from Guban
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yJ1RDC7zB4] Abdi Latif Ega The Water Bearer The journey to the well was long and scary when Twosmo was younger. She would start before the shadows cast, and would usually reach the well when there was a significant shadow in the day. It was scary because the land was an endless darkness. Her camel, a ten foot beast, would not avail her any form of protection from the many dangers lurking out there – the wild animals in search of a succulent morsel before they returned to their dens. Twosmo, at this tender age, felt she was being thrown to the hyenas in the darkness, shrouded ominously before the break of dawn. Whenever she felt she could not possibly go through with it, the voice of her mother in her head would sternly urge her on, resoundingly stating how it was her duty to the clan, family, and a further duty to her own homestead of the future. In the light of the day, brought on by an unrelenting sun, the land assumed an indistinguishable form. Every thorn looked like the others, every ant hill looked identical, there were thousands of well-trodden foot paths all around. The small foot paths in the sandy earth, marked by spaces of grass in the ground resembled a translucent head of thinning hair. The trees were mainly thorn trees – all emaciated and small in stature from a sparse diet of nothing butvery little rain-fall. The trees had this incommon with every living thing in this desolate abode of collective harshness. It was a most barren part of the world. Everything that grew here had to put up a great fight to merely exist. Plants were as fierce as the rest of the environment; they abounded with thorns to ensure life. The lay of the land was unforgiving, cruel as if still despondent from its volcanic eruptions of long ago. Sand-lodged in places where seasonal rivers once flowed. Barren volcanic mountain ranges in the background presided over everything, stoically, aloof to the daily proceedings, as they unfolded. A flat enormity of semi-arid land was dashed here and there by thorn trees too short to hide or give shade to anything. Mingled with thorny shrubbery, that translucent head of hair grass resembled hay growing out from the earth, what perhaps used to be long luscious grass when this was a savanna. The ten foot camel followed obediently through a nose lead. This animal with all its clumsy glory reigned supreme to the fierce pastoralist. This animal was the end and beginning of all things. There was conflict as to which was more important: water or the camel. Disputes were always over water rights for the camels, goats, sheep – in that order -which invariably involved bloodshed. Only the camel sufficed as payment for the disputes, often heralding the end to hostilities, although there were those rare individuals who chose a life for a life instead. The currency of the camel was used in all manner of occasions. It was used for bride price. Since marriage was oneof the most important events in a Somal’s life and procreation, the objectof the nomad’s very existence, the fierceness of life without the camel demanded large congeries of sons to protect the wealth and general well-being of the family from other such families and from treacherous often barren lone operators, barren precisely as a result of the lack of this clumsy currency in abundance. Wealth in this part of the world is truly in the eyes of the beholder. The camel is the most rugged and austere of the domesticated animals, reflexively soare the wealthy in these parts. If you seea rather gaunt, lanky red and dusty man, he could be rich in camels and sons, or he could just as well be impoverished. Twosmo would often hear her Awowo describe many such men of many sons and camels. She cut a picture of one in the throes of death induced by sustained hunger brought on by his own miserliness. After a long solo journey, Twosmo would arrive at the well, as did many of the girls, having walked a quite lengthy distance, exhausted. They would then wait for the men, usually their kin, to draw the water for them. The wells were very deep in the earth and, as the men worked, there was a chance for a slight reprieve for the girls before the arduous journey back home, leading a camel now laden with fifty litres of water on each side. The water was rusty in color approximating apple juice, a color which permeated everything. It seeped into the clothes, fingernails, and was red, being the color of the loose sand of this region. After the journey, there were other chores awaiting her return. She would tend to the needs of Awowo, filling his abolition water container full before the night prayer, bringing him milk and most of all–the tea before he would retire for the night. By this time, Twosmo had kraaled the livestock for the night, surrounding the encampment with thorn tree branches as an impenetrable defense against would be wildlife intruders. The Arrest YUSUF WAS ASTOUNDED BY THE CITY ITSELF. He was exasperated with the desire to break the monotony of the perpetual moving, grazing and general animal husbandry of it all. It was here in these desolate places of nature’s barren garden that he would first hear of the larger world outside.This eventually kindled his desire to see beyond the confines of the limited world of the harsh plains, a world of constant movement in search of pasture and water.A world existed beyond this utter desolation, he had heard, and it had cities that abounded with people who never moved. Incredibly, they stayed put for years. Yusuf was determined to become part of the city and identified as such, but he had to shed his much ingrained camel ways. For this, he looked to Commander Ali for questions. In Ali Deray, his commander, he saw one who wielded the respect and fear of his fellow city dwellers.Yusuf sought to understand the intricate ways of what made him, at barely a few years his senior, so prominent.Yusuf had met many officers outside and inside the military whose rank equaled that of Ali Deray, but who, despite their rank and file, were just plainly ignored. Yusuf rationalized that whatever he knew in his previous life did not apply to the ways of the city, and by extension, the ways of government. So, when he was ordered to complete the arrest of aman named Hoagsaday, there were many layers of adherence in his under taking of the orders. On the morning he was ordered to do so, he summoned the other soldiers and commenced toward Hoagsaday’s house. He knew of the man. He was one of many who had left the country in search of better economical prospects and had returned after a long sojourn with much more.The soldiers arrived at Hoagsaday’s inearly after-noon and knocked with the usual arrogance most coercive forces are known for. Everyone was indoors, refugees from the midday’s naked sun. Such was the custom of Mogadishu that from around one o’clock to at least five – longer for others – those who could ate a hearty lunch – quite excessive, particularly if guests were being entertained and, afterwards, anafternoon siesta was agreed upon by all who lived in this city. This time proved quite opportune forYusuf to present the full regalia ofcoercive bravado and intimidation. It was an added effect of humiliation for a prominent member of the community, as Hoagsaday was, to be rounded up attheir home by the government and in such a manner and at such a ubiquitous time and place of privacy. The intended audience was the public, who would know of the incident before long. It was a nation populated by news chronicles and worthy disseminators, the news would spread like a tsunami, instilling fear in the almost fearless nomads turned citizens of a modern city state. Hoagsaday heard the knock which at first drove him quickly into a fit of anger, commonly induced by afternoon sleep –it was probably a mannerless person, particularly rude, probably an impatient person having some business with him who thought nothing of invading his privacy, rather than wait for him at the store during the normal hours. He called to the servant to answer with a firm admonition to the knocker,then again, he quickly changed his mind,brushing past the servant in a haste offury to answer the door himself.“Who is it, don’t you have any sense at all? I just can’t understand how a mature person can be so inconsiderate.” As he opened the door with a forceful jerk with one hand, he was confronted by the khaki brown color of a soldier’suniform. Hoagsaday simultaneously heard ,“Are you the rich guy from overseas, we have orders from my commander, to arrest you, Hoagsaday. Come with us now,” almost barking ,“Getin the truck.” Hoagsaday saw a military truck behind his vehicle in the driveway full of nondescript beige berets, hunched in the back. In a flash of second, Hoagsaday went through a montage in his mind in search of anything that might shed some light on why the military wanted him. The thought of this event at his home at this hour when most people were resting in the privacy of theirhomes was surreal. Since nothing wasamiss, Hoagsaday grew more and moreagitated with these lower ranking enforcers that dared to show up like this. Momentarily regaining his stature as a prominent businessman from one of larger clans, he stood barreling his chest, now returning the bark, “What in the name of God makes you think you can come to my home, at this time, and under such pretentious allegations, and barge into my compound and ask to take me, Hoagsaday, an upstanding member of this city, to the station just like a common and habitual criminal?” By this time, his children, wife, and a number of his relatives both visiting and staying with him were all shocked out of sleep. They were all heading outside towards the fracas on the veranda, alongside the official intruders. “Hear this bigmouth? Come along quietly before we drag you by the scruff of your neck in front of your wife,children, and your entire family.” Hoagsaday had by now gone from disbelief to belief in the reality that these goons meant business. There was no doubt in his mind now: this madness was real. It was futile at this point to plead with rocks, and he made a split second decision to acquiesce which was heavily influenced by the gradual milling on the veranda of more and more male family members as they woke up to what was going on. Abukar, a male cousin just arrived from the hinterland, started an abrasive verbal assault on the soldiers ,“What kind of animals are you? Has the government stopped recruiting humans into the military? How dare you come here with this nonsense? What great balls are these you come with? Do guns have brains? This is not a government matter. When you come here like this, you don’t come here as a government, but as a clan. Everyone has a clan too, and you will reckon with Hoagsaday’s. We see you behind the clan camouflage of your uniform.” With that, Abukar was descended upon by two soldiers who had come for Hoagsaday. The berets were now quickly unloading from the truck, all heading to the veranda to help subdue Abukar who was by now pinned to the ground with two soldiers on top of him, engaging in the scuffle as best he could from beneath the two soldiers. He continued to harangue the soldiers with open threats, as other males decided to join in on the now potential melee. One of the soldiers shouted a command, while the loud cocking of several machine guns was simultaneously heard, launching the all too well known severity in the air, a severity that garnered instant access to obedience. Precisely at this moment, Hoagsaday stated loudly,mainly for the benefit of his family and to calm the soldiers, that he would obey though he requested to go back into the house and change out of his ma’wiss, a long sarong worn by males used both privately in the city and regularly in the hinterland. In a brave posture, he reassured his family and went outside onto the back of the truck, whereAbukar was already lying prone on the floor,bloody at the soldiers’ boots. The truck drove fast speeding through the empty roads of siesta time, making its way to a non-descript and heavily guarded isolated building. Both men were manhandled off the truck, barely making the distance between the flatbed of the truck and the ground on theirfeet because the soldiers were all busy thumping them with their boots and rifle butts. Abukar was given extra rations of hurt for his earlier infraction and continued defiant disposition. They were separated at the entrance of what looked like a front greeting area office, taken down steps leading to a dark underground,and then lead into a holding cell that had no bars but a thick metal door that was promptly shut behind when Hoagsaday was inside. He sat down in a grand stupor, sitting on the floor of this small rectangle enclosure with nothing – no furniture or even a mat to help youbrace the concrete floor. It was a concrete slab of drab nothingness. Hoagsaday was on the floor wondering if what had just transpired was real. If so, who was involved? How does one go from a routine day to some underground holding concrete pit? He Started to get out of the haziness of blurred thoughts, slowly thinking about Abukar, Twosmo, his young wife whom he had just left hysterically crying, along with his children, during the fiasco. He was not so certain any more whether he could get the ear of someone, anyone. What had just transpired had all the makings of quite a serious problem. There was nothing he knew. He knew absolutely nothing, not even a mere inkling of what he was upagainst. He now tried in his mind to go back to that earlier montage of events in recent memory to somehow put some feet on why the government had interrupted his life today. Hoagsaday was not in the government. He was a private business man not engaged in anything even remotely breaching any law of the land. He paid his taxes regularly, never borrowed from the government, nor was he engaged in any way withthose who were part of the government, in any partnerships,neither did he solicit any official of the government for powerful whispers on behalf of his company even though this was quitecommon. Hoagsaday was simply a man who had worked hard for several years to acquire what minimal capital he could asseed money, to start a business and buy a home in the city. He was slightly reassured by the thought that someone from his clan was probably already inquiring on his whereabouts in the hope of finding his location, and on who needed to be talked to inorder to gain his release.As things were in Somal, there would be a hodgepodge of government in the western sense, the traditional pastoral ways of adjudication, and with a large dose of clannishness. In the meantime, his eyes wandered around this hot dungeon of sorts, the cracked concrete wall full of graffiti, left by those whohad had the dubious privilege of passing through this bare and dirty place. This was quite a change from the normal day for Hoagsaday, who had until this point worked himself into the psyche of the city dwellers, known as an ambitious and innovative hard working man. He had within no time established an operational business that quickly blossomed into many other ones. With prominence came the multitudes of the envious, of course in varying degrees. Some said he dug in toilets, others said he had done a lot of common street begging when he was abroad in the Middle East. Still others said he beat a hasty retreat after a long career as a thief in the Middle East when his gang made a final career ending score. The rest of his gang were reputed to be non-Somals and prominent in their countries as he was here. This adventurous mystique was created around the person of Hoagsaday sort of like a modern day version of the famous Ali Baba fable. But one did not need to look far to find the origin of these rumors. They were generated by rival business men and the collective of idle naysayer who had witnessed Hoagsaday’s quick ascendancy to the parapets ofbusiness circles in the city and who had been astonished at his conscientious efficiency. There was that, and then there were the others who wielded power in the government and used their high positions as a means to public and private coffers. Hoagsaday, having spent a significant amount of time overseas, had indeed dwelled in nostalgia. Ideas heavily flavored by a hybrid existence in the Middle East at the confluence of many cultures. He cultivated some ideas from the West, the Middle East, as though he was somewhat delusional about the reality of life where he had left. For reasons unknown he somehow did not configure in his hybrid ideas about the very spot he came from.The things he had left were now worse! In this way, one could say he was quite delusional. Hoagsaday, was hunched in a cell passing away the time in deep reflection, or what others would rightfully deem as anxiety about a looming uncertainness over his life, his property. Twosmo, the wife of Hoagsaday, right after the incident involving the military took place, felt a more ominous feeling in relation to the occurrence ofher husband’s unusual arrest. She therefore summoned the driver and was off to a relative to get things done, as that was how things of such magnitude were broached. The Bloodlines THERE WAS AN UNWRITTEN LAW THAT WAS INCORPORATED into fabric of life – a hold over from the people and their culture of pastoralism – which was the hierarchy of clan bloodlines. This clan hierarchy was entrenched in religion, government, and in general, with all of the Somali. So whatever one was, he was above all a member by blood of a clan. Blood affiliations ran deep in the society, forming the trajectory for all the modern occurrences such as a the modern state,the officials within it, and consequently the society at large. Every philosophy, Western or otherwise, was grounded in this concept of the bloodlines. And it followed that distant clan rivalries were a pretext for altercations in the now. In this spirit, Twosmo went immediately to a prominent member of weight in the affairs of the clan in the dislocation of the city. Soma lia’s clan system was based on patrilineal blood relationships, complemented differently by matrilineal blood relations. The male blood line, however, and thus the male, dominated clan affairs. Though Twosmo was particularly aggrieved in the case of her husband’s sudden arrest, Hoagsaday’s clan could never be represented by her. The car arrived at the bungalow of her husband’s relative, an elderly businessman like Hoagsaday and long time resident of the city of Mogadishu. The gate was open. the car drove into the drive way. Twosmo quickly got out of the car and knocked at the door purposefully in abandon. A worker came to the door and recognized her. As she brushed past him, straight to where the women of the household were sleeping, she quickly explained the situation, waiting anxiously for an audience with the elder. ——————————————————— Abdi Latif Ega is a novelist from Somalia. He is doing his doctoral work at Columbia University. adminhumanitiesunderground.org
A Song Sung True
Gopal Gandhi Her name responds with images. Of her. O.P. Sharma has a lovely photograph of her. A ‘late’ Kamaladevi, picture-daters would say. She is seated at a table, her hands stretched across it. The round face is lined with scars of battle. The salt march of 1930, for instance. A thousand footsteps on the sand are etched on that face. And a smile washes over them, like the waves at Dandi might do. As you look at the picture more closely, you see a chin of extraordinary determination and eyes of a rare penetration. But it is the hands that grip you. Strong-veined and profusely, almost ostentatiously, bangled. Who says courage and beauty do not go together, she seems to ask. They cannot but. I am proud to be a woman and I celebrate the beauty of womanhood, the whole frame can be heard saying. Let no one, absolutely no one, take beauty to suggest weakness, no fear! And to proclaim womankind’s strength, I will assert its feminity, not ape men. My working, writing, creating hands will proclaim them. Then there is the black and white footage of her fanning a pot of boiling saltwater. The quirk of 8 mm speed-filming gives her hands, bangled again, an extra verve. With each vapour goes a wisp of imperial hubris. Each sedimented salt-crystal makes swaraj tactile. Kamaladevi is in that frame the satyagrahi incarnate. But she is not to be typecast! Not in that scene, not anywhere else. In Mangalore, where she was born on 3 April 1903, father, mother, elder sister and Kamaladevi comprised a rather small family, for those days. It was there, in the verdant garden home of her Saraswat parents – Ananthiah Dhareshwar and Girijabai – that Kamaladevi first saw, touched and began to move the multi-coloured beads on the abacus of her sensibility. Her memoirs (Inner Recesses Outer Spaces, Navrang, 1986) tell us that the twinkling of the mrigasirsha star which heralds rain, the onset of showers in the month ofsravana and the worship of the tulasi plant became a continuum for her, signalling the reassurance, if any was needed in that fecund part of our western ghats, of the creative principle of life. Kamaladevi’s narration of her childhood is no idle amble down a memory footlane. I had not heard it explained anywhere until I read her autobiography that mrigasirsha is so named because the rains it heralds are such as make the mriga (deer) bend its sirsha (head) down under the torrent. For Ananthiah, a district collector, nationalist politics was taboo. But even in her teens, Kamaladevi made her own decisions. Nobody was to give her taboos. In this, she was clearly influenced by her mother, ‘a feminist with a very strong consciousness about women’s rights.’ In 1910, when Kamala was seven, Ananthiah died, leaving no will. Her step-brother claimed the entire estate and offered a subsistence allowance to Girijabai. This the self-respecting widow declined to accept and decided to support her daughters by herself. For those times, this was no ordinary resolve. It steeled the young girl in adversity and resoluteness. But certain customs Girijabai could not resist. By the custom of the times, Kamala was given in marriage while in her early teens – and not surprisingly, was widowed not long thereafter. What could that ‘status’ have meant to a child? In a less enlightened home, it could have meant an irreversible eclipse. But Girijabai’s home was different. Kamaladevi studied, passed her Senior Cambridge and was encouraged to pursue her interests which were clearly taking her towards the arts and theatre. She moved to the intellectual and capital of the South – Madras. Around that time her path met that of Harindranath Chattopadhyay. A musical genius, the young Bengali had poetic and histrionic talents that could only have been matched by those of his sister, the Bulbul-e-Hind, Sarojini Naidu. Kamaladevi and Harindranath found they had shared interests and decided to marry, affronting the orthodox not just because this was, in her case, a remarriage but by its cross-regional nature. Spurred by a joint vision, this did not deflect them. ‘When poet-musician Harindranath and I teamed up it was for a sharing of dreams and ambitions to devote ourselves to create a new theatre in India,’ she writes in her memoirs. But the real theatre of the times was not under arclights or on stage. It was being played out under the sharp daylight of non-cooperation. Kamaladevi was but sixteen when she happened to be in Bombay and attended a mammoth meeting addressed by Mahatma Gandhi. Chowpatty was ‘a sea of heads,’ she recalls, and being there she felt the power of the Mahatma’s appeal. She was enlisted into politics that day, I should imagine. What drew Kamaladevi into that vortex was more than the self-evident political compulsion of the cause. It was the strange mix that Gandhi was offering of political regeneration and constructive renewal. Kamaladevi and Harindranath met the Mahatma and Rabindranath Tagore at Santiniketan. ‘Tagore felt that personality can be built up through music,’ she records. Whereas Gandhi said it was ‘to be built up through craft – the use of hands.’ Harindranath, restless by temperament and peripatetic by choice, wanted to go to England and savour its world of letters and theatre. Kamaladevi joined him there and enrolled in Bedford College, London, to read sociology and economics. But after a brief spell there she returned home. Not because she would not have made a success of an academic course in London but because her mind was in India. She enrolled in 1924 for volunteer work – no simple badge-pinning work, let us remember, but everything that needs to be done at a mammoth gathering – at the Belgaum Congress. The session was a historic one, presided over by Gandhi himself. The Mahatma had been a volunteer in earlier Congresses himself, when still relatively unknown. Nothing was too menial or too ‘high’ for a volunteer. Kamaladevi’s presence did not go unnoticed. How
Sex, Work & Autonomy
Anchita Ghatak Sex work continues to be a vexing issue. Abolitionists feel that prostitutes or prostituted women are victims of the worst possible kind of sexual exploitation and prostitution should not exist. They will not use the term ‘sex work’ or ‘sex workers’ because they believe that giving exploitation the dignity of work and victims the dignity of workers is supporting and perpetuating exploitation. The other day, I was speaking to an eminent Abolitionist activist, who told me that she had never met a woman who had entered sex work of her own accord and willingly adopted the epithet of sex worker. I replied that I had met several. It is important to remember that many places across the world have seen demonstrations by sex workers and their allies, where people in sex work- women, men, transpersons- have demanded an end to stigmatisation and criminalization, recognition as workers and rights as workers. There are some countries where prostitution is legal. At the outset, I would like to state that while sex workers are not exclusively women, much of this article will focus on women sex workers. Activists who believe that ‘prostitution’ should be abolished, usually work against trafficking. Implicit in their anti-trafficking approach is the belief that trafficking is synonymous to prostitution. Organisations / individuals who work for the rights of sex workers also work against trafficking. They say that human trafficking sells people into forced labour and is a crime. Working to establish sex workers rights, activists, many of them sex workers themselves, have focused on the discrimination, injustice and violence that exist in the sex trade. They have drawn attention to the injustice and harassment sex workers face from the state, their families, pimps and madams, to name a few. They have not tried to portray the arena of sex work as a great and glorious place. They say that many women earn a living as sex workers and their work should be recognized as work and there should be norms and regulations in place that enable women to earn a living in a safe conditions. Many sex workers’ organizations have pointed out that they are against children being in sex work, or any kind of work, for that matter. Children should be in school and not at work. Adults who are in sex work or join sex work should make informed choices – that includes the decision to join or not join sex work, to engage in sex work and any other occupation(s), to leave sex work and so on. Gloria Steinem in a recent meeting in Kolkata told me that body invasion is intrinsic to sex work and so, it is not right to see prostitution as just another occupation in the unorganized sector, where working conditions are unjust and often, inhuman. It is difficult for me and many other feminists to agree with Steinem’s position. The sex worker is selling sexual services – that is her work. She has entered into a contract with her customer to provide sexual services. It is a transaction between consenting adults. To say that the sex worker is being invaded by the very nature of her work, is to deny her agency. In an article, in The Hindu, Steinem disagrees with the proposition that a sex worker is consensually selling sex. She says, “also I don’t think “consenting adults” is practical answer to structural inequality. Even sexual harassment law requires that sexual attention be “welcome,” not just “consensual.” It recognizes that consent can be coerced.” If consent is coerced, it is not consent, surely? Harassment and violence in the workplace is a reality. Struggles against sexual harassment in the workplace are going on everywhere. It is imperative to remember that like all women workers, sex workers too have a right to a harassment free and violence free workplace. Asking for customers of sex workers to be criminalised is a forceful way of denying women control over their choice of livelihoods. Saying that the very act of a woman selling sex is violence and exploitation is as paternalistic a point of view as saying that there can be nothing called marital rape. It is necessary to have a situation where the buying and selling of sexual services is not a furtive, criminal activity. It is such a social climate that will enable sex workers to lay down safe working conditions and bring clients to book if they violate agreed conditions. One has come across news reports, where governments in Northern countries have apparently told women on unemployment benefits that they have to become ‘sex workers’ as sex work is work like any other. Abolitionists often use such examples to argue against adopting the term ‘sex work’ and seeing it as a legitimate arena of work. Surely, this is not the first time that the patriarchal state machinery has appropriated the language of women’s liberation to oppress women? The question here is whether citizens have any element of choice when they are offered jobs instead of unemployment benefits. Abolitionists, as well as those who work for the establishment of sex workers’ rights, agree that if women on the margins have to assert their rights their choices have to expand and they must have access to education, healthcare, food, shelter and safe employment opportunities. It is in the area of employment that there is a sharp difference of opinion. Amongst abolitionists, there is a slight moving away from the term prostitution to survival sex. The question of women’s sexual autonomy in marriage is a vexed question. Is it only ‘prostitutes’ who engage in sex for survival? Sex workers have been categorical that they do not support people being coerced into sex work even if it is a caste based occupation. They are clear that while women have the right to opt to earn a living as a sex worker, they also have a right to refuse to do so. Like women workers in the unorganised sector – domestic workers, construction
Isobel Armstrong’s Material Imagination
Steven Connor I draw the phrase ‘material imagination’ from Gaston Bachelard, who uses it to describe two intersecting things: firstly, the ways in which the material world is imagined, not just by scientists and engineers, but by everyone, all the time: poets, children, footballers, cultural analysts, cabdrivers, medics and mad Hatters: the ‘material imagination’, then, as the way in which matter is imagined. In an age of conventional scepticism, in which the mind is always, as a Beckett character says, ‘on the alert against itself’, the prescribed move to make at this point is to doubt whether one can ever look steadily at anything other than one’s own conceptions or categories. But where do these conceptions and categories come from? For there is no way of imagining the nature of the material world which does not draw on and operate in terms of that material world, its spaces, substances, stresses, processes. Imagination is itself always prepossessed by the world that it attempts to imagine, made up, like the gingerbread-man enquiring into the question of his dough, of what it makes out. So the phrase ‘material imagination’ must signify the materiality of imagining as well as the imagination of the material. Isobel Armstrong’s work is a the most richly significant extension we have seen in recent decades of what might be called a Hegelian materialism of signification. Perhaps that work is, as a result, sometimes caught in the fix that Hegel bequeathed to us all, whereby one cannot imagine any kind of object except as dead and other to us, even as we also cannot help wanting to take that object into epistemological custody, making it our own, making it us, by flooding it with feeling and concept. We either leave the object out in the cold of our objectifying, or we kill it with the kindness of our identification. Wherever you look, whether within the recesses of the subject, or at the object, the same subject-object pingpong is always about to start up. And yet, Isobel has always been disinclined to let such predicaments bake into impasses. Indeed, the effort of her entire work has been to show the vitality of such predicaments, predicaments which are largely epistemological in Language as Living Form and political in Victorian Poetry. The problem which keeps generating and regenerating the ‘living form’ of nineteenth-century poetry is that of how to marry the self-forming contemplations of Hegel, in which the mind risks overwhelming its own world by taking itself as its own other, with Marx’s insistence on relationship. It is only when there is a relationship between the material act of mind represented by a poem and sets of material circumstances that relations can really exist, that time can be inhabited as well as merely unfolding, and that the poem can act and work (1982, 48-9). The most significant moments in Isobel’s virtuoso readings of nineteenth-century poetry are often those where a certain field of material possibility is isolated, rotated and worked. There is, for example, the moment in which she reflects on Hopkins’s use of the phrase ‘glassy peartree’, saying that ‘[t]he idea emerges through the particular physical nature of glass and one might say that the notion of transparency is given a soul because it is incarnate in the specific irreducible and particular qualities of glass’ (1982, 8). Or there are these reflections on the idea of an ‘air’ in Victorian Poetry: An air is a song and by association it is that which is breathed out, exhaled or expressed as breath, an expiration; and by further association it can be that which is breathed in, literally an ‘influence’, a flowing in, the air of the environment which sustains life; inspiration, a breathing in. All these meanings are present in the elegy, as perfume, breezes, breath or sighs, where they are figured as a responsive, finely organised feminine creativity, receptive to external influence, returning back to the world as music that has flowed in, an exhalation or breath of sound. (1993, 326) Another example would be the reading of a passage from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound in Language as Living Form which concludes that Everything is moving through everything else and the kinship of exhalation and winds, rain and aerial dew, which are all offered as separate entities and actions, is such that forms and functions merge, reverse and exchange. With ‘it circles round’, ‘it’ is not merely either the original exhalation or the aerial dew but every element in the passage. Exhalation, winds, blooms, fruits, flowers, stems, leaves, dew, as a totality, a unity, circle round. The rapidity, the flux of syntax, the capacity of Shelley’s words to make things dematerialise into aery thinness, is extraordinary. (1982, 45) These passages have in common the fact that they are reading poems which are themselves at these moments reading aspects of the material world, the world of nonhuman objects, substances, organisms, and processes, dew, air, transpiration, evaporation and, in the process, perhaps also trying to become these objects. In the last quotation, Isobel’s argument is that Shelley can do anything, because the mind of his poem makes everything over into itself. At this point in her argument, she is instancing Marx’s critique of Hegel, that, in the latter’s philosophy, ‘Man cannot create himself in terms of a meaningful and evolving relation with externality; he can only create himself anew as an entity of thought’. (1982, 43) But, in evoking Shelley’s dematerialising power, Isobel seems also to limit or partly to revoke it: if there is evaporation, coalescence, there is also work in Shelley’s writing, if only the work of dissimulating work. Isobel’s own working out of the process whereby work is dissimulated in Shelley’s poem restores the sense of an encounter, a striving, a resistance, an abrasion, a transforming, a surpassing. At moments like these, Isobel is borrowing a poem’s encounter with material objects or processes to release and disclose the nature of the poem as a worked object for her. All of this might come down, as is suggested at the opening of Language as