You Will Have To Swim, Mr. Marek !
Marek Kaminski During and after 1970s the Polish underground press drew on experiences of Second World War veterans of Armia Krajowa. After martial law in Poland and the government crackdown on Solidarity, the activities of underground publishing were significantly curtailed for several years. Nevertheless, with the communist government losing power in the second half of the 1980s, production of Polish underground printing (bibuła) dramatically increased, and many publications were distributed throughout the entire country. After 1989 some of the underground publishers in Poland transformed into regular and legal publishing houses. In the 1980s, at any given time there were around one hundred independent publishers in Poland who formed an exceptionally vibrant segment of the black market. Books were sold through underground distribution channels to paying customers, including subscribers. Marek Kaminski is Associate Professor of Political Science and Mathematical Behavioral Science at the University of California, Irvine. Between 1982 and 1989 he managed Solidarity’s underground publishing house STOP. In his landmark book Games Prisoner’s Play: The Tragicomic Worlds of Polish Prison, Kaminski presents unsparing accounts of initiation rituals, secret codes, caste structures, prison sex, self-injuries, and of the humor that makes this brutal world more bearable. This is a work of unusual power, originality, and eloquence, with implications for understanding human behavior far beyond the walls of one Polish prison. Here is an excerpt from the Introduction of that book. ———————————————————————— Prison socializes an inmate to behave hyperrationally. It teaches him patience in planning and pursuing his goals, punishes him severely for his mistakes, and rewards him generously for smart action. No wonder that inmates are such ardent optimizers. A clever move can shorten one’s sentence, save one from rape or a beating, keep one’s spirit high, or increase one’s access to resources. There is little space for innocent and spontaneous expressions of emotion when they collide with fundamental interests. Brutal fights, self-injury, and rapes can all be explained as outcomes of carefully calculated actions. Paradoxically, much of the confusion in interpreting prison behavior arises from both a failure to understand the motives of inmates and an unwillingness to admit that outcomes judged as inhuman or bizarre may be consequences of individually rational action. The main message of the book is that prisoners optimize under the constraints of their harsh life conditions and the local subculture. Their behavior reflects their attempts at optimization. Such a “rational choice” approach helps us to better understand prison behavior. A Personal Note I beg the reader’s forgiveness for a brief personal narrative that explains how I learned this lesson myself, and how I collected the data that support it. This is not an autobiography, but I would not be writing this book had I not experienced the life of a prisoner firsthand. In 1985 I was a twenty-two-year-old sophomore student of sociology who had switched disciplines, disappointed with abstract concepts after three diligent years of studying math. Poland had just witnessed the glorious rise of the Solidarity movement in 1980 followed by the introduction of martial law under General Jaruzelski in 1981 with the rationale that can be summarized as “I kicked your ass, but the Soviets would shoot it.” Dissatisfied with the moral and aesthetic poverty of communist way of life, I joined the underground Solidarity resistance network. In 1985, I was running an underground publishing house, STOP that employed about twenty full-time workers and up to 100 moonlighters. Between 1982 and 1989, we published about thirty-five titles of more than 100,000 books combined. We were a part of a decentralized network that included about 100 underground publishing houses, hundreds of periodicals, thousands of trade union organizations with a hierarchically organized leadership structure, a few Nobel prize winners, and even underground theaters, galleries, and video rentals. We called it an “independent society.” Half-revolutionist, half-scholar in the making, I was also looking for a topic for my Masters thesis in social anthropology. With hesitation, I started collecting data on the inner workings of the resistance network. My dilemma was figuring out how to balance facts with fiction. If too accurate, my thesis could easily become a handbook for the communist secret police. After my thesis defense I could also fall under permanent surveillance, effectively preventing me from running my organization. At the very worst, the communist court could use my thesis as evidence and throw me in prison. On March 12, 1985 my thesis dilemma was solved. During a random stop at a police checkpoint, “Dragon,” the driver of our van, was so nervous that the policeman became suspicious. He disregarded Dragon’s fake documents and implemented a thorough search of the van, which was filled with illegal Solidarity books. Dragon decided to talk. Within hours, five secret police agents had escorted me to a police station, joking that “you will have to swim, Mr. Marek.” In fact, I was “swimming”–police jargon for jail sentence–for five months in the Bialoleka and Rakowiecka jails. On my second day in a police station cell, after overcoming my initial shock and disbelief, I decided that my thesis would be on the subculture of Polish prison. After just several hours I knew that I was entering a bizarre, terrifying, and incredibly interesting environment. Rapes, knife fights, suicides, brutal sex, blunt talk, and self-injuries appeared to be its chief attributes. Ordinary life was reduced to eating and defecating. It seemed as if Pandora had freed all the imaginable violent human emotions from her box there and let them play without the usual societal constraints. I decided to make the best of my personal misfortune and use it as a unique opportunity to study this fascinating society-within-society. My goals were clear: I did not want to write nostalgic memoirs or point an accusing finger at the regime that had jailed me. I wanted to conduct an extensive and uncompromising research project, using all of my methodological skills. I expected that this would require developing new research techniques or modifying old ones. I was ready to face the necessary risks. It was up to me whether I mobilized my academic spirit–or gave
Nizamuddin
Devi Prasad Mishra [This is a selection from the poetry series Nizamuddin that first appeared in the Hindi language blog Tadbhav–तद्भव early this year. Translated by HUG] ——————————————— (1) Mean lane and a cow a woman almost touching go past each other and both have babies in their womb and both are tired and both have no hurry at all to reach home and a man makes his way through them about whom it is said that he is a police informer and keeps tabs on people around and a kite-laden boy whizzes right through all three of them and a woman in burkha is walking straight from the other side who reserves enough convenience to cry as she will or laugh out loud with available rotten vulgarity. Bahadur Shah Zafar’s arrest is still fresh news in the lane as fresh as the news of the arrest of a young man arrested for implanting bombs and explosives. In the far corner of that restaurant sits a man with his elbows on the table whose omelette is getting cold and stale waiting right there for hours. He may be in the know that a tunnel has been secretly constructed from Gujarat to Nizamuddin and people are freely using it. This tunnel has been there always—now here now gone. Quite a few rumours about Nizamuddin usually waft around. (2) As I made my way out of the lane A tree welcomed me and I counted 21 birds And as I looked more carefully 17 more Little ones I found hidden And then 21 more trees This road I could call wild, untamed, still unmanicured like the Hindi literary landscape And when I spot that girl who was from the third or fourth tradition, I realized she is lanky and blithe. She is Zeenat, that’s her name Who, after having gotten a BA degree from Meerut University Wanted to do her MA in English From the Indira Gandhi Open University I mean the same girl who had conspired to send packing the Brits from India in 1857. (3) Rahim could just be around the corner walking around Rahim’s tomb I felt so. But that accident is averted—that of one poet’s meeting another. Pigeons make that unerring sound with their wings—whirrrrrr—and keep that sound in your mind intact brother. I keep walking around the tomb. Is someone going to appear or am I loitering in the clatter of the departed? The wildness of my language in tombs lying around—shadowy, decrepit. And an incoming phone call—may be the apocalyptic call that will decimate Hindi poetry altogether and it has by now reached Sarai Kale Khan… (4) Now what can one do if goats loiter often at my poet’s grave it is now Nazeer now Ghalib. When Asad Zaidi chuckled in his usual boisterous way and told me this truth I didn’t reply that this could easily become a neat slice of some utterly poetic line. Have I ever tried to impress upon you that Nazeer Akbarbadi must be included in the Hindi poetic canon and a carbon copy of this plea always lie with me somewhere and after my death you will retrieve that and then whether you bury, burn or turn me to vultures I have no business. I mean if you bury me goats will inevitably arrive. If you decide to burn me I will disappear into the hydrants leading up to the Ganga. But how did this rumour get to your ears that vultures mean those commentators in Hindi who hover around the corpses of control and command. Suppose I get a breather from the vultures? (5) I have no clue whether this is apocryphal that once Mirza sahab had narrated a tale about a man who was turning out to be a power-hungry hireling and the loss was this that his yield and turnover was never getting diminished. (6) As I keep thinking what Mirza sahab may have verbalized and what he might have given a pass I wander into a particularly momentous bylane and chance upon this shoe. This was the lost shoe of one Zaidi. Yes sir, that same Zaidi who had pelted the other one of the pair at Bush. This one got saved and so I chanced upon it at Nizamuddin. Now you have put me in a quandary by reminding me that this one might be Zain-ul-Abideen’s who was Mohammad’s great-grandson and was called Zaid. But this shoe can be anybody’s as the tilism says and it could be Mirza sahab’s too as you know he would often appear donning a single piece of footwear. Or may be the shoe had been one Nizamuddin’s, who, Khuda grant him happiness, was no less of a maverick. It is also said that he had once assailed a hakim with a shoe or was it Allaudin Khilji with whom he got engaged in this kind of a scrap? But today I have found the shoe and I am going to return from Nizamuddin’s hearth with this one undamaged. And now I have this in my mind that all sensitive, wise people always have and will put on but one shoe. The other is always hurled at the powerful. (7) Look at the results of writing for all How my work swells and takes its toll How voluble, such loudness that it turns out So measly and they say I am on a roll! Sitting right in the middle of the marketplace I quote my price and my earnings praise All those matter don’t miss such bargain such ways The morning that you fancied now dazzles in twilight Daze now argue Marx or that shitty mall carry on the Lalgarh craze and my beloved country see how the Masjid sways and stillness gone now infamy stays In Nizamuddin, such is its daily overwhelming maze. (8) The mushaira session went on till the early hours. People seemed to return from some kind of
In Defense of the ‘Decadents’
Samar Sen Certain critics point out with a sneer that ‘Progress’ is a Victorian word. Perhaps they are right: the Victorian belief in progress was based upon security and a rising level of production. Forebodings and uneasy apprehensions shadowed the late-Victorian period, because it was an age of finance unlike the early Victorian age of production. The relation between production and distribution is far less apparent in our age of finance, hence the sense of frustration marking the closing years of the last century. To the sceptical critics of progress it may be pointed out that though the present century has widened the gap between productive forces and social relations and to a certain extent justifies their enlightened scepticism, the latest powers of world production still permits a rational belief in progress. We find that production power of man has still immense possibilities. So we are still for progress. It is not desirable in our day to reaffirm the medieval conception of human life, to declare that man’s fate is inevitably tragic and all notions of progress an illusion. To assert this under the painful pressure of circumstances is a subterfuge, a means to shrink responsibility. It is rather easy to talk about our belief in progress with reference to past history. But the moment we come to consider the present, do define the meaning of the progressive movement in literature, we seem to be a melting pot, and confused voices of lamentation, denunciation and warning strike the ear. The modern Bengali poet is between two fires. If he tries to be honest with regard to the vices of his own class and voices his sense of decay, he falls under, and is found guilty of the charges of obscenity and obscurity. The eternal principles of art, he is told, are beauty and truth, truth and beauty, to deny which is bad taste, a perversion. On the other hand he is told from the progressive quarter, which emphasizes his defeatism and obscurity, that he is a decadent and damned petty-bourgeois. The damning is thus complete. He then thinks of perhaps a dozen or so of his admirers and continues to use a medium of expression whose beauties commend themselves only to the dozen or so, with confusing results both for the moralist and the progressive critic. A gentleman, sceptical of the progressive demands on poetry, when politely told that he was a decadent bourgeois, retorted: “You can call me a swine if you like, but I am what I am.” It is certainly time to clear up a host of misunderstandings. A really progressive critic will be a great force today. But a certain notion is gaining ground, fanned by some of the progressives and by the newspapers which have their own sentimental ideas about literature, that to be progressive means to write about mazdoors and kisans in a broad sentimental vein, to depict all the glories of a possible proletarian revolution and to do all these in a way which would be understood by the man in the street. A way with defeatism and all bourgeois subtleties of expression! Nothing is more important than direct propaganda. It may be that the results will be slightly disappointing for some time, but all will be well in the future society. The progressive who proceeds in this manner is not an objective critic. He is a sentimental humanist. We must not forget in our new-born enthusiasm for the cause that literature has a tradition of its own and that there are many invisible gaps between the economic and the cultural superstructure. If we consider the changes effected in Bengali poetry in the last fifteen years we must admit that it has definitely ‘progressed.’ The best of it has almost got clear of that sickening vice bequeathed by the Tagorean tradition—sentimentalism. It has improved and made considerable changes in technique. From a loose and ineffective language to a highly polished and flexible one, from a mere turning loose of emotion to a consciousness of the disruptive forces threatening society, —there are considerable achievements. To sacrifice all these in order to widen the appeal and rouse the people by direct propaganda will be dangerous sacrifice. It will mean a swim backward in literary tradition and will revive the sentimental age in a changed garb. Such demands on poetry, backed by the newspapers and the progressives, will have dangerous consequences for the rising generation, which has every chance of being taken in by these easy methods of cheap and quick popularity. The critic who asks for such a literary change in the name of progress, we repeat, is at best a sentimental humanist. What can be achieved if, in the immediate present, the Bengali poet tries to widen his appeal? Mass-appeal is indeed a tremendous thing. It can at least help fill up, the empty pockets of the unfortunate writers. But how do the masses come in? The vast majority of them is illiterate. The reading section consists entirely of the middle-classes. To appeal to them is to pander to the tastes of a demoralized class, to turn poetry into simple wish-fulfillment. Consider the plight of the Indian film industry and the Radio, both of which are middle-class and popular. If the middle class had any vitality left it would have at least created somethings significant during and after the Civil Disobedience Movement. But nothing of that kind happened, because at this late hour in history the colonial bourgeoisie has no life at all. With huge and vital sections of our population illiterate and dim in the background, we cannot really hope to effect a revolution with our writings. That would be putting the cart before the horse. We can at present only soliloquise, we cannot address the real audience. To be really progressive in our time and in our country,where only a fraction is literate, is to preserve the integrity of what is good in our past tradition, to be true to oneself
Hopeful About Hopelessness: Gyanranjan Ke Bahane
Neelabh [This is an excerpt from Gyanranjan ke Bahane, where the writer gives us a unique sense of the Hindi literary world from the 1960s till date, by way of tracing it through the story of his friendship with Gyanranjan, writer and editor of the watershed literary magazine Pahal. Translation HUG.] As I have said, between Gyan and me, things were getting into a rhythm of sorts. But in this new chapter, our relationship would be more of a roller coaster ride, with its fair share of ups and downs. Once Gyanranjan got into the business of editing Aadhar, the pace and style of his own writings began to suffer. No one would really consider him to be a prolific writer, but at least there used to be regularity in his pen earlier. After 1970, there developed a kind of sluggishness in that evenness of output. The half-formed, halting tale which Gyan would narrate to us at leisure actually saw the light of the day as ‘Anubhav’, which got published in 1972. After that bit of writing Gyan had not written any short story. Perhaps a variation of that idea one might be able to detect in ‘Bahirgaman,’ which Ashok Vajpeyi had included in his Pehchan series. Since no edition of Pehchan had taken the responsibility of providing us with the publishing details, nor was there any bit of information about the date and year of the individual editions themselves, it is impossible to tell at this point which version of the story came out first. But yes, his story ‘Ghanta’ appeared in ‘Katha’ in 1968 and after that Gyan had written two other short stories. Of course, post-‘Anubhav’, Gyan had published a couple of sections from his proposed novel, but that too remained incomplete. Later, once his journey with Pahal began, and the way he got involved in that project, it was impossible to come back and write creative stuff systematically. Most certainly, an opportunity lost. We, I mean Dudhnath Singh and I, have often tried to ponder over this: why had Gyan stopped writing? I mean, what could be the reasons? Over a period of time I have come to my own personal conclusions about this matter. Gyan’s writings and concerns, having begun during the Nehrvian era and having felt the full impact of the illusory aspect of that era, had arrived at a new juncture. One of the first signs of a generation’s disillusionment with the Nehruvian era was possibly Amarkant’s—a man of the previous era—story ‘Hatyara’, published in Nayi Kahaniya. The disenchantment with Nehru’s time and ways had provided Hindi literature with some pregnant possibilities. The likes of Shrikant Verma, who gave us poems like ‘Bhatka Megh’, were rattling their twin-bladed sabres of distrust and rage. The fervour of Janwadi movements and much of the earlier streams of the left had already ebbed from the cultural scene. In these circumstances, the restless, self-centred ethos of Nayi Kavita was being demolished by the seething fumes of the directionless and anarchic poetry-movements like Akavita, which gobbled up even some old-timers and seasoned left activists. During these times, if we behold the stories of Dudhnath Singh, Gyanranjan, Kashinath Singh and Ravindra Kalia collectively, one would clearly notice signs of nihilism and negativity—a spiralling nakarvaad was in the air. Ravindra Kalia and Kashinath Singh were fully draped in the ominous chaddar of negativity—quite distinctly apparent if one reads Ravi’s ‘5055’ or Kashinath’s ‘Apne Log.’ But Dudhnath and Gyan, if you allow me a popular adage, were hopeful about hopelessness—astha ke saath anasthavadi. Dudhnath nurtured his own brand of negativity, which was nature’s gift—one that we can make out right from ‘Vistaar’ (published in Sarika), meandering past ‘Sukhant’ and ‘Dharmashetra Kurushetra’ and leading up to ‘Namo Andhakaram’ and ‘Nishkasan’. The difference was only this that while in his first phase of writing, the impulse of negativity was channelled through and coloured in the motifs of self-destructiveness and melancholy, gradually the same bent changed and got engaged into viciously tearing down others, along with paying repeated obeisance to self-centredness and self-glorification. In Gyan’s kind of negativity, on the other hand, since it had emerged from real social unrest and turmoil, the public-social nature was always at hand, in attendance. Even the beatnik wave could not deter him from his chosen path, though it did influence him a lot. ‘Amrud ka Pedh’, ‘Shesh Hote Huye’ and “Fence ke Idhar aur Udhar’—all bear testimony to how he had tirelessly exposed and torn apart middle class vacuity and other loose sensibilities. It is strange that recently, as I again sat reading his 1972 ‘Anubhav’, I felt that an unsuccessful story of his time was so prescient with truth of a different order. It was ahead of its time actually. I also felt rather wistful and wondered whether things would have been different if Gyan had tolerated a wee bit more the very structurelessness of his stories and wandered a tad more in the by-lanes of his thought world. Had he given such stories some more time to mature in his mind and had he nurtured them further with his developing experience, his work may have exhibited altogether different contours. But Gyan was of a different mettle—living life and literature on a knife’s edge. Maybe the terrain of his writings was middle class existence; but the way he would undo and lay bare each of its layers by his unique style and turns of phrase: that was his and his alone. And when one continues to exhaust all of one’s linguistic munitions with such energy in each and every bit of writing, at one point one may find the arsenal exhausted, empty. That is what transpired I suspect. Perhaps Gyan had lacked the patience and endurance to dismantle and recast his own mould afresh, the way Nirala, Sarveshwar and Raghuvir Sahay had done. Gyan’s art had gradually developed into a fortress and then into a prison-house of its own. There was yet another reason.