden's wife Najwa, she draws an intimate portrait of living with a feared, controversial and complex personality that Osama was. From her home in Atlanta, she speaks to Yamini Deenadayalan about her insights into Osama’s childhood and why he shouldn’t have been buried at sea.
Tabloids across the world picked up one line in your book where Najwa says ‘sleeping time is my favourite time’ and then made Osama out to be a sex machine. How do you respond to this?
I believe that it is ridiculous to pick up a statement and make assumptions. I only put down what Najwa said. My assumption was that she was home alone all day and at night, she got a lot of attention from him. As women, we like getting attention, being talked to and we weren’t talking sexual things you know. Najwa is a very conservative Muslim woman who would never think like that and bring up such a thing. In none of my books is there anything to do with sex. The words sex machine never came out of my mouth.
There is a lot of intelligent criticism that goes around but sometimes the western media is quick to jump into situations like this and make a caricature of Islam. Do you agree?
I’ve noticed that. When the American government said Osama had held a woman in front of him (when he was being attacked), I didn’t believe them. Later, they retracted the statement. People on blogs had been talking about what a coward he was to hold a woman in front of him. The media wants to show him to be something less. Of course, no one agrees with Osama and his tactics, not even his wife and son. The truth is enough. You don’t need to add to it. I am a patriotic American. But, I also feel like a lot of journalism is parachute journalism. People land up in a country for three to four days and write about it. A lot of negative coverage is because of the lack of knowledge.
You talk about Osama’s alienation from the Saudi royals during the Gulf War because he was against the Americans defending the Saudis. This was one of the incidents spiralled him into the path of militant Islam. What clues do you get into his psychology in his early years?
Osama’s father did not see any of his children apart from a first couple of sons who were older. Osama being in the middle was a sort of a forgotten child. And when you have 50 children, how on earth will you keep up. It would affect any young man not to be part of his father’s life on a regular basis. Osama was a very quiet boy, and maybe he wasn’t happy. He turned to teachers at school to find a father figure. And some of these teachers were militant. At that time, Saudi Arabia opened its doors to all the Palestinians who were upset about what had happened in Israel. That would lead him to have a bad image of the west because America is so closely linked to Israel. Osama was an intelligent boy who had deep thoughts ten years earlier than most people his age. So, he came to the conclusion that too many people were interfering with Islam.
Why don’t you talk about this in the book?
I thought that readers would want to get to a time when Osama was more active. I knew that people would want to get to Afghanistan and what was going on there. I didn’t want to write a 2,000-page book though it was difficult not to. I have 20 notebooks filled with their stories.
Within the purview of his own traditional beliefs, Osama was fair to the women in his family. Yet, he was very cruel to his sons. Why?
He followed exactly the Quran and other teachings in Islam. I am sure no Saudi father would treat his sons the way Osama did. Yet, Osama wanted to raise sons who were strong. Osama let his wife raise the daughters and he raised the sons and this is common even in my culture. When Osama wanted to take a second wife, he talked it through with Najwa for many months and this is unusual.
Your gaze as a western woman dominates the telling of the story in all your books. Are you conscious about this?
I would hope it doesn’t interfere. I worked really hard to let the story unfold from the person who lived it and is telling it. That’s why I choose the first person. I am a western woman who has a lot of contact with the Middle East. I believe that over the years I have come to understand the mentality more than most. However, I think it is important to explain certain things that say Najwa would never explain because it’s normal in her culture. Most of my readers are western. I’ve had letters from people saying (exaggerated Southern drawl) ‘Are you tellin me Saudi women can’t drive?’ And I am like, this has been news for 30 years. While I don’t judge, I feel the need to explain.
What is your relationship with them now?
I don’t speak with Najwa but I pass messages because of the language barrier. I feel close to Omar. We talk or email three or four times a week. I feel he is like a nephew to me. I ended up having a lifelong bond with all the people I wrote about.
How did the family react to Osama’s death?
Well, I spoke with Omar the night we found out. Omar had asked me not to tell the specifics about the personal conversations. However, they were shocked. I believe that the family expected that if he was found he would be arrested because they have seen that all over the world. They have seen that with Saddam Hussein and the others that America was chasing. This is particularly because there were so many different stories. That he put up a fight, he held a woman up, then they said no, he didn’t hold a woman in front of him, no he didn’t pick up a gun, no he just ran into the room. I was shocked about the sea burial as was every Muslim I spoke to. Najwa’s mother died of shock the week following Osama’s death when she was told about it. My only thing was, and it doesn’t make me popular with Americans, that it would not have taken a lot of effort to contact Omar or one of Osama’s brothers to identify the body. It would have made a big difference.
This is a collection of stories about people who live on the fringes of their own self-esteem, or of their dreams .These are people trying to make sense of life’s unpredictability, the inability to control it. What shines in this story is empathy and understanding. When you are writing about a father who commits suicide (What I want from you), leaving behind a young son dying of cancer, a young woman and a younger still son meeting death again and again, you could get soppy and give me a handkerchief-soaked-with-greeting-card-words. But that’s what Keith Lee Morris doesn’t do. He engages you with the predicament of the individual; he walks into this perplexing tunnel of the human mind and gently moves his flashlight around.
In Camel Light, a middle aged man spots a cigarette lying under the dishwasher. The cigarette leads him to wonder about his kids, his marriage, his wife’s possible infidelity and then the disintegration of the world around him, a certain powerlessness as he zooms out into global warming, into an apocalypse gathering at his dinner table while he sits and holds a cigarette.
In Guests, young college graduates are employed at a fancy hotel. They get by with their fantasies for the rich, bored female guests, sometimes seducing them. David, one of the kids is the quiet one, the one who is willing to watch other people living their lives. An unbreathed sigh for what could have been in my case, if I had learned long ago to play by the rules that I never knew existed. What does he choose when a rich guest offers him an option that could change his life?
An adolescent boy emotionally frozen forever after a friend’s murder, of ordinary people coming to face with their very fragility. You cut through stereotype, condescension, the temptation for flowery prose, caricature, hyperbole and every folly that literature is capable of and just lying there casually is truth. Call It What You Want.
You can sleep all you want but the day is still there waiting and the bed is not another country. An young, unnamed Romanian seamstress living in Nicolae Ceauescu’s regime is constantly summoned. Her crime is having sewed ‘’marry me’’ notes into theItaly bound trouser pockets in the factory where she works. The hope is to escape the country. Women could apply to get married. It was all about Italy. It was nothing about him (the potential husband). It was about going from being bare assed poor to having a marble vase on your table.
There is of course always a battle between content and form. Here the content is unnerving. You are invited as voyeur into this woman’s mind, as she takes a tram ride from her home to meet General Albu for an interrogation.The prose is like thought process , especially as it would be in a totalitarian system- disjointed, scattered, wretched, random, hopeful. You end up reading in rhythm, this happened, that happened, her best friend died, her body splattered red like a bed of poppies, the nut, it always helps to eat a nut to face the summons. You learn about the failure of her first marriage, her lover Paul who copes (with alcoholism) and the careful rituals she develops in order to cope herself.
And so, the form is not friendly, not conducive and you feel like an outsider visiting neurosis. You understand how terror’s largest presence is not in the fire of bombs or the drums of gunfire but in the rhythm of the mind trying to retain sanity, the mind that occasionally tips over, scrambles back to an uncertain balance.
I was wondering about the games that life plays…..I went through all the possible ways of getting fed up with the world. The first and the best: don’t get summoned and don’t go mad, like most people. The second possibility: don’t get summoned, but do lose your mind….The third: do get summoned and do go mad…. Or else the fourth: get summoned but don’t go mad like Paul and myself….or the fifth to be young, and unbelievably beautiful and not insane, but dead...
Her tram journey was supposed to take her to the interrogation but she misses her stop and where she goes is worse, by far.
A powerful personal tale about the individual will that is submerged in the face of totalitarian power. The trick is not to go mad.
If you are a vegetarian animal lover, your introduction to taste Bourdain’s Medium Raw is painful, but that’s why you want to sort of devour masochistically. Why? It starts like a suspense novel, where the greatest chefs of America gather, shrouded, to eat an illegal meal of orlaton : sublime dribbles of varied and wondrous ancient flavours- figs, Armagnac, dark flesh slightly infused with the salty taste of ( the author’s )own blood.(The hunting of the orlaton bird is banned.)
The thrill of all this exquisiteness wears off when you find Bourdain in the Caribbean
with his vulgarly rich drug addict girlfriend. A lot of personal mean rants-more appropriate as facebook statuses of exhibitionists. A pinch or two of gyan on spaghetti and we’re done.
Thankfully, Bourdain the man of culinary excess, gastronomic bizarreness returns. In this sequel to much loved Kitchen Confidential, he’s over heroin, has wandered the Caribbean and remarried. The world has changed personally and in culinary terms. Food to Bourdain alternates between unconditional love and raw sex, enlightenment and nirvana. Describing pho (Vietnamese noodles) as more like love than sex will be more appropriate…Sometimes I think I should feel guilty about writing stuff like the above. It’s porn. Albeit food and travel porn. Apparently his parents taught him not to show off.
We assure you he slips and mostly we are glad he does. One day he is eating from the Taco lady in Puebla and on another he is gorging on roast goose in Hong Kong and then living it up in Paris with pearls of tapioca with oysters and caviar, you know.
Food of every imaginable kind remains his passion, not the show around it, just what’s on the plate. In an interview to First City in December 2008, he said “Context is so important to the perfect meal. I think a Bombay Burger (Vada Pao) is just as likely to be a perfect meal as a meal at the best restaurant in Paris.”
You learn that the recession made foodies of the world more equal. CEOs didn’t want to be seen dining openly at fancy restaurants. Tables were suddenly freed for those who deemed it unthinkable to dine at a Masa or something equally intimidating. So, he is being analytical about the world that has changed since Kitchen Confidential, about how food is the new music for the young, on a quest for exceptional box sized eating joints in downtowns across the world. He is being weird in a fun way. He meanders too, sometimes too much. But it’s Bourdain. We sort of forgive him.
