Heaven, Hell and Five Books
Ma Jian, in a conference on ActivistHumanities at SOAS, University of London last week, said that Tiananmen made a writer out of him. And travelling 10,000 miles after the event made him a Chinese. When you see and feel atrocities around you, there is no other option but to pick up the quill and write, he said. Something drives you. A force. You reach out to yourself and the world reaches out to you. Thus writing happens. He also said how normalization happens: surreptitiously. Before you realize, things have changed. People around you have morphed. Isn’t something similar happening in India–social engineering at a grand scale? Before we realize…] Here is Ma Jian, on his favourite titles and themes from Chinese dissident literature: ——————————————- Why did you choose these books to make a set of five? What common themes or perspectives do they share? When I was thinking about this yesterday, I realized that the history of Chinese literature has often been shaped from outside of its society – by exiled writers and thinkers. From [3rd century BC Chinese poet] Qu Yuan to Confucius, the Tang dynasty to the Qing dynasty, right up to modern novels today, you find that those authors who in the end became central to Chinese culture were at the time writing from outside of their country – exiled, pushed out or banned. Would it be fair to call them dissidents? More or less. In their contemporary society, they couldn’t exist [be published] – that was only possible after they died. In their times, they were exiles like me. I think they had to be exiles before they could return into the midst of Chinese tradition. What advantage is there to writing about China from the outside? It’s precisely because I have left China that I understand China better. I see more facets of China, and have better information about it. I don’t know if writers inside China can climb the great firewall [of internet censorship], for instance – and their information influences the way in which they think. In China, your understanding of history and of the wider world is very different. So I think I understand China better from England, because I see more than one side to the story and know how unfree it is. Writers inside China would respond that you haven’t lived there for over two decades, and don’t understand how much has changed. I don’t think they understand me, because it’s like I don’t exist in China. If you search for my name on the Internet there, it doesn’t exist [because it’s censored]. I’m a zero. So maybe they think I’m not important. Specifically, it was only in 2011 that I was forbidden to go back to China at all. Before that, I went back there every year. I even bought a flat in Beijing. But the police were very strict with me, and controlled who I could see. I was forbidden to meet Liu Xiaobo during the Olympics. I’m one of the so-called “sensitive individuals”. Do you write principally for a Chinese or English audience? The main reader I write for is still Chinese. I’m constantly thinking how my books could be published in China [where they are mostly banned], even if they were censored or changed. Red Dust and The Noodle Maker were both published in China, but under a different name and heavily censored. I write all of my books in Chinese, and they are then translated into English. I think that if a foreigner reads a Chinese novel, he or she can gain an entirely new experience of life from his or her own. To understand a different culture is like to understand a different language – you gain a lot of new wisdom. Tell us about your first book, Li Sao or The Lament by Qu Yuan, from the “warring states” period of ancient Chinese history. From my perspective, because I prefer to combine literature with history myself, Qu Yuan’s The Lament was an obvious first choice. If we’re talking about Chinese literature, we must wonder where it all began. Except for The Book of Songs [the earliest collection of ancient Chinese poems], The Lament is the earliest pinnacle of Chinese literature. I don’t know what it’s like in English translation, but it’s movingly written. Qu Yuan was originally an official from the south of China. Then he was banished, because he was criticizing the corruption of the Chu state, and became a dissident. He led a double life, and finally he committed suicide. He felt his life had no meaning. His country, his system, his people had all forgotten him. From the very top, step by step he fell to the bottom. You could say he experienced all the suffering of Chinese society. The Lament is the story of Qu Yuan’s life, his autobiography. From this poem, you can see the changes in Chinese society, the people’s struggle, and the sorrow and despair of everyday life. The more he experienced – of both heaven and hell – the more mature he became. And what he was opposing in China at his time was more or less the same as the problems in today’s China, such as corruption of the leadership. Criticising China from the outside, his situation has some similarities with your own. I think the story of Qu Yuan is quite possibly the story of all genuine, non state-approved Chinese authors. Your next choice is the famous Romance of the Three Kingdoms, set in the 3rd century. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms only became a book a thousand years after the events which it describes. You could say that its story is the story of all China, passed down from father to son. It is one of China’s four great classical novels, which also include the Journey to the West. But only with Romance of the Three Kingdoms did old Chinese stories really become Chinese literature. It’s also beautifully written. A reader can harvest a lot of history and knowledge from this book, because it chronicles all aspects of China. You can discover in it the entirety of the Chinese character, ancient and modern. All Chinese people today can find themselves inRomance of the Three Kingdoms, whether you are rich or poor, old or young. For example
Hiuen Tsang
Temsula Ao When I was assigned to a regular House after about a week of my arrival, I was ‘appropriated’ by some seniors who were already in class X. As a result, I had to perform all kinds of errands for them, like fetching water for them, carrying books and messages to their friends. And sometimes they would make me run to the furthest House saying that someone wanted me there, only to laugh when I came back and reported that no one there had asked for me . Saturdays were the worst. Apart from washing and airing my own clothes and things, I had to take care of the needs of these seniors. Not satisfied with torturing me with these chores they would make fun of my appearance calling me Hiuen Tsang because of my Mongolian features and the fact that my hair was cut with a short fringe falling over my forehead. To add to my humiliation, they began to make fun of my metal bowl and plate too, (kahi and bati, in Assamese) which I had carried from home as instructed by the hostel authorities. Every hosteller had to bring a plate and cup for her use. The ragging continued for quite some time and I had to endure it because I was in the junior most class and had to do the bidding of the seniors. But things came to a head one Saturday and I seemed to have lost it. Being unable to take their harassment and taunting anymore, I hurled the ‘bati’ on the wall which broke into two pieces. The senior girls stopped in mid-laughter and fell silent. Encouraged by their shocked faces, I ripped the frock I was wearing down the middle shouting ‘You all are fit only to be step-mothers!’ and with the torn frock flapping on my naked front, I ran out. The senior girls gave chase and after making them huff and puff after me round the big compound several times, I came back to the House quite exhausted. When the tired girls reached the House, they pleaded and coaxed me to take off y torn frock and one senior hurriedly took out her sewing kit, mended the frock frantically and made me wear it again before anyone could report the matter to the Matron. From that day onwards I was left alone and the seniors treated me with some amount of grudging respect. That was perhaps the first incident in my life which taught me that the best way to cope with bullies is to stand up to them. But I still bear the scar from another incident from that period of my ‘apprentice-ship.’ I was ordered by one particularly aggressive senior to draw water from the hand pump and carry two buckets to the bathroom so that she could have a leisurely bath. I proceeded to do her bidding. The iron buckets were heavy and when filled with water, it became difficult for me to carry it to the bath-house by myself. But somehow the first bucket was safely deposited in one of the cubicles of the bath-house. By the time I filled the second bucket and tried to lift it I was exhausted but I had to deposit it somehow in the cubicle. So, I tried to half-drag and half-carry it; in the process some of the water had spilled and I finally managed to reach my destination with only half a bucket of water. But when I entered the cubicle, I slipped on a patch of melted soap and my right shin was caught in the rusty, jagged end of the corrugated tin partition between the cubicles. There was a searing pain and I screamed and screamed. The senior girls heard my scream and came rushing to the bath-house to investigate. When they saw my state, one of them picked me up to take me to the hostel infirmary. But the girl whose errand I was performing managed to warn me not to say anything to the Matron about her role in the accident. When the nurse asked me what happened I sobbed and timidly replied, ‘I slipped in the bathroom.” Luckily for me it was only a flesh wound but it was an ugly gash and took almost two weeks to even begin healing. It did heal eventually but to this day I bear the scar on my right shin. —————————————— [Temsula Ao is a poet, short story writer and ethnographer from Jorhat, Assam. This excerpt is from her memoir–Once Upon A Time, Burnt Curry and Bloody Rags.] adminhumanitiesunderground.org
Vernaculars Underground: Histories, Politics, Aesthetics–ABSTRACTS AND BIONOTES
March 7th and 8th, NMML, New Delhi I Speakers Anil Yadav, Sinews of the Political in the Hindi Underground The world of blogs is a mystery. It comes in small doses, and the way it connects with life and politics is through generations of rocks, friction, temperature, sound, and the impossible measure of their various facets. We know no one’s email id, telephone number, relationships, or any particular habit – all these are little doses of mystery. If we had unearthed the mystery, perhaps life would have been more satisfactory, but the pull towards the politics of the unknown is the hidden accelerator in life. Modernity seeps into the crevices of our galis and quasbahs in such doses. It creates a palimpsest. We tend to die, little by little, without this pull. This cosmos is our kabaadkhana—the dumpster’s nightmare, spreading to the farthest corners through the twisted varicose veins of our existence. * Currently based in Lucknow, Anil Yadav is a journalist with The Pioneer. He is the author of the remarkable travelogue ‘Yeh Bhi Koi Des Hai Maharaj’ and has just published a scathing collection of short stories titled ‘Nagarbadhuye Akhbarein Nahin Padhti’. His fiction and travel writings are featured on several websites including iharmonium, pratilipi, and kabaadkhanna. ————————————————————- Ashok Pande, Simple Joys of Rag-picking As a fantastic gift, life offers us a world filled with an amazing diversity. It is a wondrous act of nature that god, in the words of famous poet Viren Dangwal, has given man a brain “that soaks in everything” and which “travels beyond the universe in a moment/ and just sleeps when it retires/ in muck like a frog throughout winters”. To gratify all borders of intellectual hunger, man created most serious forms of art, and parodied these very forms for momentary drolleries. Therefore if there is a place for Meer Taqi Meer, ‘Danish” Taandwi (immortalized in Shrilal Shukla’s novel ‘Raag Darbari’) too is accommodated. If most intricate moves of chess are there, the ‘Shit-coat’ of a typical Pahari card-game Dahal Pakad too finds a place. The Chutney music of West Indies survives alongside Ustad Amir Khan’s Raag Bahar. Even if one endeavors to, it would be impossible to finish a complete list – such an immensely vast cornucopia of joy this world is. I began my blog ‘Kabaadkhaana’ in 2007 with the sole purpose of trying to share these wonderful things with others. एक शानदार तोहफे की शक्ल में जीवन हमें अजब-अद्भुत विविधताओं से भरी एक दुनिया नवाज़ता है. यह प्रकृति का करतब है कि आदमी को बकौल वीरेन डंगवाल भगवान ने “हर चीज़ को आत्मसात करने वाला” ऐसा दिमाग़ दिया जो “पल-भर में ब्रह्माण्ड के आर-पार/ और सोया तो बस सोया/ सर्दी भर कीचड़ में मेढक सा”. हमारी बौद्धिक भूख की हर सीमा को तृप्त करने के लिए कला के गंभीर से गंभीर रूप आदमी ने बनाए, और पल भर की ठिठोली-मौज के वास्ते इन्हीं रूपों की पैरोडियाँ भी बनाईं. इसी लिए अगर मीर तकी मीर का वुजूद है तो ‘राग दरबारी’ से अमर बन गए दानिश टांडवी का भी. शतरंज की जटिलतम चालें हैं तो दहलपकड़ जैसे ठेठ पहाडी ताश के खेल का गूकोट भी. उस्ताद अमीर खान साहेब का राग बहार है तो वेस्ट इंडीज़ का चटनी संगीत भी. लिखने बैठूं तो इस सूची का अंत नहीं हो सकेगा – ऐसा ज़खीरा मौज का है यह दुनिया. इन्हीं अजब-ग़ज़ब चीज़ों को दूसरों के साथ बांटने का काम मैंने अपने ब्लॉग ‘कबाड़खाना’ के माध्यम से २००७ में शुरू किया था. * Ashok Pande is a poet, painter and translator. His collection of poetry Dekhta Hoon Sapne was published in 1992 and he has translated Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate into Hindi. Pande has written books on Yehuda Amichai and Fernando Pessoa, and many of his travel-pieces and translations from world-poetry have appeared in Pahal. His translations of Shamsher Bahadur Singh’s poems was published in 2002 as Broken and Scattered, and Viren Dangwal’s poems, It’s Been Long Since I Found Anything, in 2004. Other translations include: the novel Lust for Life, Dharati Jaanti Hai (Yehuda Amichai’s poems), Ekaakipan ke Bees Arab Prakashvarsh (Shuntaro Tanikawa’s poems) and selected poems and prose by Fernando Pessoa. He runs the cult Hindi blog kabaadkhaana. ———————————————————————- Amit Sengupta, Parallel Cinema of the Media Industry: The difficult and stimulating narrative of small is beautiful Like independent and dogged documentary filmmakers who remain outside the comfort zones, mappings and trappings of the commercial structures of big finance and market sustainability, or like the ‘other’ meaningful cinema versus the box office formula film industry, this is a repetitive narrative which is deeply self conscious and critically involved with the idea of the political unconscious. Many of these filmmakers hate to be dubbed within the restricted and cliched paradigms of ‘art’ or ‘alternative’ or parallel cinema. In that sense, the discourse within the ‘little magazine’ or ‘small media’ too would resist being branded and condemned as small or marginal or alternative. That is, the debate between what is mainstream and what is alternative itself becomes a twilight zone where the lines become blurred and the kaleidoscope of the cracked mirror moves away from one-dimensional explanations into a more layered, evolving and complex realism. In the context of the new corporate media culture dominating the Indian information and mass communication scenario, and the tyranny of mediocrity, it becomes all the more crucial to unravel this twilight zone and rediscover a lucid, critical and enlightening realm of possibilities. Hence, we must walk again through this zigzag bylane of the difficult and stimulating journey of the small is beautiful. * Amit Sengupta is currently Associate Professor of English Journalism at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication. New Delhi. Till recently, was Executive Editor, Hardnews magazine, Delhi, the South Asian partner of Le Monde diplomatique, Paris; www.hardnewsmedia.com. Has been Editor, Tehelka, News Editor, Outlook and Senior Assistant Editor, Hindustan Times, among other assignments in leading Indian newspapers and magazines. ——————————————————————- Shawon Akand, Beyond the Colonial Hangover: Alternative
The Wayfarer of Being
Manash Bhattacharjee [This obituary piece was written on the night of 19 April 1998, in Poorvanchal, JNU, on receiving the news of Octavio Paz’s death. It was handwritten in a ruled class register, and typed in a manual typewriter in Munirka by a vexed typewriter. He was placated by tea and cigarettes. The article, published in Literary Review of The Hindu, on 17 May 1998, has been retrieved from the physical archives of the newspaper, in Chennai. I would like to render my gratitude to Amit Sengupta, who had read this piece in the journal section of JNU’s library and encouraged me to send it to Nirmala Lakshman. I am also indebted to Kaustabh Deka, who currently works at The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy, for retrieving the piece for me.] ———————————————————————————————— The Buddha did not teach me how to die. He tells us that faces dissolve, that names are empty sounds. But at death we have a face, and we die with a name. In the borderland of ashes, who will open my eyes? ~ ‘Remembrance’ For Octavio Paz, to die meant ‘to return / to the place we don’t know’. Like most experiences, death for Paz for also a paradoxical event: to leave a place and move into another. Loss and recovery. But to this world, for us who cannot travel with him to that unknown frontier of self-experience, his death can only mean a loss. Indeed, it is hard to believe that Paz (1914–1998) will now be addressed in the past tense. At 84, he was still referred to as ‘a youthful man’. As a poet and essayist he was, till recently, pouring out his enormous wealth of creativity with impatient regularity and a furious sense of life. For Paz, poetry itself was a suspension between two paradoxical statuses of being: a bridge between solitude and communion. Poetry is born in the womb of solitude, but to Paz, solitude is never absolute. It is always populated by the presence of the other, which can even be ‘our shadow’. ‘I am never alone’, he wrote, ‘I speak with you always / you speak with me always’. Paz glimpsed reality always through the paradoxical nature of time. The ‘present’ for Paz was both motionless and fleeting. It cannot be touched. It is real in its clarity and unreal in the excess of its apparitions. The present is also a ‘presence’: ‘a fountain of reality’. Through time, poetry becomes a search for presences where you lose what you receive and retrieve what you lose. The day is short, the hour immense hour without my I and its sorrow the hour goes by without going by and escapes within me and is enchained. ~ ‘Constraint’ The antimony of this experience reveals a ‘third-state’ between what passes and what stays. This, says Paz, is the state of ‘empty plenitude’. Here, being inhabits a transparency and poetry slips between the affirmation and negation of its impulses: a bridge in the interstices between the ‘tangible’ and the ‘intangible’. By interpreting reality, poetry, however, alters it and leaves behind a residue of beauty. This aesthetic quest in Paz’s case was surrealistic in nature. Contrary impulses and meanings collapsed into each other, and a subversive and playful interaction occurred between language and experience. A turbulent imagery resulted along with the slippage of being between dream (past) and vision (present). In this way, Paz fuses different levels of being and reality into a rich and complex unity of poetic experience. His long poems like ‘Sunstone’ and ‘A Draft of Shadows’ are expressions of such kinds. Paz’s long poems are like spiral staircases through which the soul passes through different states of emotions, bordering on ‘vertigo’, and at last descending to the tranquil emptiness of clarity. Paz’s poems reveal his mixed inheritance. He drew together the Spanish and Nahuatl strands of Mexican poetry. Wordsworth particularly influenced ‘The Draft of Shadows’. His love poems had the fury of Breton, and the intensity of Eluard. He was also influenced by Freud, Sade, Bataille, and the Tantric and Zen Buddhism. All these disparate influences make Paz an interesting poet. Philosophically, Paz, like Eliot, suffered the modern dilemmas of communion. To counter this despair, Paz searched for the moment of experience outside time, which is also Eliot’s preoccupation in ‘Four Quartets’. But through the maze of dream and vision, such an escape for Paz ended with an affirmative negation. Manuel Duran calls Paz a ‘philosophical poet’ like Eliot, but ‘more intimate, more erotic, warmer than Eliot’. He says this because Paz always probed the alienated relationships of life with lyricism and a profound sympathy. Also Paz, as Duran rightly points out, opened ‘the windows of Mexican culture to all influences’. He was as much at home in the Orient as he was in Paris, in America or in his native Mexico. It makes Paz a true pluralist. He believed that the ethical foundations of the ‘new civilization’ would be ‘the plurality of different times and the presence of the other’ where ‘we would live in the full freedom of our diversity and sensuality in the certain knowledge of death’. The politics of this new world would be ‘a dialogue of culture’. Yet, in order to avoid nihilism, Paz desired ‘a higher unity’ as a guide. To Octavio Paz, it was not possible in the modern era to disengage from politics. He felt is his duty to intervene in the moral conflicts and errors of present-day politics. Stalinist rule and the Russian totalitarian state disenchanted him from communism and he pressed for the necessity of liberal values within socialism. This caused him to be dubbed as a ‘traitor’ and a reactionary among Leftist intellectuals, and it distanced him from his famous friends like Marquez and Fuentes. But Paz refused to be silent on the crimes of the communist states. He called the Soviet state ‘the first soulless state in human history’, as he felt that the millions who died