Aliens of the same world: The Case of Bangla Science Fiction
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay Locating Bangla Science Fiction SF as a genre has always presented problems of definition. Since Gernsback’s “scientifiction”, attempts to define the nature of this genre have been common, so much so that when we refer to District 9 or Avatar as SF, as we did in this seminar, we think we know exactly what we mean. However, when we extend our understanding of SF to include those outside the predominantly Anglo-American (and marginally European) space, I believe we must redefine SF tentatively as an index of cultural transformation which may be understood through what I call the “history of scientificity”. I use the term scientificity as a concept. The colonial era, in which actual political control became the progenitor of a number of myths of science, is an important site for the study of concepts as orienting components – words around which archival and paraxial histories may be constructed. These histories are utilized by the colonizer and the colonized in the context of Bengal in ways that enable different forms of the same discourse: the discourse of legitimacy that gives meaning to the colonial situation. What remains unquestioned in these histories is scientificity itself. The existence of non-relative truths that may be discovered is never under debate. Working on colonial science, one must isolate strands of debate that allow “scientificity” to become enshrined as the principle of political legitimacy for both the colonizer and the colonized while reflecting upon the historicity of the concept itself. SF is a space where the “transcendental” nature of science merges with its subjective “earthy” historical other in fiction; consequently, one must begin a history of scientificity and unravel when and by what means scientificity becomes an orienting component of the “future history” that is SF. This is as much a question in the history and philosophy of science as it is of modernity and the constitution of the modern self in the development of techno-scientific cultures. Since science functions as a constant field of cultural tension in the asymmetry of colonial relations, SF becomes an invaluable means of exploring the nature of cultural identity shaped by colonization. I have selected one specific kind of SF for analysis here – the category of the tall tale. This is because the tall tale most explicitly engages with the criterion of scientificity and reveals the questions which a history of SF must recognize. Games of Truth in SF-Tall Tales The stories of Joseph Jorkens written by Lord Dunsany, Edward Plunkett (1878-1957) and the ones of Ghanada (Ghanashyam Das) written by Premendra Mitra (1904-1988) belong to the category of travel tall tales. Tall tales that base themselves on travel have three basic dimensions. The first is the landscape and people of the travelled land. The second is the object or point of surprise. The third is the character of the storyteller, which defines the tale as a tall tale. The similarities between fantasy, SF, fiction and the tall tale are governed to a large extent by the presentation of the tale. The tall tale becomes a tall tale owing to the relation created between the teller of the tale and the event in which the teller participates. And the fundamental premise of the tall tale is that the tale is always described by the teller as absolutely true, exceeding the boundaries of fiction (which by definition is not-true). Unlike Munchausenesque tall tales, regarded generally as the forerunner of the genre, the similarity between Jorkens and Ghanada emerges in the precision of the narrated tale in scientific terms – including geographical specificity, use of expressions that convey the scientificity and hence seek to attest the truth of the narrated tale, and presentation of ideas and events which in themselves seem logically possible. The veracity of the tale is seldom under doubt due to the events themselves, the doubt emerges from the character of the teller of the tale and the tale itself is then compared to a framework of non-fiction outside the fictional world. All fiction is by definition false, the important part of the tall tale is not that which is clearly false, but that which posits itself as true. Thus if we are to pay attention to the actual source of textual meaning in the tall tale, we must locate it in the probable rather than the incomprehensible, because the latter derives its meaning secondarily from the former. By paying attention only to the locus of improbability, one is likely to miss out on the power effects of the images and ideas taken as true within the fiction. In the context of the adventure stories described here, the two layers of truth that are particularly important are the presentation of the foreigner and the use of science. In the preface to the first volume of Jorkens’s adventures, the narrator explains that one of the purposes of the stories is to “advance the progress of Science, and establish our knowledge upon a firmer basis; yet should they fail to do so, I feel that they may at least be so fortunate as to add strangeness to parts of our planet, just as it was tending to grow too familiar.”. This is a recurring idea in the Jorkens stories: the impact of these stories on scientific knowledge. But the novelty of the scientific idea is supported by the “familiarity” of the taken for granted, whose scientificity is never in question. Thus even if we mark out the story as a tall tale, the experience of the improbable is only tied to the novum, Darko Suvin’s term for the new object or idea that SF introduces, and not to the cultural assumptions within which the novum is placed. Moreover, the experience of the scientific is exclusively linked to the British colonizer, and indigenous experiences of these objects become irrelevant in the “scientific project”. “The tale of the Abu Laheeb” is a prime example of the way in which the scientific project assimilates local knowledge. In this story, Jorkens
Time, Finance & Cinema
Geeta Patel In a real-time, single fifteen-second take shot with a still camera, a man walks slowly, the end of his stick feeling its way across slightly uneven earth, dotted withstones, blotched with green. He moves diagonally across the frame, his body hugging the low raised mound that runs upward from the lower left-hand corner to the upper right-hand corner of the frame and divides one field from its neighbor. The shot continues in real time as the camera pans down and stays frozen to capture the movement of two feet that travel from the frame’s lower right edge to the upper left edge, following the track laid down by the stick. A jump cut moves the camera outward into another shot in which the man, Wannihami, is silhouetted against the trees and sky, walking across a wide expanse, spade across his back. The camera is immobile, and Wannihami’s real-time movement bisects the frame. He walks out of the frame; the film cuts. When Wannihami reappears he has reached his destination; the camera lingers on him standing in front of a grave, trees behind his upper body. Spade in both his hands, he lowers himself to his task. The film then cuts fluidly between Wannihami’s feet darkening the frame’s upper left corner, and the spade swinging past them in an arc in and out of the frame. The rest of the frame is filled with the earth covering a coffin; Wannihami’s body centered on the screen hunched forward to its task, arms hard at work; a close-up of Wannihami’sface calmly intent, resolutely at rest as his hands fill the screen, entering from the right to scrabble at the softening ground. Each scene is only two or three seconds long, each taken from a different angle, each recorded with a still camera, though the cuts produce the illusion of a moving camera. The circular repetition of the scenes, the circular movements in each frame, turn the linear frame-by-frame temporal continuity into one action that keeps on coming back. The only sounds are ambient: stick tapping, the soft suss of wind, Wannihami’s spade scratching as it tears at the hard packed earth, Wannihami’s hands clawing the ground as it begins to break apart. As Wannihami walks to this place of burial, a minute-long single shot taken with an immobile camera reveals a woman holding a water pot against her hip, standing before a water source, who spots Wannihami outside the space of the frame. She startles, drops her pot, and hurries out of the frame. The film returns to Wannihami’s repeated labors, shot after shot. Suddenly the center of the frame is dense with people who begin running down into it from every direction; they take over Wannihami’s task. The digging becomes a social event; the film cuts back and forth between Wannihami’s brother-in-law digging and people crowding the frame, huddled over the grave. The coffin is pulled out, shouldered across bodies, its seal broken and opened. Wannihami’s hands reach in. What the coffin inters, revealed as it pops open, are sticks, shards of timber, rocks. What ought to have been in the coffin was a body, the body of Wannihami’s son, Bandara. The scene echoes the opening sequences of this film, Purahanda Kaluwara (Death on a Full Moon Day), the one that introduces us to Wannihami, the blind father, whose Tiresias-like vision gifts the film one of its narrative continuities or story lines. In this early series of scenes, the camera also follows the end of a stick feeling its way across slightly uneven earth, cracked dry, dotted with stones and blotched green. Two feet follow the stick. Wannihami’s stick enters the frame from the lower left corner, pursued by one foot, then a water gourd, and finally both feet. The camera stays still until the feet begin moving away out of the frame through the upper right corner. The camera then proceeds along with Wannihami’s feet, accompanying him from behind as he squats, and in the middle of his movement down to sitting, cuts to the front. We see Wannihami dividing the frame in half, water to his right, cupping the lower corner of the frame with light. Again, the only sounds are ambient: the nimble touch of a stick feeling its way, feet shuffling behind, the soft suss of wind and water. As Wannihami sits, the camera follows him downward; his stick is across his shoulder, body leaning forward into it and his hand is stretched out with a clay cup toward the water. The film ends with Wannihami squatting before the same tank, rain washing his face as he watches boys playing in the water. Water is echoed by the coffin. Water opens the film. Water closes the film. Water and coffin: both turn iconographic and become characters in the film. Purahanda Kaluwara, directed by Prasanna Vithanage, a well-known Sri Lankan director of independent films, was produced in 1997, released for screenings in international film festivals, and banned by the Sri Lankan government when it was to be shown in Sri Lanka in 1999. It was finally screened in Colombo on September 28, 2001. Vithanage had run into trouble with the army while he was shooting the film; the army felt that the film “discouraged soldiers and neglected military families.”1 The Sri Lankan government had finally banned the film under the emergency powers granted to itself after the Elephant Pass debacle in 2000, because of its supposed effect on soldiers, on military morale, and on future recruitment.2 Vithanage took his case before the Supreme Court, fighting for artistic freedom and freedom of speech, and the Court granted the release of the film with a problematic judgment that, though it did not address the terms of Vithanage’s demand, permitted the film to be shown in theaters in Sri Lanka.3 Purahanda Kaluwara is a complex film told in a deliberately straightforward fashion. It is the story of a family and a village near Anuradhapura, an old capital
Slightly Autobiographical: the 1960s on the Lower East Side
Rashidah Ismaili-Abu-Bakr The Lower East Side of New York has little relation to the mid-upper (but not too far) East Side. In the early ’60s, when I was living there, it had a distinct “otherness” from the West Side. Most people refused to think in terms of geographic opposites: east-west. Therefore, one said “The Village” and knew it meant west of 5th Avenue not above 14th Street and not below Houston. This was/ is where the “artists” lived. The Lower East Side of the ’60s was surrounded by a world of turmoil: rebellions, the Vietnam War, the Bay of Pigs, Kent State, assassinations, and a host of human rights violations in the United States and abroad. Sandwiched between the racial and class barriers of the West and South, Africans in America walked the streets of the Lower East Side with ease. Bouyed by a historically more progressive and diverse zone, Black men ventured freer with their white female partners, arm in arm along the cluttered streets with fruit and vegetable sellers from Eastern Europe (although few would be so bold as to stroll after dark along Hudson Street or go too far south, into Little Italy). The rich ethnic mixture of the Lower East Side was built up by waves of immigrants from war-torn Europe who found themselves in limited confines of five-story tenements: walk-ups with hall toilets, bathtubs in the kitchen. Densely populated streets offered little space for their children or for merchants. A functional co-existence did, however, develop. Bakers were indoors all year round; rag collectors traveled the streets; and vendors and brave pedestrians shared the sidewalks. Although these immigrants constituted a lower class of marginal socio-economic status, they were for the most part in control of their profits. Those Africans who were living nearby (Harlem contained the bulk of the Black populace in the early 1900s) were the buyers. Even in this non-affluent area, class alignment with color was in full practice. But in the ’60s there was war and chaos and, simultaneously, hope. Here, in cramped apartments and cold-water studios, the essence of life and the role of art and artists were discussed, fought over by Black and White artists with an air of seriousness. Poets read their works in bars, cafes, parks, and studios. They carried heavy bookbags of manuscripts. Dog-eared books lined their shelves. Perhaps encouraged by the questioning and revolt, believing change (for the better) was immanent, African American artists came together on the Lower East Side to begin the job of articulating the stories of their people. The corner of East 10th Street and Avenue C is about a fifteen-minute walk from where, a century ago, the first African Theater stood. It is about the same distance from where the old city limits were drawn. Here the bodies of Africans, slave and freed workers, were dumped. But for me in the ’60s it was less than five minutes from the homes of my friends. In one building lived Joe Johnson (and Steve Cannon, I think–at least that’s where I met him) and Askia Muhammad Toure. My son used to play with Ishmael Reed’s daughter. Not too far away, on East 5th or 7th, lived Archie Shepp. Our sons were around the same age, and Garth, his wife, and I bartered sittings. I would watch Pavel and Accra while she worked to augment the earnings of the budding giant of modern music. When Archie was on the road, we would cook big pots of food and let the boys play as we kept each other company with stories of our childhood and other experiences. In fact I read my earliest works to her, and Garth always seemed to recognize them as poetic. On Friday nights Tom Dent would hold meetings of Umbra at his tiny apartment. There would always be a gallon of communal wine, ashtrays filled with cigarettes, and loud voices demanding to be heard over others. After a few hours of discussion of the latest poems and the contents of so-and-so’s novel, the girlfriends would start to arrive. I had to leave early because of my son, and I remember having the feeling of being left out. Somehow, it was after I got out on the street that I would notice that all of the women were White. For me this was a painful time. I was separating from my husband for the first time. Alone, with a small boy, trying to complete graduate school and write, I felt very estranged at times from my ebon scribes and painters. They made it clear they were not interested in me because I was Black, African, and too ethnic; i.e., |not beautiful.’ Besides, I did not do drugs or drink. In fact, cigarette smoke made my eyes tear and my throat choke. To add fat to the fire, I had strong opinions and was extremely independent. These were the ’60s, and Black men were coming into their own. Black women had to understand their manly needs, walk ten paces behind, submit to male authority. We were not to question a man’s work, even if it were incorrect. We were to dress “African,” assume the persona of “The Motherland,” and raise little revolutionaries. Most of all, we were to remain unconditionally loyal to the Black man and never, under any circumstance, be seen in intimate association with a White man. This, of course, was in stark contrast to the behavior of almost all of the men I knew–excuse me, brothers–who had not a single “significant other” but several White women as lovers and wives. Calvin Hernton was to chronicle this dilemma in Sex and Race in America, and he was willing to tackle this sensitive issue in serious dialogue. African-descended women tried to balance their creative urges with home and the personal demands of their men and families. A few found relative, and some permanent, happiness in the arms of White men. But these sisters paid the price. Some were denounced, others ignored.
A Muslim Meditation on Violence
Nauman Naqvi What is the source of Islam’s potential for a beautiful, passive revolution today? How are the greater and lesser jihads distinct and entangled? What are the experiences of force given in the Muslim tradition? What are the relations between beauty, divinity, history and the forces of peace, truth and violence in this tradition? These are the prayers, the questions silently addressed in this filmic presentation of the anguished work of poesy and asceticism against historical violence in the painter-poet Sadequain (1930-87) – a presentation of the experience and logic of another force given in Islam, and dramatized in the life and oeuvre of this postcolonial Pakistani artist. Through a range of effects – including a generous and dynamic display of striking images juxtaposed with ravishing lyric from both Sadequain, as well as the larger Indic-Muslim and affinate traditions of the pre- and post-colonial modern period – this lecture-film enacts the experience and logic of this other force in three dramatic scenes of a performative lecture given by Nauman Naqvi at The Second Floor (PeaceNiche) in Karachi. The scenes – the hand, the head, and gesture – are scenes of what Sadequain called the technique of ‘mystic figuration’ in his painting: a certain tortured entanglement of the aesthetic, the ethical and truth in Muslim inheritance. An anguished entanglement of beauty, the good and truth in their ecstatic appearance in the secular world – the world of sight and sound – that is inseparable from the demand of sacrifice, of a strenuous self-canceling intention given in the aspect of a subtle violence of immanence in the Muslim understanding of being and existence. In tracing this haunting, subtle force of life, the lecture-film gestures towards the potential inheritance of a radically ethical politics of universal grace in Islam. Please click the link for viewing the lecture film: http://vimeo.com/28159751 HumanitiesUnderground thanks Nauman Naqvi for providing and allowing us to publish the video text. adminhumanitiesunderground.org