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
Of Sublunary Incubus-Demons and Their Givenness
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen “Between the moon and the earth there live spirits whom we call incubus-demons.” So declares Maugantius, summoned before the king to explain how a boy named Merlin could have been born without a father. Inter lunam et terram, between a celestial globe in ceaseless circulation and the dull earth: in this intermedial space dwell creatures at once human and angelic. Incubus-demons can assume mortal forms and descend to visit earthly women. “Many people have been born this way,” Maugantius asserts. Among the progeny of such intercourse is Merlin, destined to become our iconic wizard. This genesis narrative marks Merlin’s advent into the literary tradition. The story yields no evidence of his future as a bespectacled and senescent figure, cloaked in robes and wielding a wand. Dumbledore is a diminished and modern avatar. The primordial Merlin is much more difficult to emplace. Between moon and earth is a gap that opens because the two realms cannot touch. Merlin arrives from a kind of heavenly lacuna, a suspended and disjunctive space created because two bodies which are two worlds endlessly withdraw from each other. Aerial and moonlit, this middle realm is knowable only at second hand. Maugantius makes clear that his knowledge of what dwells between lunar possibility and the cold earth’s heft arrives vicariously, through books of history and philosophy. Speaking of philosophy books and strange intermediacy, Graham Harman has argued that “Objects hide from one another endlessly, and inflict their mutual blows [“physical relations”] only through some vicar or intermediary” (“On Vicarious Causation” 189-90). The Merlin episode suggests a medieval version of this statement that is just as true: “Worlds hide from one another endlessly, and enjoy their mutual embraces [“physical relations”] only through some vicar or intermediary.” Merlin’s birth is the weird result/enabler of an asymmetrical, humanly inassimilable relation. Merlin’s mother is a king’s daughter and a cloistered nun who nightly finds a handsome man in the solitude of her cell. The incubus-demon who fathers Merlin is of unknown biography and intentions. He sometimes touches the ordinary world, but just as often withdraws from terrestrial connection. His desires cannot be reduced to the merely sexual. He wants at times to kiss and hold the nun, at times to converse invisibly on unstated subjects. Merlin arrives, that is, through an abstruse relationship that unites for a while two beings from oblique realms. The angel-demon and the solitary princess never fully touch, or do so askew, in a conjoining that is textually enabled only backwards, through the strange progeny who makes possible and embodies their “shared common space” (Graham Harman’s term for the third object within which two others meet, 190) or “thalamus” (Geoffrey of Monmouth’s word for the nun’s cell, a Greek noun that also means “chamber” “bedroom” “bridal bed” and, metonymically, “marriage”: that is, the space of an unequal, complicated, potentially disastrous, possibly transformative caress). The relation between the nun and the incubus engenders a creature who if not wholly unprecedented is nonetheless unpredetermined. Though Maugentius can invoke a history for such an arrival, he cannot account for Merlin’s erratic life to come. The text that I am speaking about in this language that weds Object Oriented Ontology to Latin historiography is Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1136). Geoffrey’s history is most widely known for having bequeathed to the future the King Arthur of enduring legend. Without Geoffrey this provincial British warlord would be an obscure medieval footnote rather than the progenitor of a still vibrant world. At his first appearance in Geoffrey’s text Merlin is a precocious and quarrelsome young man. As the story unfolds he will reveal surprising abilities, demonstrating that seemingly inert rocks may contain within them bellicose dragons; foretelling grim futures that include incineration, poison, and flowing blood; enabling through his transformative potions an adultery-minded Uther Pendragon to engender Arthur. Merlin alters completely the timbre of the text in which he appears. The History of the Kings of Britain has until the moment of his entrance offered a chronicle of the island’s early days. Its sedate Latin prose describes how Britain was founded and who ruled its civil war loving kingdoms. Wonders and supernatural events before his advent are few. A tribe of giants to kill, a sudden rain of blood, a sea monster and some ravenous wolves are scant exceptions to a martial account of settlement, inheritance, dissent, and political intrigue. Merlin appears just after the first mention of magic in the narrative, in the form of incompetent magi whom the perfidious King Vortigern summons to assist him in finding a way to escape the persecutions of the Saxons. Merlin is not himself a magician; magi are figures of failure in the story. For Geoffrey of Monmouth Merlin is a prophet, a poet, a schemer, an architect and an author, a figure of singular ingenuity rather than of saintly or demonic inspiration. He cannot be domesticated into mere category. After his unexpected advent the rules for how the story may unfold change. Earlier in the History when an earthbound king dreamt of travelling spaces of cloud and air, his fate was to plummet with his manufactured wings to a shattering death (Bladud, who practices “nigromantium” rather than magic, 30). That stretch between earth and moon had not yet opened for narrative sojourn. Merlin, however, born of the meeting of nocturnal radiance with mundane constrictedness, conveys the wheel of Stonehenge across the sea “with incredible ease.” This transmarinal relocation is not accomplished through supernatural agency. There is nothing divine or occult about the movement. Merlin works with the earth’s givenness, its alliance-seeking materiality. The monoliths are swiftly transported via his operationibus machinandis (“feats of engineering” 128) and machinationes (“machinery,” “engines,” “contrivances”). Merlin is an engineer, a vicar of causation who knows that objects launch into motion only through the intermediary agency of other objects. The stones are disassembled, loaded onto ships and carried to their current home for repurposing as a British monument, thus